Every person, from king to commoner, lives by a moral code. Catholic moral theology is grounded in the Ten Commandments and the principles of Natural Law.
The law of the jungle, by contrast, rests on power and emotion. Modern times, however, have seen the rise of a managerial moral system—one that reframes moral questions as technical problems to be solved through spreadsheets, projections, and computer models.
The Catholic Church clusters its moral precepts—Natural Law, God’s positive law, and Church discipline—around the Ten Commandments. Catholic moral theology is reasonable and governs human acts. The deliberate violation of a moral precept, with freedom and full consent, renders a person guilty. Although most sins are venial and weaken the soul, some sins are mortal and rob it of sanctifying grace. God grants His grace and the sacraments to restore that grace and return us to the path of salvation.
The law of the jungle, by contrast, invokes self-interest, vice, powerful emotions, and personal or tribal power to obtain necessities, real or perceived. Literature and cinema depict this moral code vividly, including its modern expressions in organized crime. The Old Testament also offers several examples.
When objectives are achieved and emotions cool, violence often subsides. King Herod comes to mind.
Herod the Great (c. 73–4 BC) ruled Judea from 37 BC until shortly after the birth of Jesus. A brilliant and ruthless ruler, he expanded the Second Temple and built Masada and Caesarea. His reign also imposed crushing taxes, repression, paranoia, and the execution of rivals—including his own wife and sons.
Caesarea Sebastos was among his crowning achievements. Built where no natural harbor existed, Herod’s engineers poured massive concrete breakwaters into the sea, transforming an exposed coastline into a Mediterranean hub of commerce. It was an astonishing feat—proof that technical brilliance and moral blindness often coexist.
According to the Gospel of Matthew, an aging Herod learned from visiting Magi that a child had been born who was called “king of the Jews.” When the Magi failed to return, Herod ordered the killing of all male children two years old and under in Bethlehem and its vicinity to eliminate a perceived rival. Josephus later described Herod’s final years as marked by madness, terror, and a ghastly illness that consumed him from within.
In some ways, Herod stands as a bridge between the law of the jungle and a distinctly modern moral system.
In March 1970, the Catholic journal Triumph published an article titled “The Herodians.” The editors identified a new morality that neither invokes the Ten Commandments nor operates through raw passion. It is the morality of technocrats.
The editors warned—even then—that the “abortion mongers [were] losing patience.” For years, the campaign to legalize abortion had crept through state legislatures, but progress was “abysmally slow” and dangerously vulnerable to local resistance—especially from Catholic “anti-Herodians” and their bishops.
Triumph cited Roger O. Egeberg, President Nixon’s chief health officer, speaking in a February 1970 interview.
Notice the tone. No rage. No panic. No bloodlust. Just management—treating human beings as populations to be regulated in response to external pressures:
Increasingly, yes. I’ve been rather conservative about [abortion]. But increasingly, I feel we’ve got to face abortion as the backup of many methods of contraception which aren’t perfect. … I do think that facing a continually growing population is the most horrible thing we can face.”
Abortion was presented not as a horror but as a tool—a corrective for systems deemed inefficient. It was a bureaucratic problem to be solved.
Since then—and especially after Roe v. Wade—abortion as a management instrument has claimed more than 70 million American lives. The feared Population Bomb never arrived. Instead, nations now confront a different calculation: collapsing birthrates, empty schools, and aging populations wondering who will pay the bills.
Triumph closed with a line that still unsettles:
Herod’s crime had a certain humanity about it—a passion, a rage, a frantic defense of his throne. He had nothing, really, against babies.
The point is not to rehabilitate Herod, but to draw a contrast. Herod killed in fear. We kill with spreadsheets. Herod raged. We reassure with statistics and forecasts. His crime was sudden, personal, and shocking. Ours is procedural, sanitized, and politely defended as progress—killing at a distance, using video-game technology.
Herod may not be the monster we imagine—not because his crime was small, but because we have perfected something far worse: killing methodically, without passion, without hatred, without shame, and without humanity. Paradoxically, the passions of hate and shame may be the very brakes that restrain crimes against humanity. Overheated emotions eventually burn out. Cold calculations, by contrast, are codified, institutionalized, and perpetuated.
Yet no one can escape the Catholic moral order, because we are inescapably God’s handiwork. The same God who establishes the laws of the universe also establishes the moral laws that govern human behavior. In Jesus Christ, God and man are reconciled, and God’s law is revealed in word and deed.
Whoever dies in sanctifying grace wins eternity, and no human tribunal can judge the unseen realities of a soul. Even tyrants such as Herod—whose deeds rightly horrify us—may somehow have entered the Promised Land. This is not a defense of Herod’s crimes, but an examination of the moral reasoning by which we now excuse our own. Perhaps Herod was already learning to think like us.
Have you seen satellite images of the Earth at night—cities blazing with light amid vast darkness? Suppose God granted us lenses that could detect sanctifying grace rather than electricity. What would the great cities reveal? What of the quiet countryside, the hidden reaches of the jungle? And what truths would stare back at us if we turned those lenses inward, into the mirror of our own souls?
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Understanding our belief systems, even while professing religion, often follows less from what we think we believe about God than what we decide to believe about the nature of evil. Authentic faith enables us to deal with evil, but ideology does not. If evil is viewed as personal, then the human condition is permanently imperfectible, and we can only hope to inspire individual reform. If we decide to believe evil is determined by the tides of history, possibly to escape confronting our own need for reform, we are inclined to side with the principalities of elites who view evil as a problem of social engineering, a management problem, which they promise to eliminate once they are allowed to impose their self-anointed vision on the rest of humanity. Herod’s nihilism was not unique. This dichotomy is as old as organized societies themselves. In fact, it’s older. It’s as old as the original sin in the Garden of Evil.
Beyond today’s Herods in neighborhood clinics, Fr. Pokorsky evokes a few other personalities of recent and current history, and a question:
JOSEPH STALIN: “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”
ADOLF EICHMAN: When Hannah Arendt interviewed Adolf Eichmann, the captured overseer of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jews, she found him to be “quite ordinary, commonplace, and something neither demonic nor monstrous.” She concludes that his participation in the diabolical was due less to choice than to a habit of thoughtlessness, which she understands as our way of “protecting (ourselves) from reality[!].”
THE JIHADIST NETWORK: These folks clearly know that killing of innocents is immoral, but they are experiencing a horrified “desire to escape reality [!] or transform it along the lines of a second reality more congenial to the pneumopathological terrorist imagination.” The italicized term applies to a spiritual sickness rather than any psychological disorder or more rational thought process at least calculated to achieve justice, if by whatever means. They know what they are doing; “They are not psychopaths who cannot distinguish good and evil or innocence and guilt” (Barry Cooper, “Jihadists’ and the War on Terrorism,” The Intercollegiate Review, Spring 2007).
A routine refrain in the later Islam is what the West differentiates and labels as the inborn and universal Natural Law (Qur’an: “the Law of Moses”), but the Qur’an then omits explicit mention of the six prohibitive Commandments and denies the mystery and reality [!] of original sin.
QUESTION: Today, how might the perennial Catholic Church and witnesses to Christ testify to these (synodal?) “hot button issues”–
About the refrain of “dialogue and fraternity”, Is even Gaudium et Spes more sober and balanced: “the joys and hopes, [AND] the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age…”?
“When Hannah Arendt interviewed Adolf Eichmann, the captured overseer of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jews, she found him to be “quite ordinary, commonplace, and something neither demonic nor monstrous.”
The first question I would have posed to that statement is “by what measures” and was she a competent judge? What characteristics other than killing millions would make him observably evil? The devil’s first great lie is he doesn’t exist.
Unless she had some fixed criteria that defined ordinary and commonplace, she was operating from some subjective impression. The commonality of humanity makes most of us common and ordinary, especially if your range of allowable variation is expansive enough. Was she expecting diabolical voices or horns and a tail?
With her regard to her capacity to render judgment, Arendt made her name-as all “philosophers” do by writing and as most “intellectuals” do. Since royalties scale, every tract allows them to be more and more divorced from the ordinary world ruled by the tyranny of the alarm clock and divorced from ordinary reality-enjoying acclimation and fame.
Paul Johnson’s great book “Intellectuals” is a great insight into the fruits of those trees. Even the New York Times Book Review stated “Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done’ — but of course added “great fun (sic) to read.”
Many are disconnected from reality, surrounded by books, and associate primarily, or even exclusively with other “intellectuals” who obsess about ideas and live apart from the hoi polloi. They are the principal architects of our modernity, imposing their ideas on the “great mass of men living quiet lives of desperation”. I’m not sure they are improving the human condition. In a certain sense, Eichmann was an “intellectual” not merely willing to subject and subordinate people to his ideas, but to engage in mechanized mass murder.
I wonder how an exorcist might have evaluated Eichmann.
Given the probable size of Bethlehem, and the likely birthrate at the time, I have seen estimates that the Holy Innocents probably numbered around 20. The number of abortions reported in the USA for the first half of 2025 was slightly over a half a million, so we will have million abortions for 2025, even after Dobbs.
The statement attributed to Stalin, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” seems to hold true. Especially given our reaction.
fr. Jerry presented the appetizer, now for the meal.
ADOLF EICHMAN: When Hannah Arendt interviewed Adolf Eichmann, the captured overseer of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jews, she found him to be “quite ordinary, commonplace, and something neither demonic nor monstrous.”
****
The banality of evil.
Thank you for this article. Please publicize this youtube video from Dr. Anthony Levatino M.D. Gynecologist Obstetrician and former abortionist detailing the horrors of abortion procedures, at the different stages of pregnancy, including the danger of the pill for women. Show it especially to young women who are not told in school the true details of abortion at the different stages; in this video age this is a most effective way to combat the killings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hqoLEhrGmQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFZDhM5Gwhk&t=269s