I feel horror and sadness as I read ever more revelations about the crimes that brought about the collapse of the Enron Corporation. It’s not an easy scandal to follow. It’s not about sex, but a series of complicated schemes to steal money in what seem to me quasi-legal ways.

I think this scandal is, in truth, simple: the executive officers of Enron borrowed company money, did so without telling their employers (the stockholders) and used the money to start their own private companies. If the rest of us were to do such a thing, we would obviously be stealing.

These nationally prominent men and women secretly took their employers’ money with the permission of Enron’s Board of Directors, with the cooperation of auditors at the “accounting” firm of Arthur Anderson, and with no adequate warnings raised on Wall Street or in the government offices of our Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tragically, this story is not just of blind greed, but of a clear-sighted, conscious immorality. When Enron’s executive officers became aware that they could no longer hide their thefts, they sold their Enron stock before the secret of their thefts was revealed. Then they contrived a legal way to prevent the rest of the employees of Enron from selling their Enron stock in order to prevent a collapse of the market for it. That stock, now worthless, is for many Enron employees their retirement.

This is not a mere scandal, in my mind. It seems to me that what happened at Enron was not entirely illegal (maybe all legal!), and the financial community in which many of us entrust retirement savings is badly tainted by these crimes. Our country is now fighting two wars: one outside our borders, and another within this nation against our inner demons of greed and dishonor.

Our nation’s religious values offer guidance in this national tragedy: 1) Our economic system must be fair for all participants. It is wrong to have an immoral or even amoral code for one group of skilled people while the less skilled must follow a secondary moral one. 2) Freedom cannot cancel-out compassion and fairness. We have freedoms because we are good neighbors and because we act honorably toward them. Freedom without compassion and fairness is all Afghanistan has right now. 3) A corporation is a public accommodation, chartered by the people for the common good. Corporate officers are not private citizens, but public figures who must earn and deserve the public trust they hold. Betraying that trust should be treated as the significant crime that it is.