Corruption of the Heart - Fr Chris Chatteris SJ

In the Spiritual Exericises, St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, puts before the retreatant some of the issues that must be faced if one is serious about following the Lord. He asks the one doing the retreat to imagine Jesus and how he graciously invites his followers to be his companions and to share his life. This will involve at the very least poverty of spirit, or detachment from riches, and maybe also actual poverty. This is all very nice, but Ignatius is a realist and he introduces a sobering note by also asking the retreatant to imagine the opposition to all goodness to whom he refers chillingly as ‘the enemy of our human nature’ and whom he describes graphically thus: ‘the chief of all the enemy in the vast plain about Babylon, seated on a great throne of fire and smoke, his appearance inspiring horror and terror.’

The retreatant is then told about the tactics with which this ‘enemy of our human nature’ tries to ensnare us. Ignatius writes, ‘Consider the address he makes to them (his servant-devils), how he goads them on to lay snares for men and bind them with chains. First they are to tempt them to covet riches that they may the more easily attain the empty honours of this world, and then come to overweening pride. The first step, then, will be riches, the second honour, the third pride. From these three steps the evil one leads to all other vices.’ Well, all this rather scary imagery may come from the imagination of the European Middle Ages, but when we look at how the pull of money and the things money can buy continue to ensnare and destroy people in our own time, we should perhaps take it more seriously. After all, consumerism is the air we breathe. Take a recent example which is unfolding as I write - that of the daughter of the former Angolan President. Isabel dos Santos, said to be Africa’s richest woman, is accused of having amassed a fortune estimated at $2.2 billion by corrupt deals involving the country’s national oil company. I would maintain that in a world with millions living in absolute poverty, no one is worth $2 billion, even if they have worked hard for it. In this case, however, the money seems to have been stolen. How it was all done has been revealed by a ‘dump’ of information dubbed the ‘Luanda leaks’. The fallout from this revelation has already begun; one banker who was involved in the flows of money has apparently committed suicide. Apart from the greed involved here, it is the callous disregard for one’s poor compatriots which makes the moral outrage all the more understandable. As one commentator put it, ‘While the winners enjoy the luxuries of living in London, partying in Mediterranean resorts and winter sun aboard multimillion-dollar yachts, the losers’ lives are blighted by sewage, eviction and disease. Certainly, St Ignatius was not wrong when he argued that the love of money can lead to ‘all other vices’. When you start to read about the lifestyles of people who have benefitted from corruption you begin to see more of these. Often there is a compulsive and insatiable need to spend, shopaholism driven by a desire to flash and flaunt extremely expensive material goods before the world. The shamelessness of such people who delight in sweeping through the streets in cars worth millions past people who are struggling to eat one meal a day is truly breathtaking. One feels that there must be a terrible, inner emptiness that they are desperately trying to fill with more and more stuff. The loss of their own human dignity is lost on them. Surrounded by fawning hangers-on, many of their imagined friendships are based solely on their bottom line. Should the money and the power that goes with it disappear, all these fair-weather friends fade away fast. I wonder how Mrs Mugabe’s social calendar is looking today, compared with when her husband was still alive and in power. We rightly reserve a special condemnation for the heartlessness and blindness of the corrupt in developing countries because they become super-rich at the expense of the desperately poor. The corrupt of Corruption of the Heart Fr Chris Chatteris SJ

the wealthier nations may not cause the poor of their own countries as much immediate misery as the poor in the developing world but the wider damage that can be done by corruption in rich and powerful countries may ultimately be worse than that wreaked by our local criminals. For example, President Trump is clearly in a corrupt relationship with the energy lobby in the United States of America. The coal, oil and gas corporations have backed his presidency with their money and now he is repaying them for their support by dismantling health and safety regulations. He is also singing their tune about how climate change is a hoax or isn’t really a problem. He is even willing to go to Davos and give a speech for them which flies in the face of the best climate science. By this corrupt behaviour he is doing nothing less than putting the planet at terrible risk because whereas humanity desperately needs the leadership of the United States to tackle the climate crisis, Donald Trump, locked into his own corrupt interests, resists all rational and moral calls to do anything at all. The things he is doing and the things he refuses to do are clearly causing great damage to the planet and he does not care. Actually he even seems to take a malicious delight in mocking the science and the desperate calls of those concerned about this greatest of human crises. Blinded by wealth and power and with a heart completely closed towards the rest of humanity, he is a terrifying picture of narcissism. Catharsis is called for in these extreme cases, a thorough cleansing of the rot. Truth is the essential cleaning agent, as the Luanda leaks episode demonstrates. Or, to change the metaphor, clear light must be shone in the dark places where all these dirty deals are made. In that light we may begin to understand how hearts, including our own, can become, as St Ignatius warns us, prone to ‘all other vices’.