Bulletin Column from July 3, 2022

Dear Friends at Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish and Saint Frances Cabrini Parish:

Praised be Jesus Christ! Yet another Independence Day is upon us, making it a fitting occasion to recall the great gift of freedom as the Church has always defined it and understood it: freedom is the ability or the capacity to choose and do what is good and what is true. Moreover, as I choose what is good and true over and over again, meaning avoiding what is sinful and contrary to my nature, I grow freer and freer because my habitual capacity for what is good is deepened.

All of this of course means that we have to know what is good if we are going to choose it, meaning that on one level I am less and less free the less I know what is good. People are deprived of authentic freedom if they are deprived the knowledge of the truth about right and wrong, human nature, and the gift of Revelation. This is part of why the Church has always been so intensely interested in the task of teaching. Our teachings, all of which come from God, show us the pathway to goodness and with it to true freedom. The Christian desires real independence, albeit not from authority, nor from God, nor from other people, but rather from sin. In this way a free person lives well in community.

Americans have customarily had a difficult time with freedom. In our historical and cultural DNA is unfortunately the incorrect understanding of what it is. We typically think of freedom as being free from any restraint, almost like a principle of physics. I am free if nothing constrains me, like a ball is free to roll around a table top until something stops it. I am free in America if I have room to expand my personal, mental, and physical horizons. I am free if no one can place any limits on my personal preferences or ideas. If I do encounter such limits, then I must overcome them or I am not free.

This is of course rebellion if one takes it to its logical conclusion. Americans in the mode of Western social contract thinking have often decided to live with concessions to our apparently innate freedom from all restraints by choosing to abide by laws that govern social systems. We can live with laws if, in our current historical mode, they were created by a majority of elected officials. Our system sort of works, at least to the extent that the laws we are making, the officials making them, and the population electing them all have a fairly common understanding of a universally binding set of higher, moral laws. If that breaks down then all bets are off for trying to hold in tension my personal sense of limitless freedom from resistance, together with my admission that societal living requires me to abide by rules that impose resistance.

All of this gets very messy if one begins, as we do in America, with the incorrect idea of freedom. If one is not careful, and if people are not well taught about what is good, and true, and of our nature, then the incorrect notion of freedom as the absence of any barriers quickly gets out of hand. The notion that I do not need to submit to anyone or anything is intoxicating and ultimately deadly.

The recent and tragic multiplication of mass shootings, and the debates about guns that accompany them, is one manifestation of how awry our notions can go in the absence of sound classical principles to guide us. It is difficult to calmly and rationally discuss the merits of an apparent “right to bear arms” in a society that has abandoned so many attempts to teach people how to responsibly handle not only guns but more basically their own mental whims.

What sort of social system creates people with the frame of mind that views everyone around them as disposable entities in the light of their own, personal mental turmoil that evidently is only relieved if other people are blown away? One that glamorizes the violent manner of removing other people who have come to be viewed as obstacles to one’s own, interior self-actualization. We have raised a whole generation of people who believe that freedom means giving in to my urges because resistance is unhealthy and confining. It makes sense that such a population cannot control their own guns. If one understands that true freedom is about self-control and choosing what is good, then a discussion about society and gun violence takes on a different and more productive dimension.

Another highly problematic manifestation of our difficulties with understanding freedom correctly is the transgender fad of the current moment. The inaccurate idea that a person can choose one’s gender and accompanying identity is all about a notion of freedom that requires every limit to be overcome. If I feel confined by my innate biological sex, and the gender roles in society that go along with it, then true freedom requires that I just change it. If my sex is in my mental way of self-actualization, I will blow my old gender and self away, destroying my body in the process, doing violence to myself in the process, because I am convinced that I will feel better without imposed limits. This is Western freedom, defined by a lack of resistance, run totally amuck.

We are only going to be a truly free society if we ceaselessly work on the never-ending project of forming people in the truth of the moral law and of our human nature. This is of course about Divine Revelation, the Natural Law, grace, conversion, virtue, and the classical view of reality. There is no doubt that in a fallen world even truth itself, a classical view, can be abused and twisted. There is ample evidence that it was, and that it continues to be. However, the current state of the West should at this point be enough to show us that we made a mistake in prior eras of tossing out the whole classical system in favor of one that makes the individual zone of the mind the absolute highest authority that exists. The notion of freedom as the absence of all resistance is increasingly a recipe for anarchy in a world that has never been taught what is required to live together in a society. Freedom means knowing and choosing what is good, as in, what is of God. On this foundational principle rests the health and the future of our nation.