The Reification of Evil and The Failure of Theodicy: The Devil in ...

“I couldn’t follow the heated argument very well, but it seemed to be between those who
believed in the elimination of people who were useless, useless to anyone, to themselves,
the state, and those who believed in euthanasia only for those who suffered from hopeless
diseases or defects like mongolism, severe epilepsy, encephalitis, progressive
neurological diseases, mental defectives, arteriosclerosis, hopeless schizophrenics, and so
on. Dr. Jäger took the more humane side. Dr. Brandt … maintained that ‘reverence for
nation’ preceded ‘reverence for life.’”
These so-called humanists, of course, debated only the medical definition of “useless”, without
ever questioning whether it was moral to define any human as “useless” – in other words,
whether one ought ever to judge people by purely utilitarian standards – and then kill the
“useless” ones in the name of humanity. Among the people that the “humane” Drs. Binding and
Hoche would have put to death is Dostoevsky, a man with severe epilepsy. Percy’s list of
“hopeless diseases or defects”, of course, is a hodge-podge intended to make us re-think just
what we consider “hopeless”.
In interviews and essays, Percy never overtly acknowledged his debt to Flannery
O’Connor, but he made many wry nods to O’Connor in his novels. In this instance, the nod is to
O’Connor’s introduction to A Memoir for Mary Ann, written by the Sisters of Our Lady of
Perpetual Help Cancer Home. The book, no longer in print, concerns a three year old girl with a
disfiguring facial tumor. Part of the girl’s face, including one eye, had been removed during
surgery. She received a prognosis of only a few months to live, but after being placed under the
care of the Sisters, she confounded the experts by living another nine years. In the world of
Percy’s novel, such a girl would have been subjected to pedeuthanasia, as she had only an
“unproductive” future and much suffering in front of her. O’Connor acknowledged the
weakness of the Sisters’ writing, but the book made her think a great deal about the little girl
who, taught by the Sisters, learned to do more than merely endure her condition. The Sisters who
cared for the dying girl will remind us of Father Smith who ran a hospice for the dying. When
the girl died,
“Bishop Hyland preached Mary Ann’s funeral sermon. He said that the world
would ask why Mary Ann should die. He was thinking undoubtedly of those who had
known her and knew that she loved life, knew that her grip on a hamburger had once
been so strong that she had fallen through the back of a chair without dropping it… The
Bishop was speaking to her family and friends. He could not have been thinking of that
world, much farther removed yet everywhere, which would not ask why Mary Ann
should die, but why she should be born in the first place.”
“One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit
the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him.
… Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero
cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of innocents. In this popular
pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they
saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of
acceptance, which is to say of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by
tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is
wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its