That's how the level of awareness has often times been heightened in the world. A crime is reported; then there are investigations related to it; information regarding the crime and the investigation is presented to the public in various flavors through various media; the public buys and consumes them with excitement; discussions about it take place through the media and besides the media among the general public; through these discussions and personal cogitations based on the take, the graph of awareness among the public slowly rises. By the time the entire discourse surrounding the crime and everything about it is subsided, the society will have ascended many steps of being civilized at least conceptually. Therefore, for some time now, I have been trying not to make value judgments about print media, visual media or online media. Because society belongs to everyone; it is made up of everyone. And changes brought about by the people collectively only will stand time.
Let's take an example of the very thing that I must be ashamed of as a Catholic believer. It was in 2002 that the Boston Globe published a series of articles reporting on the sexual abuse of minors by some priests in those diocesas in the Catholic Church. And what was the aftermath? One after another, disturbing reports emerged from almost every diocese in the country. Hundreds of priests were arrested; tried; imprisoned. And such investigations happened in most parts of the world. Bishops were questioned. The Church was put under siege. Gradually, the Church became aware of the seriousness of the crime. Changes occurred; mechanisms for change were put in place. Gradually, similar accusations and cases began to emerge in churches with married ministers. The changes that began in the Catholic Church slowly spread to Protestant churches too.
Women began to disclose the abuse they had suffered from prominent figures in the film and political fields, even when they were vulnerable and in their adolescence. A social movement usually called "Me Too" emerged in developed countries, meaning "I was also a victim," or I stand with them. Society has grown up to realize that such things are not isolated incidents, but is caused by the dominant patriarchal value system โโin the society. Do we have any idea how much the world has become literate in terms of justice, rights, and gender equality in the last quarter of a century?!
But there is one thing. It might seem to be a criticism about our society's display of spiritual bankruptcy.
Two thousand years ago, a crowd led by the Pharisees, known to be the saintly people in the society, dragged a woman they had caught in the act of committing adultery -a sexual crime according to the Jewish law - into the presence of Jesus. 'She was caught in the act of adultery. Jewish law dictates that such people be stoned to death. What have you got to say?' This was their question. The crowd just waited for the Master to say, 'follow the law'. They had come with rocks in their either hands. The police in the crowd stood there with their inherent thrust for blood. The first response from the Master was silence. When they kept repeating the question, came a verbal response. "Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her."
The next verse amazes me the most. "When they heard this, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders." Is this possible? To me it looks as though there is no other verse in the Gospel that seem so improbable. This one verse is enough for me to salute the spiritual integrity of the Jewish people of those times!
A single stone would have been enough to make all the stones to be whizzing at her! But that didn't happen.
(There is no doubt that the desire for justice to be done, no matter how influential the predators are are, is an expression of our ethical consciousness. But let us not forget that even such a lofty sense of justice shouldn't lead us to be judgemental about others.)
What about our day? If we look up the meaning of the word Pharisee, dictionaries also would give one of the meanings as "hypocrite". However, the reality is that most of the moralists of our days don't have the honesty/integrity/sincerity of the Pharisees of Jesus' times, or even that of the ordinary moralists who came along with them with stones in their hands. The general public - that include you and I- has grown in awareness with each and every case in our society. The name of the instrument we possess and use at times must be: "the moral intensity graph". Because we often compare and say, 'I have never done such heneous acts'. Before the the social impression we create that we're all saints, how little the hypocrisy of the Pharisees!!
