I must confess I once paid a bribe.
It was the mid-1990s, and I was traveling with a delegation of US and Croatian bishops inquiring into conditions in the former Yugoslavia. Our small party was stopped at a Serbian-run checkpoint at the border of the Republica Srbska, the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia. The border guard was slow in returning my passport.
One of my companions from the local church leaned over and whispered, “He’s admiring your passport cover.” A light leatherette covering held the passport. I was a little slow on the pick-up. The Croatian-American translator whispered, “Tell him to take the cover.” And, not speaking Serbian, I gestured to the guard that he might take the cover. He did so and waved us on.
It was a small event, a petty bribe, but for me it became emblematic of corruption. In a war zone that was only just beginning to quiet down, bullying and extortion were still a way of life. What we had experienced was the barest token of the strong-arm behavior that had brought the region into a savage civil war. Still, the demand for the bribe was an overt abuse of power, a way to display the power the Bosnian Serbs still held over the despised Croats and their contempt for the Catholic clergy in our vehicles.
Because I was leading the trip, I felt pressure to extricate the delegation from the delay, further inconvenience—and who knows, even worse. It was only a shadow of the fear a parent or spouse might experience for failing to meet the demands of a corrupt official.
There’s much that is wrong with corruption. It impinges on the freedom of men and women to live ordinary lives; it imposes burdens on the poor and the vulnerable that often impoverish and weaken them further; it impedes just economic growth; it skews the distribution of wealth; and it retards and even reverses movement towards a just society in which all groups share in the common good.
But at its core, corruption is a misuse of power to extract personal gain from what should be a public service or from a commercial good or service under normal terms of trade.
As an abuse of power, corruption violates the dignity of the person from whom the extra payment, the baksheesh, the modida, or the refresco, is demanded. In trade, at least, bargaining, as in the bazaar or souk, would be acceptable. The indignity comes from the imbalance of power and, in the case of government services, the injustice of threatening to deny something that should be part of the common good shared by all.
The injustice and abuse of power become more obvious when the corruption becomes systematic. Government no longer functions as the instrument of the common good, as Catholic social teaching holds, but rather as the exploitation of the public monopoly of power for private enrichment for the ruling family, the governing party, or certain elites and their hangers-on. Such impostor governments, Aquinas wrote, are seditious, for they employ power for their faction at the expense of the public and the common good.
Corruption often stands at the bottom of our lists of the world’s ills. But, especially in its systemic forms, it is the root of many evils, not the least of which is the loss of a sense of the common good and civic responsibility. It is a social disease that forecloses the development of the good society.
