Dostoevsky and social sin

Christine Freeman was brutally murdered in South Bend this past June.

She was beaten and then smothered until she suffocated in the street. Somehow she regained consciousness and was then bludgeoned until she was unresponsive. Paramedics arrived and revived her, but she died later at a hospital in town.

Christine used to live at the Catholic Worker in South Bend. She was known for her gratitude and good humor. It is difficult to describe someone in a few lines, but she was well-loved at the Worker house.

I have spent the last three summers at the Catholic Worker, but I never knew her. Many of my friends did, and many of them went to her memorial service last week.

The Catholic Worker in South Bend runs a house of hospitality — a community of people living together to practice the traditional Works of Mercy, praying for the living and the dead, welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc.

About thirty of us live together on St. Joseph street: summer staff volunteers, live-in volunteers and guests ranging from otherwise homeless people, college students, professors, artists, mechanics, singers and laborers.

One old mansion houses the men, another houses the women.

We failed Christine. We all did. Just as we share in the virtues and good works of someone in our community, we share in the evils they commit or the violence they receive, whether or not we know the person.

Certainly it is not the same level of culpability as that of the murderer. Nevertheless, it remains as an injury to us all.

Whenever we fail to greet a homeless person, we kill them in some way.

Whenever we do not include people, we kill them.

Whenever we ignore or treat lightly stories of murder, abuse and violence, we are complicit in them.

The guilt incurred by another person’s violent action is, in part, transferred to us.
We are all responsible for everyone. Dostoevsky shares this sentiment in “The Brothers Karamazov” in the story of the woman and the onion.

A woman in hell was pulled by an angel to heaven, but others in the flames grabbed at her feet to be pulled up as well. She began kicking at them to keep them back, ignoring their pain.

She refused to be pulled from hell if others could come with her into heaven, so she fell back into the fire, losing her balance as she fought everyone else off of her.

Indifference to the death of Christine, or toward her while she was alive, places us just where the woman was with her angel: culpable.

What is more, if we are indifferent toward her murderer, if we abandon him, we have slipped from the angel’s grasp.

Dostoevsky saw this, Dorothy Day saw this.

We have a responsibility to mourn the death of Christine Freeman. She was poor and worth little in the estimation of the state or the economy.

We have a responsibility to care for her murderer. Otherwise, we fall prey to the delusion that we are only responsible for ourselves.

If we selfishly kick at those around us with our eyes on heaven — or money, or grades, or power — we end up doing violence to others. What is more, as in Dostoevsky’s story, we do violence to ourselves.

­— Mthomas5@indiana.edu