The question of scandal

Scandal is when we cause or lead others to sin. We, of course, should try to avoid scandalizing others. In fact, we should try our best to give good example to others always in the tenor expressed by St. Paul once: "Be imitators of me as I am of Christ." (1 Cor 11,1)

But we should also try our best that we don't get scandalized ourselves by anything, the way Christ was not scandalized by any sin and evil. Remember Christ saying to the disciples of St. John the Baptist who asked if he, Christ, was the expected Messiah, "Blessed is the one who is not scandalized in me." (Lk 7,23)

This is only possible if we are truly united with Christ, that is, that we are so full with Christian love that we can take on anything and, in fact, can carry out the duty to help, to purify, to correct and transform sinful situations. If any sin affects us, it is more to trigger this duty to help rather than to sink into sadness, despair, anger, and into more sin.

We, however, should avoid falling into that state of not being scandalized the way big and unrepentant sinners are not anymore scandalized by any sin and, in fact, they flaunt their sin and justify any sin.

For them, there is no more sin, strictly speaking. Their sense of good and evil is so badly damaged that it has become a purely subjective one, detached from the moral law set out by God, our creator.

In fact, we should be very sensitive to sin and to anything that can lead us to it. But we should not allow that sensitivity to undermine our capacity not to be scandalized by sin and anything evil the way Christ was not scandalized by them.

For this to happen, we have to have the mind and heart of Christ who was willing to bear all sins of men by dying on the cross and delivering the death blow to this sin by rising again from the dead.

We, of course, can achieve this ideal little by little, and always with the grace of God. We have to learn to develop a certain healthy sense of immunity from sin and evil. To be realistic, since we cannot avoid sin and evil in this world, let us try to make them the very germ that is injected with enough dosage into our system so as to develop the appropriate antibodies, so to speak.

We may need to be properly supervised by an experienced spiritual director in undertaking this delicate process of immunization just like anyone gets inoculated for immunization not just by anybody but by a trusted and competent person, usually a doctor. There is always the danger of falling into either overdoing it or "underdoing" it. We need to strike a healthy balance.

This is what happened to Christ who, St. Paul said, made himself like sin without committing sin in order to save us. In a sense, though it pained Christ to see sin committed left and right, he simply was game with the whole thing and just pursued the way for our salvation that ultimately ended up on the cross. We have to be ready to follow this path.

This means that we cannot and should not be too delicate as to be easily affected and scandalized by sin and evil. Again, Christ told us to be "wise as serpents but innocent as doves." (Mt 10,16) St. Paul reiterated more or less the same idea when he said, "Do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature." (1 Cor 14,20)

We therefore have to learn to be patient with everyone, but with great desires to change what needs to be changed, to heal what needs to be healed. We should not be patient as to be totally passive to the anomalous things around. Our patience and self-defense should have its corresponding action and aggression.

This will definitely require a certain spiritual training and regimen.

The art of spiritual warfare and ascetical struggle has to be learned, since our life will always involve certain spiritual and moral combats.

We should never feel exempted from the need to pray a lot and to have constant recourse to Christ in the sacraments and in his word. We need to systematically make daily plans to wage this spiritual warfare of peace and love, specifying the fronts we have to tackle, the weapons we have to use, etc.