Rohr (2025, pp. 22-23) shifts his critical attention to the present day:
“This concentration on the collectives changes our moral focus entirely. If we do not recognize that evil first and foundationally resides in the group, we will continue to search out, condemn, or perhaps forgive the “few bad apples,” thinking that will take care of our problems. But too often, sins we condemn in the individual are admired, or at least given a cultural pass, at the corporate level.”
Rohr has identified the patterns maintained in our society and the untested assumptions that comprise and reinforce these patterns. Rohr (2025, p. 23) specifically provides a list of many assumptions embedded in the exceptions we make in our contemporary society regarding the enactment of specific (destructive) actions:
“Consider some of the contradictions in our own culture, for example:
Killing is wrong, but war is good.
Greed is wrong, but luxury and capitalism are ideals to be sought after.
Pride is bad, but nationalism and patriotism are admirable (never in the Bible, however).
Lust is wrong, but flirting and seduction are attractive.
Envy is a capital sin, but advertising is our way of life.
Anger at our neighbor is wrong, but angry people get their way.
Sloth is a sin, but wealthy people can take it easy.
Murder is wrong, but easy access to guns is a right and duty.
You can see how we got the sense, shared by many, that we are living under an utterly conflicted morality. Even ‘capital sins’ such as greed and ambition are no longer even critiqued at the individual level, but seen as virtues.”
At this point, Rohr (2025, pp. 23-24) moves directly into the domain of money—and its collective value and evil:
“I have learned from a lifetime as a preacher that even a slight critique of capitalism is totally unacceptable in American pulpits. It can be intuitively and freely understood, however, in the barrios of Guatemala, or the lower-middle-class Mexican American parish where I preached regularly until Covid, because their viewpoint is from the receiving end of capitalism’s damages. Those who benefit from capitalism, or other dominant systems of power, will often assign virtue to rare, distant individuals called saints–and even then only after they die. We must learn to see virtue as involving some form of giving back to the community and society, not just privatized ‘purity’.”
