Cain and Abel
The media record all kinds of calamities: robberies, hold-ups, homicides, feminicides, abuses and perversions against children. Today we are horrified by such crimes, but history teaches that in other centuries the same has happened. How can this reality be explained? In the human race, heroes and great figures have not been lacking; people who have dedicated themselves to the service of others. The religious panorama presents us with saints: they have lived on earth aspiring to Heaven. With their gaze fixed on the Mother of Jesus, who has manifested herself in La Salette, Lourdes and Fatima; choosing the little ones as witnesses.
But history has also recorded the wicked, who have lived for themselves and have despised the just, those who lived according to God. They have employed their freedom in doing evil. It is a true mystery, that double potentiality of human freedom, a condition of the creature. God is the maximum freedom, indefectibly adhered to the Good, which is Himself. The creature has as its own task to imitate God by always doing good. The most serious crime is the contempt for human life. The history of Christianity knows martyrdom, which is the witness given to the Faith. During the first three centuries, martyrs multiplied, victims first of the Jews and then of the Romans. But martyrs are the protagonists of history, especially in times of Revolution. In these periods – we are in one of them – martyrs multiply, and witnesses to the Faith accumulate by the thousands. Cruelty manifests the black depths of the human soul, which raises the question: is one born wicked or does one become so after innocence, especially when it is baptismal innocence? Baptism forgives original sin and confers Grace, which inclines toward the good. But it does not annul the inclination to evil, against which one must struggle, with the influence of Grace.
The Bible presents ancestral cases of Good and Evil. The first woman, seduced by the devil, committed the first slip and involved her husband. The clearest symbol is the relationship between Cain and Abel. It is explained that the fratricide’s envy could not bear that Abel’s gifts were preferred by God. Envy will always represent a cause. The most terrible thing occurs when the crime takes place within the bosom of the same family, in which love must be the bond that unites its members. The mystery of evil cannot be attributed solely to human freedom. The devil’s masterpiece is the dissolution of the family, in which the Family of God is reflected, which is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; source of the love communicated to creatures.
+ Héctor Aguer
Emeritus Archbishop of La Plata.
Buenos Aires, Tuesday, March 17, 2026.
St. Patrick, bishop.
Holy Season of Lent. –