A Reflection on Freedom

 

Today we in the United States celebrate our national day and observe the completion and proclamation of the Declaration of Independence. It is a day in which we announce publicly and reflect personally upon the self-evident truths about the nature and dignity of the human person. While the document is a part of our national heritage, it asserts several principles that are immutable about everyone everywhere by relying on the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God which lead any person to acknowledge that in fundamental ways all persons are made equal by their Creator, God who (not the state, not some political party or organization, not some other human power) bestows the human person with particular unalienable rights. Virtually every person is gifted with the capacity to rely on his or her intelligence to comprehend and appropriate the intelligible reality where these rights become evident and their meaning becomes comprehendible.

This does not mean that everyone is equal in every way, nor does it mean that everything every person wants to do is equal in merit or truth with whatever else anyone elsewhere wants to do. It does mean, however, that each of us possesses in his or her own uniqueness a commonality with everyone else which everyone has the capacity to understand as I have already presented. This is what we celebrate and upon which we reflect today. In a national context, we further deliberate how our forbearers considered certain actions by others to be abuses and usurpations of claims to authority and exercises of power. They discovered the self-evident truths and would remain silent and inactive no longer about how these truths had been discarded by the state.

Today we hear a great deal about freedom in the context of our nation’s governance once again. In the setting of our Catholic faith, the Catholic bishops have declared that in the present age there remain problems with the exercise of civil power that threatens that which is fundamentally the possession of the person and not the state—religious freedom, the first liberty that is a self-evident truth. As we celebrate our national day and proclaim freedom, I want to offer these few thoughts about the meaning of religious liberty that is true for the believer as it is true for the one who is not.

 The first point to remember about this freedom is that it is a natural right and because of this its existence comes from no earthly power, and its exercise is not a license (as the infamous Casey dicta describes liberty) but a responsibility as it is the common property of each member of the human family. Responsibility implies a distinction between the ought and the want.

Freedom, moreover, has two components—the from and the for. The Declaration of Independence in a temporal fashion explains this, and the Declaration of Religious Freedom of the Second Vatican Council does the same in the spiritual. Both explanations, when faithful to their essence, focus on the existence of truth versus falsehood. This is the freedom for something. Both demonstrate an antipathy to coercion. This is the freedom from something. The human person once again has been gifted with the fundamental capacity to comprehend these points.

There are those in the Church, our nation, and the world who also claim the necessity for freedom. I do not think that all of them have a proper understanding of this God-given gift, though, for often times their conception of freedom is whatever will satisfy the want for the self or the like-minded. This self and the group of like-minded enter alliances with those other persons who hold on to this same conception of freedom which is characterized by subjectivism and zealously protected by the will that has little or no virtue. What sustains this alliance is the concurrence to let each person decide for one’s self what is right and what is wrong and to not interfere with these decisions. This leads to the perilous course of freedom’s application about which John Courtney Murray warned a half century ago. However, when a different voice about freedom is raised and introduced into the public square, this alliance perceives a threat and reacts in ways seeking the silence of this alternative voice—the voice of authentic religious freedom.

This is the state of affairs today and why many bishops and other Catholics are participating in the Fortnight of Freedom. The soul which motivates this expression of freedom for the Church and her members is kin to the one that animated those who signed and proclaimed the Declaration of 1776. This is something worth acknowledging, celebrating, and protecting for the present moment and for our posterity.

Pope Paul VI highlighted this in one of his allocutions at the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council when he asked the temporal authorities of the world this rhetorical question which he also answered,

What does the Church ask of you today? … She asks of you only liberty, the liberty to believe and to preach her faith, the freedom to love her God and serve Him, the freedom to live and to bring to men her message of life. Do not fear her. She is made after the image of her Master, whose mysterious action does not interfere with your prerogatives but heals everything human of its fatal weakness, transfigures it and fills it with hope, truth and beauty. Allow Christ to exercise His purifying action on society. Do not crucify Him anew. This would be a sacrilege for He is the Son of God. This would be suicide for He is the Son of man. And we, His humble ministers, allow us to spread everywhere without hindrance the Gospel of peace on which we have meditated during this council. Of it, your peoples will be the first beneficiaries, since the Church forms for you loyal citizens, friends of social peace and progress.

A blessed Independence (and interdependence) Day to one and all.

 

RJA sj