““We must be honest here, and not defensive; the issues are now too grave and too urgent. Our inability to see our personal failures is paralleled by our inability to see our institutional and national sins too. It is the identical and same pattern of addiction and denial. Thank God that Pope John Paul II introduced into our vocabulary words like “structural sin” and “institutional evil.” It was not even part of the conversation in most of Christian history up to now, as we exclusively concentrated on “personal” sins. The three sources of evil were traditionally called “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” We so concentrated on the flesh that we let the world and “the devil” get off scot-free.8””
