the facts answer

There is a design in the Cyprus sting that is bigger than us
What it is happening on the island breaks another frontier of trust. And while this makes us angry, it poses a question.

Very often, in my work as a journalist, I am called to look squarely at the “bunker” that the former Pope Benedict made visible to us in his September 2011 speech to the Bundestag in Berlin.
The story of what happened with the Cyprus bank deposits provides a clear example. I asked a friend, who works at a senior level in a Spanish bank, if he could describe in a sentence the precise nature of the economic crisis. He offered three words: lack of trust. It is impossible to regenerate a banking system, he said, unless the banks and those who regulate them are trusted by their customers and potential customers.
The next day, catching the first headlines about the Cyprus bombshell, I wondered if somebody had been eavesdropping on our conversation and had set out to test my friend’s thesis to the limit. I found myself called upon to write about the crisis, and inevitably did so in critical terms. To be honest, the story made me angry on a number of different levels. At the very least, there was the palpable stupidity of those who had made the decision–without, it seemed, taking into account the effects it would have on the fragile European economy. But I also felt deep indignation at the idea that a new line had been crossed, and that the political and economic authorities had now shown they were prepared to breach what had heretofore been an iron principle: that the personal reserves of citizens should not be used to pay for insolvent banks. In writing about the issue, I said that the most incisive analysis of what had happened had been contained in a single-word slogan on a banner held up by a protestor outside a bank in Nicosia: “Thieves.”
So, I was uncompromising in my response, and fairly downbeat about the implications. I expressed anger at both the recklessness of the initiative and its deficiencies in a moral context (regarding the breach of trust that had occurred).
I also have to admit that, looking at the issue in these ways, I was moved to something approaching despair. When would those with responsibility for the European economy begin to pay attention to what is really happening? Were they completely indifferent to the terrors and concerns of working people?
But, from time to time, as I reflected and wrote, I would be struck by another, almost opposite thought: all this is leading somewhere, and what we know about reality in its larger dimensions tells us that this will ultimately be a better place. Reality, we know, is not hostile. There is a pattern to events which, though it may take a long time to reveal itself, is ultimately hopeful.
I had this strong sensation, thinking about Cyprus. It seemed to me that, in the breaking of the new frontier which the Cyprus sting represented, there was also the promise of a new beginning. I don’t know how to explain this in terms of the everyday logic of the bunker, but I have a strong sense that it must be so.
This is what our experience tells us: Christ, at the center of history, desires only what is good for His people. Trust and hope are not necessarily coterminous in the world, but ultimately, in the infinite reality, they are. In the end, we know that there is a Providence that watches over us. Sometimes it is hard to see by what earthly mechanism this phenomenon might be operating. Sometimes, the very opposite is indicated by the actions of men. But hope transcends all this. It is not naïve or unrealistic, but still it holds to faith in something greater than the petty mechanisms of the manmade world. And because it does, we know that, no matter what happens,  the light of Easter morning remains the core meaning of reality.