Category Archives: Freedom

Cancelling Anger

Culture, Freedom, Virtue, , , , , ,

Virtuous men are rarely, if ever, prone to propaganda.  That is because they can ascertain when to “fight the good fight”.  Vicious men, on the other hand, are extremely prone to it.  They have no idea which are the good fights and so they must be told.  But simply telling them is not enough.  Lacking any real control over their anger, they need someone else to stir it up for them by turning events that fit the narratives catastrophes.   Having no way to turn it off, they are absolutely unforgiving and must find offense around every corner.  Discerning ears will recognize this scenario for what it is—our modern society and its incessant need to cancel other people.

In truth then, at the heart of cancel culture, is the inability to discern the difference between wrath and anger.  These terms, even if they are often used synonymously, are not truly referring to the same thing.  Anger is, first and foremost, a passion or an emotion built into human nature to deal with the presence of evil.  More specifically, it is the emotion that provides an interior motor to fight against a specific evil that acts as an obstacle to achieving some good thing.  When a man discerns some good thing is being blocked, he wills to be angry in order energize him to fight the good fight.     

Fighting the Good Fight

The virtuous man knows the good fight when he sees it because he has the virtue of justice.  He is habitually desiring that each person receives what is due to him.  When some obstacle is placed in the way of that being achieved, he grows angry in order to move him to fight to restore justice.  This is why St. John Chrysostom thought that: “He who does not get angry, when there is just cause for being so, commits sin. In effect, irrational patience sows vices, maintains negligence, and encourages not only bad men to do wrong, but good men as well.”

Not only does the virtuous man grow angry when he should, he also directs his anger at the source of the injustice and does not just “vent”.  Likewise, he also filters it through the virtues of clemency and meekness to avoid becoming excessively angry and aim it at the injustice first and then the cause of it.  He truly knows how to “hate the sin, but not the sinner” because he is just.

Our Lord, Who referred to Himself as “meek and humble of heart” is the example par excellence.  When He cleaned the Temple, it was because His Father was not being rendered what was due to Him.  So, fueled by anger, the Just Man removed the obstacle.  With meekness He whipped the tables but with clemency avoided whipping the money changers.

The reason why anger is such a strong emotion is because it must often supply enough fuel for us to fight for justice for other people.  When that fuel turns inward and ignites a fire in us because of how we perceive we are being treated then it is truly wrath.  This is why wrath has been considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins—it turns what should be an outward-facing passion into a selfish one.  The wrathful man sees red, not because of an offense against justice, but because he has been slighted in some way.  To use modern parlance, he has been offended by the words or actions of another person.  Because anger must always be justified, he must also search for a reason why his own personal offense is really unjust.  In essence wrath turns anger off of justice onto my feelings and directs it not towards rectifying an injustice, but mercilessly punishing the offender.

A simple example might help us discern the difference.  A man is getting on to a crowded bus and he steps on your foot.  You feel anger arise, but look at him and realize he had tripped over someone else’s foot a few feet ahead of you and it was merely an accident.  In that case the just response is clemency because it was an accident.  Now suppose that same man enters the bus looks you in the eye, smiles and stomps on your foot.  Now the anger is justified, but the meek man would temper his response such that it did not include punching him in the face.  But the anger would be directed towards the action and not just the fact that it was done to you.  The way to know the difference is by imagining after stepping on your foot he goes and steps on an old lady’s foot.  If you are just as angry (or more) about that as you are about your own foot being stepped on, then you know the anger is justified.

This scenario also highlights an important point that is often a source of confusion regarding anger.  The Christian in imitation of Our Lord, when He is the sole victim of the injustice, will often suffer it in silence and not be angry.  But when there are other victims, including those who might be scandalized by you not confronting the evil, then zealous anger will confront the wrong directly.  The “others” include the offender because he needs to know that he has done evil in order to repent—and will need to be justly punished as part of that repentance.

Back to the Cancel Culture

Every passion, when not properly wedded to virtue, needs increased stimuli in order to get an equivalent response.  Related to the question at hand, wrath needs to be constantly fed, especially when it is being used to keep the vicious fighting.  It no longer becomes about justice, but about keeping them angry.  There is no need to discern whether something is actually unjust or not, because the anger will make it “feel” that way.  There is no need to make the distinction between victim and perpetrator because the object of that anger will tell which is which.  There can be no forgiveness until the perpetrator is “cancelled” and is no longer exists, either literally or figuratively. 

Thankfully, history has many examples of cancel cultures that always end with the cancellers eating their own.  When there is no one left to be angry at, when there is no one left to cancel, wrath demands that you execute the executioner.  For those who are trapped in this vicious circle the only option is for the virtuous to step up and restore justice.  Fear, masquerading as prudence, is never the solution.  Neither is the ersatz anger that we call “outrage.”  Nor is any attempt at cancelling the cancellers.  Only true zealous anger for justice can repair our decadent culture.

A Healthy Sense of Sin?

Freedom, Sacraments, Sin, , , , , , ,

In a 1946 Radio Address, Pope Pius XII said that “perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.”  There has been no great moral awakening since he uttered those words so that what was begun has found its completion in our age.  The widespread loss of a sense of sin has led to a great spiritual malaise in which any semblance of shame has been lost and sins are demanded as rights.  The soul of our culture is dead, which is not surprising because its natural soul, the members of the Church, have also lost their sense of sin.  Communion lines grow longer while Confession lines grow shorter and even public sinners are given Communion as a right. 

A Great Spiritual Awakening

Pope St. John Paul II thought that the only way to stimulate a Great Awakening was to restore this sense of sin:

“The restoration of a proper sense of sin is the first way of facing the grave spiritual crisis looming over man today. But the sense of sin can only be restored through a clear reminder of the unchangeable principles of reason and faith which the moral teaching of the church has always upheld.  There are good grounds for hoping that a healthy sense of sin will once again flourish, especially in the Christian world and in the Church. This will be aided by sound catechetics, illuminated by the biblical theology of the covenant, by an attentive listening and trustful openness to the magisterium of the church, which; never ceases to enlighten consciences, and by an ever more careful practice of the Sacrament of Penance.”  

Reconciliation and Penance, 18

The Holy Father was reminding the Church that one of her essential tasks in to preach the bad news of sin.  In fact, the Church has no mission if there is no sin, or at least if there is no sin to be forgiven. Just as the Father sent the Son into the world for the forgiveness of sins, so the Son sends the Apostles and their successors (c.f. John 20:21-23).  To omit the reality of sin from the Gospel renders the Good News utterly senseless. 

The Pontiff did not just say that a sense of sin was necessary, but a healthy sense of sin.  Sin and guilt, at least according to spirit of the world, are things to be explained away because it is unhealthy.  That we can develop a healthy sense of sin is itself Good News because it frees us from not only rationalization but also scrupulosity.  Both of these ensnare us because they leave us closed to the reality of God’s mercy.  What then would a healthy sense of sin consist in?

Elements of a Healthy Sense of Sin

We must first see sin for what it really is.  First and foremost it is an offense against God, but not God as Divine Rulemaker, but God as Father.  In fact, JPII says that all sin is ultimately a rejection of God’s fatherhood.  God gave to us the gift of freedom, but not so that we choose whatever we want, but so that we can choose Him.  He is at every moment providing (e.g. Providence) the means for us to do that.  We only need to orient our freedom towards this reality.  Sin then is disorientation, setting our eyes off in the wrong direction and away from God.  And this is why one of St. Thomas’ thought that “God is offended by us only because we act contrary to our own good” (SCG, 3.122).

A healthy sense of sin then begins by orienting our freedom with acts that are truly good.  When we see sin as ultimately harmful to us and enslaving us, we lose the desire to rationalize and self-forgive.  Now we desire to flush our sin and move forward in freedom.

But it also consists in seeing sin through the lens of God’s Providence.  God only permits our sin if He can turn it to our good.  The obvious example is the “happy fault’ of Adam that won for us the Redeemer.  But this principle applies to each and every sin that we commit.  Ultimately, we are permitted to commit certain sins and not others because those certain sins ultimately can be oriented by God towards our sanctification.

This sense of sin is unfathomable unless we drop the God strictly as Rulemaker paradigm.  He is not sitting in Heaven with His Divine Gotcha Button waiting for us to mess up.  From all eternity He plotted how He was to redeem me and you and that would include using those sins we commit as a means to that sanctification.  This is not to trivialize our sin, but to see them from God’s perspective.  We are permitted to commit certain actual sins because those are the sins that, when repented of, will draw down upon us the grace of a true and deeper conversion.  So that when we sin, the grace of repentance follows right behind it, causing us to run back harder and faster than when we fell.  This healthy sense of sin then takes the focus off of our actions and shines it upon Divine Mercy.  In other words, a healthy sense of sin sees all personal sin as a means that Providence uses to glorify God’s Mercy and save our souls.  Only a healthy sense of sin rooted in this reality protects us from falling into scrupulosity.    

Eliminating the Other Police Force

American Founding, Church and State, Church Authority, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Ecumenism, Freedom, ,

While we are about the project of reforming the civil police force, we are allowing the Thought Police to run amok.  The Thinkpol are slowly rendering certain ideas unutterable simply because they do not conform to the Ochlocratic Orthodoxy.  Not only do they have ritual humiliation at hand, they have co-opted corporations so that private views now have become fireable offenses.  The mob silences dissenters by threatening livelihood and so most people simply conform.  Free speech has come under attack in America in ways that would make even Woodrow Wilson blush.  Like the previously discussed freedom of conscience, freedom of speech also needs defending.  And like freedom of conscience, only Catholics who have a proper understanding of it, are in a position to lead the charge.

On the one hand, it is not wholly unexpected that free speech in our country has taken such a sharp left turn into a ditch.  The Founders had an absolute faith in the power of the popular mind.  Individuals might err, but the entire society could not.  Free speech, coupled with democracy, serves as a recipe for finding the truth.  All debate, they thought, would eventually lead to the truth.  All ideas, even bad ones, then must be protected in order to keep the debate moving.  In Gertz vs Welch, the Supreme Court declared that “”Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea … (it) requires that we protect some falsehood in order to protect speech that matters.”

Captivity to the Mob

Any freedom that is directly linked to democracy is always susceptible to becoming captive to the mob.  If debate over an issue ceases then it is assumed that the truth has been reached.  Now those who do not accept the orthodoxy become a threat to the well-being of society and need to be shut up.  Thus we have things such as “hate speech” becoming punishable offenses.    

A vicious circle is formed so that truth as a democratic matter always ends in an assault upon true liberty including free speech.  It is as if they must saw off the limb they are sitting on.  Liberty can only be connected to purpose and the purpose of speech is to utter truth.  Therefore, there is such thing as liberty to speak falsehood.   Freedom of speech is not unlimited but instead is not then a justification to say anything. 

Truth is not democratic but is strictly governed by the dictatorship of reality.  Truth, that is, the accordance of mind with reality, is necessary for liberty. Summarizing, Leo XIII says that the right to free speech “is a moral power which – as We have before said and must again and again repeat – it is absurd to suppose that nature has accorded indifferently to truth and falsehood, to justice and injustice. Men have a right freely and prudently to propagate throughout the State what things soever are true and honorable, so that as many as possible may possess them; but lying opinions, than which no mental plague is greater, and vices which corrupt the heart and moral life should be diligently repressed by public authority, lest they insidiously work the ruin of the State” (Libertas, 23).    

This abuse of free speech eventually leads to its destruction as ironic as that seems.  The problem is that there is no set of public truths that are immune to criticism, no intellectual foundation upon which debate may be carried out.  Leaving everything open to debate actually closes it, a situation that Leo XIII anticipated when he said “The excesses of an unbridled intellect, which unfailingly end in the oppression of the untutored multitude, are no less rightly controlled by the authority of the law than are the injuries inflicted by violence upon the weak. And this all the more surely, because by far the greater part of the community is either absolutely unable, or able only with great difficulty, to escape from illusions and deceitful subtleties, especially such as flatter the passions” (ibid).

Americanism and the Fallout

Eventually, “nothing will remain sacred and inviolate; even the highest and truest mandates of natures, justly held to be the common and noblest heritage of the human race, will not be spared. Thus, truth being gradually obscured by darkness, pernicious and manifold error, as too often happens, will easily prevail. Thus, too, license will gain what liberty loses; for liberty will ever be more free and secure in proportion as license is kept in fuller restraint” (ibid).  This is exactly where we find ourselves.

Because many prelates in the Church in the United States are infected with the Americanist heresy, they often confuse the authentic Catholic (i.e. true) understanding of free speech with the American model.  The former leads to peace and justice while the latter leads to further division.  One prelate recently said that our religious principles demand that we “defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree.”  Such a statement is misleading at best.  What we are disagreeing about absolutely matters.  Some topics are still open to debate, or as Leo XIII said, “In regard, however, to all matter of opinion which God leaves to man’s free discussion, full liberty of thought and of speech is naturally within the right of everyone; for such liberty never leads men to suppress the truth, but often to discover it and make it known” (ibid).  Others, such as the right to religious liberty and the immorality of racism God has not “left to man’s free discussion”.  Both sins against God cry out for justice.  Therefore, it is neither “baffling nor reprehensible” that a Catholic institution, faced with playing a role in rectifying either, would seize the opportunity; unless, that is, you think the Thinkpol, rather than God, has closed the discussion.  

The Divine Composer

Freedom, God's Will, Prayer,

If we were to encapsulate the teachings of the self-help gurus, then they would boil down to “never leave anything to chance.”  After all, at the heart of the self-help movement is, well, helping yourself, by taking control of your life and seizing the day.  The saints too would exhort us to never leave anything to chance.  But they would express this for a very different reason.  For the saints there is no such thing as chance.  Instead they would urge us to leave everything to Providence.  And it is this attitude that make them saints.  If we too want to join them in the Church Triumphant then it behooves us to study how the most practical of Christian doctrines, Providence, “works”.

Notice how any discussion of Providence will always have the idea of chance in its orbit.  To say that “there is no such thing as chance” might seem provocative at first, but once we unpack it then we will see that it must be profoundly true.  If any discussion of Providence cannot proceed without bumping into the notion of chance, then we must begin there. 

Toppling the Objections to Providence

On the one hand we know that pure chance, the notion that things “just happen” violates the principle of causality.  Everything that happens must have a cause.  Usually what we mean by chance then is when we cannot observe the causality or so many causes seemed to converge that the event was so unlikely that it had to be chance.  Labeling an event as chance really is a way in for us to admit that we cannot fully explain how an event happened.  But this leaves us with only two alternatives—either the causality was governed by some random force that we call chance or it is governed by God through His Providence.  Even if it is a tough pill for us to swallow in our empirical age, we must side with the saints in their choosing of the latter and their insistence that there is no such thing as chance.

This raises a second objection in that, by removing chance, it seems to also remove free will.  If everything is meticulously planned out, then how can there be freedom to choose?  But this is to confuse chance with contingency.  God’s Providence has left some things to necessity (like the Incarnation) and some things to contingency (like Mary’s cooperation).  But it is by His omnipotence that He governs the bringing about of the necessary things through contingent things (c.f ST I, q.22, a.4).  This bears some further explanation because it enables us to marvel more fully at God’s Providence.

Because God is the Creator of all things and, because He knows His own omnipotence, He can know all things that could happen or do happen because He is their ultimate cause.  So, despite leaving some things up to free will decisions, He can alter the events surrounding those decisions to suit His purpose.  This is not to suggest that He is constantly executing “Plan B”, but an admission that He foresaw all that was to happen.  Therefore, His eternal law is simply one plan.  Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange gives a useful example to demonstrate how this might work. 

Over time, the great composer Beethoven grew deaf but, despite not actually be able to hear them, was still able to compose beautiful pieces of music.  This was because he knew music not just in hearing it, but through its laws.  He could compose without audible experimentation because he knew how the notes would fit together and create harmony.  This higher way of knowing his music through the laws governing it made it unnecessary that he try all possible combinations of notes.  In knowing the law he, in a very real sense knew all possible combinations enabling him to say “these fit, these don’t” to every set of notes that entered his mind.   So too with God.  He knows the laws by which the universe is governed, even the “law” of free will by which our actions are presented to Him and thus can Providentially compose the world.

There is one final aspect that bears mention as well and that is the role of petitionary prayer.  Prayer is a gift from God meaning that true prayer is always inspired by God in order to conform our desires to the plans of Providence.  That is why the holiest of men and women, that is those who are most like God, willing what He wills, will always be the most effective of pray-ers.  In asking for what God intends to give, they are free instruments in the implementation of His plans.  Prayer then is one of the instrumental causes of Providence, perhaps the most powerful of all them.

The Laws of Divine Providence

The laws of God’s divine composition, which we call Providence, are essentially threefold.  First, nothing that happens is contrary to His purpose of Creation, namely, as a manifestation of His Goodness and the rational creature’s share in the revealed Glory of Christ.  Second, nothing that happens was not foreseen by God and willed either actively or permissively.  Finally, God sees to it that all things work to the spiritual benefit those who are called to be saints and persevere in His love (Romans 8:28).

At this point it is good to be reminded that the doctrine of Providence is practical.  Hidden within the word Providence is provide.  This means that although we make theological distinctions between God’s active and permissive will, in our daily living we should not make any such distinction.  We should see each and everything that happens as coming directly from the hand of God with the intent of providing for the spiritual needs of those who love Him.  And everything, means everything including our own sins.  God only allows us to fall if, in the end, it leads us towards being more fully invaded by grace. 

An example drawn from real life might help us bring all of this into relief.  Forgiveness, something most of us struggle with, is only possible with a firm belief in Providence.  Recall the story of Joseph the Patriarch.  When his brothers sought forgiveness he did not trivialize what they did nor did he forget it.  In fact, he remembered it and told them as such.  But he remembered it as it truly was, an instrument of Providence.  Joseph is the perfect model for the stance towards those that slight us.  When we submit to the plans of Divine Providence, we see those who harm us actually doing us a favor.  They become instruments in God’s Providential plan.  The “logic” is simple if we believe the laws of Providence elucidated above.  This does not mean we won’t suffer, but we are guaranteed to draw the fruit that God intended for us to receive when we submit to His will in it.  Our Lord was silent in the face of His oppressors precisely to win the grace for us to do the same.  Nor does it make what the person has done right.  It simply gives us a means by which we can move towards truly forgiving the other person.  Providence makes forgiveness possible and even easy.

Master of Your Domain

Anthropology, Conscience, Contraception, Freedom, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Sexual Ethics, , , ,

A couple of months back there was an anti-vaping meme that circulating in social media that encouraged teens to masturbate rather than to vape: “Pleasuring yourself with Vape?  Try masturbation instead.  Masturbating alone or with a friend is a great safe alternative to vaping.”    Vaping may be bad, especially for teens, but the solution of masturbation is not a real moral alternative either.  The meme creators reasoned that when pleasure is the goal, it is better to choose masturbation because it is a relatively harmless activity when done in private (or even with a “friend”).  Unfortunately, anyone who contests this is puritanically shouting into the hyper-libidinous wind that keeps our culture sailing along.  Nevertheless, one could, and more importantly should, argue that masturbation is far more harmful to the person than vaping and therefore something that should also be avoided.

Because we are oversexed any conversation on this topic will naturally require some backing up of sorts.  Our culture may be obsessed with sex, but so are the apparent puritans who are always moralizing about it.  We will back up in order to first understand why sex is such a big deal. 

Sex and Desire

Our human desires all seem to point to some personal need that we have.  Hunger and thirst point to the need to eat and drink for example.  While quelling the hunger pains and slaking the thirst may bring us pleasure, that cannot be enough to decide what and how we should eat and drink.  We must always keep the purpose of the desire and its fulfillment in mind.  The pleasure is meant to be a motor that moves us towards something that is good for us.  In other words, those things we choose to eat and drink must actually meet the needs of nutrition and hydration.  Those that do not, we label as perverted.  Eating plastic coated with strawberry jelly and drinking antifreeze both might bring us pleasure, but ultimately they fail to meet the need or purpose of the desire.  In short, there are right and wrong things to eat, even if some of the wrong things are pleasurable.  Every desire must be submitted to our reason that judges right and wrong according to the purpose of the desire.

Sexual desire is similar to hunger and thirst in that it is an innate human desire, but it differs because it is more complex.  It is more complex not just because it points to the “need” to reproduce, but because it also points to two other important distinctly human aspects.  First, sexual desire points to sexual fulfillment.  By sexual fulfillment I don’t mean an orgasm, but to our fulfillment of what it means to be made as men and women.  Our sexual desire points to our personal fulfillment in women becoming wives and mothers and men becoming husbands and fathers.  I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of people finding fulfillment in other ways, but just to emphasize that we are talking about sexual fulfillment, that is, what the meaning or telos of being made as a man or woman is.  Even the most ardent LGBT activist admits this truth when they preach gender identity.  In any regard, because our sexual fulfillment is so vital to our personal identity, it is our strongest desire.

The vehemence of the desire is the second aspect.  Not only is its tie to personal identity the reason for its strength but the fact that it is the biological motor by which we come out of ourselves.  It is a social desire in that it finds its true fulfillment in uniting with another person.  But its relative strength also means that it is the one which is mostly likely to become perverted, making it prone to abuse and rationalizing Therefore, it is also the one, in our fallen state, that we need the most need of instruction by which reason might govern its use. 

It would be hard to dispute the fact that it is other-directed.  Even the person masturbating invokes their imagination to call to mind another person.  Sexual pleasure is not just a passive response to being touched, but an intentional pleasure caused by another person to whom one is attracted to.  It can never be like scratching an itch where one only receives relief from some tension, but a desire directed towards another person.  Kinsey and Freud might have duped us moderns into thinking is was just some physiological response that causes the arousal of the person, but we all know that it is the bodily contact in conjunction with the presence (real or imagined) of another person that one finds attractive.  The object of our attraction and our arousal must be a subject.    

What’s the Harm?

This other-directedness of sexual desire seems obvious so that we can see why we might label masturbation as wrong.  But it seems to be little more than a “guilty pleasure” causing no real harm.  The harm may be hidden, or, more accurately, we might say we are blinded to it, but it is a real harm nonetheless.  The harm comes into view when we call to mind that human beings are creatures of habit, or virtues and vice.  No act occurs in a vacuum but always moves us towards virtue or vice.  Because sexual desire is so strong, there is perhaps no field of human activity where the law of habit is more obvious.

Masturbation by its very nature is a self-directing of sexual desire.  The aim is not to unite to another person, but to gain pleasure.  The turning to the self is no mere guilty pleasure but forms a habit of thinking and acting in that way.  It isn’t just a self-indulgent act, but makes someone selfish.  The person becomes habituated to seeking their own pleasure first and their partner’s pleasure becomes only a calculated concern.  They want their pleasure only so that they will come back around. 

Because sexual arousal is an intentional act, the person develops the habit of mind that makes arousal by a real person increasingly difficult.  A real person does not always do what the other person wants in the way that they want.  Masturbation becomes in a very real sense a gateway perversion to ever-greater perversions.  Nearly all sexual deviants began with masturbation.  This is not to say that everyone who masturbates will become a depraved sexual predator, but that it sets a person on that path because of what we will call the law of diminishing pleasure.

As we have said, pleasure is like the motor that moves the human engine towards truly good things.  But when pleasure becomes the finish line and not the motor, it always diminishes.  One then has to find new and more exciting ways in order to increase pleasure or re-direct the pleasure back to its intended end.  The point is that the chaste man derives far more pleasure from the marital embrace than the “stud” who traverses from woman to woman, just as the temperate man enjoys a scotch more than a drunk or the temperate woman enjoys a fine steak more than a glutton.  When we moderate our pleasures to only the right use of those things that cause the pleasure, pleasure always increases. 

Returning back to the anti-vape campaign mentioned at the beginning, we can now see why masturbation is a horrible alternative.  Indulging the strongest of our desires may reduce the desire for a lesser one, but it only further ensnares the teenager in a loop of pleasure seeking.

Revisiting Our Sins

Conscience, Freedom, Grace, Sin, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, , ,

One of the most committed sins is to re-commit our past sins—at least that is what many of the spiritual masters say. What they mean by this is not that we habitually fall into the same types of sins, but that we habitually call to mind the details of our past sins. What makes this practice so spiritually carcinogenic is that by hitting the play button we are opening ourselves up to a great temptation to reignite the pleasure of the sin. In a very real sense we can “re-commit” the sin by consenting to the pleasure it brought (and still brings) us. For this reason, they say we should never rehash the details of our sins, even if our goal is to stir up sorrow, once we have confessed them. Scripture tells us that God forgets our sins so that we do too.

We may not even be aware that we are doing this because of an ingrained habit of making “look but don’t touch” moral calculations. We reason that as long as we don’t actually “do it” then merely fantasizing about it is not a sin. But sin is an act of the will so that whether or not there is any external expression of the sin is really secondary. We can commit a sin merely by consenting to thinking about something sinful. This is precisely what Our Lord is getting at when He tells His followers that they can commit “adultery in the heart” (Mt 5:28).

Revisiting the Details

By rehashing the details of past sins, we always run the risk of taking pleasure in them, that is, in taking pleasure in something that is sinful. So rather than rehashing the details, we should only recall vagaries about them. The pleasure is in the details, the sorrow is in the offense. So when we dwell upon our sins, it should always be only to recalling the offense. St. Augustine up to the time of his conversion lived a famously reprobate life. But notice that we he speaks in the Confessions of his actual sins that he provides what seems to be a rather absurd example of stealing pears. What little detail there is, focuses not on the details, but on the offense itself. And for all the rest of his sins, he is silent on the details.

Augustine’s approach is also instructive in another key way. One of the evangelical devices that is often employed is the “witness talk.” Often, rather than modeling it on Augustine’s Confessions, they treat it like a Confession. The convert will go into great detail to show just how degenerate they had become, usually pointing to specific acts. The focus then is not on God’s mercy, but their sin. The speaker may no longer take pleasure in the details, but the details satisfy a certain curiosity of the listeners who have been conditioned by the world to take pleasure in the salacious details of other men’s sins. Instead of edifying the audience however they end up scandalizing them. Better to take Augustine’s approach and focus only vaguely on the sin.

Augustine in the Garden

This is especially relevant in the ecclesial climate, rocked by scandal, that we find ourselves in. There are many bloggers/podcasters who devote entire episodes that detail the particular sins of particular men involved in the scandal. By so doing they are simply expanding the reach of the active scandal of the men who have done these horrible things. Not only are they feeding their curiosity but by providing all the gory details they may be leading others away from the Church. Again, it is not that we should be silent in the face of great evil perpetrated by clergy, but there is no need to include specific details. You can get your point across by simply saying a priest engaged in homosexual behavior without telling all the gory details surrounding the acts themselves. This is sensationalism and only further glamorizes the evil. We should avoid listening to these tabloid approaches to the scandal.

Opening Up to Grace

Jesus’ admonition to avoid “adultery in the heart” was not only an appeal to try harder, but a call to embrace the freedom He paid so dearly to secure for us. This should not be seen as an accusation but an invitation to remove the impediments to grace. Our memory and imagination are a battlefield in which we are engaged by the enemy of our soul. Because they are material faculties the demons may be granted access to them in order to tempt us. The demons can call upon our memory banks and stimulate certain images in an attempt to get us to go down a particular train of thought. This is an attempt to gain control of our will. Simply being aware of this can help us go a long way in the spiritual battle.

But we absolutely must learn to mortify our memory and imagination. This is why the saints all caution us against what would seem like otherwise harmless daydreaming. By giving attention to every image and memory that pops into our minds we become conditioned to being controlled by them. Same also with a constant barrage of images that comes through modern technology. We crave (even chemically as many studies are coming to show) the constant stimulation and lose all control of our imagination. In this state, the demons can run roughshod over us because we do not even see them coming. They are simply cooperating with the process and leading us away from the harmless to the harmful.

By training ourselves to ignore these random images and memories our bodies become habituated to only producing them when they are willed. This makes us less susceptible to the attack of the demonic because we know immediately when they are acting. The memory and imagination, the source of all of our distractions in prayer, now become prayer’s servants and grace becomes completely operative. We are free from the tyranny of the imagination and memory and free for Our Lord to fill us with His life. Our past sins no longer have any power over us.

Gender Dysphoria and the Brave New World

Culture, Freedom, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Theology of the Body, , ,

After receiving an overwhelming thumbs-down from the LGBT community for her upcoming role as a transgender man, Scarlett Johansson has withdrawn from her participation in the film.  Initially she defended her casting by reminding the critics that actors in movies are not actually turning into the characters they play but instead are merely portraying them.  Never ones to fully grasp the distinction between imagination and reality, the transgender supporters continued to blast her until she finally relented telling Out.com that she had made a mistake.  In her official statement she said, “I am thankful that this casting debate, albeit controversial, has sparked a larger conversation about diversity and representation in film.”  While Ms. Johansson may be grateful that a conversation has been sparked, this particular group of people’s track record with actual conversation and debate is rather sketchy.  Adept at verbal sleight of hand and ad hominem (would they call it something different like ad et identify hominem?) arguments transgender activists avoid answering the tough questions.   But just in case they are in a talkative mood, there are a few questions that many of us would like to have answered.

The movie is supposed to tell the life story of a “transgender” man, Tex Gill.  I put the adjective in front of man in quotation marks not to be a contrarian but because my question has to do with the label transgender.  If he really is a man and not constructed to be a man, then why must that label appear at all?  Is he any less of a man than say a man who hasn’t transitioned?  It seems to me that by applying the modifier, you are admitting as much.  What if a man had been cast to play the protagonist?  Would we have seen the same response?

Why Must There Be a Label?

The label will always apply because the dirty little secret is that you cannot actually change someone’s sex to match their gender identity.  No amount of hormone therapy can change the biological reality, a reality that touches the entire person all the way down to the cellular level.  Some differences are not due to hormones but are a direct result of the genetic differences between the two sexes as numerous studies have shown. (like the ones detailed in Exploring the Biological Contributions to Human Health: Does Sex Matter?).  The best you can do is to give that woman some masculine characteristics.  Likewise, no amount of plastic surgery can turn that same woman into a man.  Perhaps you can remove breasts and construct something that looks like a penis, but it will never achieve true biological functioning completely like one.  This, and the exorbitant cost, is why most people opt out of genital reconstruction.

At best the person suffering from gender dysphoria can hope for artificial changes in their bodies in hopes of matching their gender identity.  How is it then that this will remedy the inner turmoil they experience?  In other words, how will they ever be able to remove the “transgender” label and live merely as a man or woman?  They will always carry some physical reminders of who they really are.  It is no wonder then that most of the evidence points to the psychological benefit being relatively minor given that they have only deepened their existential crisis by living in, as Dr. Paul McHugh says, “counterfeit sexual garb.”

St. John Paul II reminded us over and over that men and women only find true meaning in their lives by making a sincere gift of themselves to others.  In a fallen and wounded world this is far from obvious so that God has left our bodies as a sign of this path to happiness.  To mutilate this sign in hopes of finding your true identity only serves to lead a person further into darkness rather than light; unhappiness rather than fulfillment; transgender man rather than man.

One of the reasons why Johansson was hesitant to give up the lead in this film is because it has all the makings of an Oscar winning performance.  In fact it does not take much prognostication skill to predict that whomever ends up playing Tex Gill will be nominated for an Oscar.  We can be just as sure that Hollywood won’t be making any movies about the thousands of horror stories of those who at various stages of transitioning realized they were making a mistake and couldn’t sufficiently de-transition to undo the damage already done.  That is because these people do not fit the narrative that transgender activists are writing.

Thanks to the rise of radical feminism, all distinction between the sexes must be erased.  In her 1970 book called The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone added a Marxist twist to Simone Beauvoir’s idea that the female body (with its capacity for bearing children) is at odds with women’s freedom.  Enslaved to their bodies and victims of male privilege the only way out (synthesis in Marxist terms) is to erase all differences between the sexes.  Rather prophetically she calls for an end to “sex distinction itself” by any means necessary including the use of biotechnology.  Thanks to the invention of the term gender and Gender Studies programs her vision has become a reality.

The question however is how many innocent people must fall prey to the creation of a Brave New World in which rather than helping those with gender dysphoria come to grips with who they are, we must be coerced into agreement with them.  They outlaw “conversion therapy” saying it is cruel to help someone live in accord with their biological sex while they encourage actual conversion therapy that includes hormone therapy, puberty blockers and surgical mutilation.  They silence all those who disagree with them and bully actresses into passing on movie roles.  Welcome to the Brave New World!

The Myth of Moral Neutrality

Conscience, Freedom, Moralilty, Relativism, Sin, , , ,

There is an ongoing debate among philosophers and ethicists as to whether or not a man is capable of performing a morally neutral act.  Like all of moral philosophy this seemingly theoretical question has practical and, more importantly, eternal consequences for the rest of us.  In performing an impromptu poll among Catholics I know, most of them said “of course there are morally neutral acts” and then proceeded to list off a few, none of which were morally neutral.  In this post then I would like to address this question in hopes of not just solving a problem, but changing the way the reader approaches everything that he does.

In approaching this question there is an important distinction that must be made.  St. Thomas in his treatise on human actions (ST II-I q.6) reminds the reader that there are two “types” of actions in which a human being is the agent.  First there are what he calls “acts of man.”  These are natural acts of man that involve his vegetative and sense faculties such as digestion, growth, heartbeats, sensual perceptions (like seeing and hearing) and so forth.  These acts are performed without any movement of the intellect and will and are in no way voluntary.  Once they do become voluntary (such as when we choose to look at something) they fall into the second category; what St. Thomas calls human acts.  These actions, because they involve deliberation and choice, are voluntary actions.  Morality concerns itself only with human acts.

Just because acts of man are not voluntary does not mean that they are morally neutral.  Just as we would not say actions of an animal are morally neutral because they do not proceed from a voluntary action, so too we would not say that these acts of man are morally neutral.  They are not morally anything because they are not morally evaluable.

Human Acts

Once this distinction is made and we focus only on moral acts, we can begin to see why no action is morally neutral.  In evaluating the moral status of any given human act, St. Thomas suggests that one should look at four particular components; its genus, its species, the circumstances surrounding the act and its end (ST I-II, q.18).

It is the first two components, genus and species, that define the object of the human act.  The object of the act would be how one would define it if they were to witness the act.  These moral objects can be good, evil or indifferent based upon their relationship to reason.  It is the object that determines whether a given act can be ordered to the good or not (Vertiatis Splendor, 79).

Yes, I said that the moral object can be indifferent or neutral, but that does not mean that the action itself is morally neutral.  Because no human act takes place in a vacuum, it is also necessary to examine the circumstances surrounding the act.  In saying that the circumstances “surround” the act one is able to catch a glimpse into their relationship with the exterior action.  Circumstances are related to the exterior action as accidents.  This means that because they are truly exterior to the moral act they are not good or evil in themselves.  However some circumstances are morally relevant and thus add a character of good or evil to the action.  The morally relevant circumstances would be those that affect the relation of the act to man’s ultimate end according to reason.

We can imagine actions that are both indifferent in their object and in their circumstances.  Yet still this does not prove there are morally neutral actions because one needs to evaluate the act from the point of the view of the moral agent in considering the end that is intended.  While the external act and the circumstances may be morally neutral, no voluntary action can be considered neutral from the point of view of intention.  Every voluntary act is done for a purpose.  The purpose is either in accord with right reason and thus is a good act, or it is contrary to right reason and thus considered an evil act (ST II-I, q.18, a.9).

It becomes evident then that one can say there are two ends to each exterior act: the end of the act itself and the end which the agent intends.  How these two ends are related can be understood by relying on St. Thomas’ use of matter and form.  He says “(H)uman activity is defined formally by its goal and materially by its external object” (ibid).  This is an important point that follows from this.

The intention of the agent is more important than the end of the act itself in evaluating the act morally.  However, because the exterior action is the means to carry out the end the agent intends, it must be a good means for accomplishing that end.  That is there are some objects like murder for example that can never be ordered to a good end.  Secondly, although one can separate the two ends in theory, they both form a single act.  In other words for the act to potentially be good, both must be good.  Likewise, while a good intention may lessen the moral gravity of an objectively evil act, it cannot make the act itself good.  However, a bad motive can change the moral quality of an otherwise good action.

The exterior act itself is objective but to only emphasize this component is to fall into legalism.  The intent is subjective, but to only emphasize this principle is to fall into subjectivism.  Finally, the circumstances are relative, but to only emphasize this is to fall into moral relativism.

Clearing Up Any Confusion

A few examples may help to make all that has been said clear.  Suppose a man sees an older woman carrying a large heavy bag and looks like she is preparing to cross the street.  He decides to carry the bag for her (the object).  She really is going to cross the street (circumstances).  He wants to perform a kind act (intention).  This is a morally good act because all three components are good.  Now take the same object and intention, but now the woman tell him she does not want to cross the street.  This becomes a morally bad act because it is contrary to reason to carry a bag for someone across the street who is not going to cross the street.  Finally suppose that the object and the circumstances are the same as the original example but now the intention is to impress the woman’s daughter.  Now the act becomes morally bad because it is done with a bad intention.

That exercise is clear but what about something like eating lunch, or more specifically eating a sandwich for lunch?  The object is good—providing nourishment to your body, but the other two components are what determine whether it is a morally good act or not.  Have you already eaten enough?  Is it the last sandwich?  Are there other people that need to eat?  All of these circumstances have bearing on the moral evaluation of it.  What about the intention?  Are you eating because you are nervous or because you are hungry?  Are you eating because you want to keep someone else from eating or are you leaving half the sandwich because someone else needs to eat as well?  Each of the circumstances and intentions will determine whether it is a morally good or bad act, but none of them will make it morally neutral.  To eat when you are hungry is in accord with right reason and therefore a good action.  Eating a sandwich for lunch can be a morally good act!

Herein, I think, lay the confusion.  We think of morality in terms of breaking rules and not primarily as acting in accord with right reason.  There is no moral law against eating a sandwich for lunch therefore it is permissible.  Permissibility implies neutrality.  But once we slide into the realm of thinking in terms of permissibility and not in terms of right reason we only try to avoid doing anything wrong and lose our desire to do good all the time.  And this is why this question is completely practical.  Once we see right and wrong in this light and not necessarily as not breaking a rule, we begin to thrive as persons.  When we recognize that the good is always an option for us, we develop all the virtues at a faster pace.  When we begin to taste the sweetness of the fruit of virtue, we desire to have our reason rightly formed so that conscience may judge the good to be done at all times.  There are no morally neutral acts, indeed.

The American Athanasius

Creed, Culture, Defending the Faith, Freedom, Natural Law, Paganism, Politics, ,

Throughout her 2000 year history, the Church has confronted a number of great heresies that put Our Lord’s promise that she would not fail to the test.  The greatest of these may have been the first, Arianism.  It challenged the divinity of Christ, labeling Him as the greatest of all divinely inspired creatures.  The Arians taught that “He was”, as Hillaire Belloc put it, “granted, one might say (paradoxically) all the divine attributes but divinity itself.”  At its height, almost ¾ of the world’s bishops were Arian along with most of the army.  So widespread had the heresy become that there were many “rank and file” Christians who were Arians and didn’t even know it.  Swimming within the Arian waters, they were presumably orthodox even though they were, in truth, heterodox.  It was really the grace-filled insistence, mingled with plenty of personal suffering, of one man, St. Athanasius, that kept us all from becoming Arians (and not knowing it).  But rather than offering an account of how he did this, instead he is put before us as an example to be followed.  Many of us, wholly unawares, are swimming within the waters of a different heretical tank.  It is the heresy of Americanism.

This term, Americanism, may be vaguely familiar to some of us, but for the most part it is as foreign as the term Arian was to our 4th Century counterparts.  Although appearing under different guises such as Gallicanism, it is essentially a subordination of the spirit of Catholicism in favor of a nationalistic one.  In an 1899 letter to James Cardinal Gibbons called Testem Benevolentiae, Pope Leo XIII warned his American colleague of the danger confronting both the American Church and, because of its rising prominence, the Church universal.  It is, as one papal biographer of Leo XIII put it, “A spirit of independence which passed too easily from the political to the religious sphere.”

The Errors of Americanism

Pope Leo XIII attached four specific errors to Americanism.  First, all external guidance is set aside as superfluous so that all that is needed is the interior lights of the Holy Spirit.  It is the American ideal of rugged individualism, freedom of conscience, and a rejection of any authority that animates this error.  Second there is a higher regard for natural virtues than for supernatural virtues as if the latter are somehow passive and therefore defective.  This comes from the practicality of the American spirit that shuns philosophy in favor of the empirical and a do it yourself mentality.  Third there is a rejection of religious vows as somehow incompatible with the spirit of Christian liberty.  There is a certain irony here given how important religious communities like the Jesuits and Franciscans were in the beginnings of our country.  Finally, and perhaps the underlying principle of the entire heresy is that the Church should shape her teachings in accord with the spirit of the age.  To gain those who differ from us we should omit certain points of teachings so as to make the faith more palatable.

At the time the letter was written the US Bishops agreed that these would be a great problem if they were present in the American Church, but denied that they could be found and dismissed them.  This point is obviously historically debatable, especially given that Americanist tendencies can be found from the beginning in the actions and writings of the first bishop in the United States John Carroll who was a cousin of Charles Carroll (of Carrollton as he reminded the British in signing the Declaration of Independence) and was mostly American before he was Catholic.  But what cannot be debated in an age of “personally opposed but…” Catholicism Leo XIII was definitely prescient.

One of the reasons that Arianism had such great appeal was that at heart it was simply a clever attempt to save paganism by making Christianity more palatable.  For a pagan, a religion in which a creature was endowed with god-like qualities is easier to swallow than the truth that the Creator became man and suffered to redeem wayward mankind.  And so it is with Americanist Catholics who cleverly seek to focus only on those things that are easy for Americans to swallow.  As she grows older, America’s palate becomes increasingly limited.  For the Catholic the highest law is God’s law mediated through the Church.  For the American it is the Constitution mediated through the Supreme Court without any reference to a Higher Authority.  How long can these two things can co-exist without significant concessions by the Catholic?  Regardless of the timeframe there will come a moment of crisis for both the individual and the Church.  Simply agreeing to disagree and focus only on what unites us is not a solution.  The problem with this of course is that there is no reason then to convert to the fullness of the truth that is found only within the confines of the Barque of  Peter.  Why convert when you are simply promised more of the same?

Patriotism and the Catholic American

Why would I offer this reflection on July 4th of all days on the greatest of all secular holidays?  Could I be any more un-patriotic than to offer a criticism such as this on today, of all days?  To ask the question is to admit the problem.  We are not patriotic to the American ideal.  That is to treat America as a religion, which is at the heart of the problem.  To be sure we love America because it is our home, but it is our home only because we share it with people that we love.  We are patriotic because we follow Our Lord’s commandment to love our neighbor.  Those people who we share a home with are those that God has placed closest to us in order that His commandment might take flesh.  And there can be no greater love than to offer to them the Truth that has been handed on to us by preaching and living it unapologetically.

We find ourselves in a society that is coming apart at the seams and it is because what unites us is not greater than what divides us.  No matter how well the Founding Fathers framed the Constitution (and they did frame well) it was never strong enough to keep us united forever.  There is only one thing in this world that can keep a people united and it is the Church.  Only a reformation of Christendom can save this country and that begins with the Church being more Catholic not less.  For a Catholic resident in a non-Catholic country it is an act of true patriotism to want to convert his country—what we need is an American Athanasius.

 

You Betcha

Freedom, Money, Moralilty, Virtue, ,

Last month the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited sports gambling, paving the way for states to fabricate their own legislation regarding sports betting.  What each of the states end up doing is still to be decided, but before political expediency takes over, we should take an opportunity to consider the morality of gambling.  The topic of gambling and games of chance is not foreign to the moral teachings of the Church.  It has been a part of her Magisterium from very early on.  And so we can look at the principles that have been articulated in order to shine some light upon the subject of betting.

Over the past century, the Church has seen a profound shift in her pedagogical methods.  Gone are the days of the manualists, paving the way for more positive virtue-based pedagogy.  Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange described the prevailing views of the two schools as “the science of virtues versus the science of sins to be avoided.”  Whether this change in emphasis is a good thing or not is a question for another time, but what is not questionable is the fact that the “science of the virtues” approach has brought with it an open antagonism towards the science of “sins to be avoided.”  The manuals were very useful at the time because of the manner in which they taught.  They would first articulate general moral principles and then give examples of applying those principles to concrete examples.  It gave the readers (who were mostly confessors and theologians) a moral vocabulary that enabled them to navigate the practical realm with greater ease.  These manuals still retain their use today, even if in a complementary way.

The point of this digression, and how it relates to gambling, is that one would be hard-pressed to find an adequate discussion of gambling in today’s moral theology books.  The emphasis may be on developing the virtue of temperance, but without concrete situations in which the virtue is formed leaves us without any frame of reference.  Even if half the story is positive, it is still only half the story.  Discussing the virtue without discussing how the stop the opposing vice from forming is not enough.  Virtue isn’t only formed by facing a temptation head on, but also in the speed in which we flee from those moments of trial.  In other words, virtues are positive things that are formed by avoiding the near occasion of sin, a concept we hear very little about today.

Moral Approach

With that being said, we have to return to one of the most popular manuals of moral theology (partially because it was the first that was written in English) to find a thorough discussion of gambling.  In his Manual of Moral Theology, Fr. Thomas Slater, S.J. briefly treats the subject of gambling and games of chance.  He says that gambling, when it is framed within the realm of recreation and entertainment, is morally legitimate with some obvious caveats.  First, on the part of the gambler he must be acting freely and betting what is at his free disposal.  This means that he is not betting money that would otherwise be necessary for living and providing for his family.  Likewise both parties must clearly understand the rules of the game and that the outcome of the game is uncertain.

The reason why it is helpful to examine this issue from the “old” schema of moral theology is that this is one of those situations where just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.  Gambling is fraught with moral danger because it is a highly addictive form of entertainment that very quickly gets out of control, paving the way for moral ruin.  Neuroscientists have recently discovered, what St. Thomas and the Scholastics already knew, certain behaviors by arousing our passions, can become addictive.  Specifically they have found that certain behaviors like gambling produce similar chemical responses in our brains as some of the most addictive drugs like cocaine.  These neurotransmitters (of which dopamine is the primary one) are produced in response to certain stimuli and produce a feeling of pleasure.  This release is not just in the actual winning of the bet, but in the anticipation of the winning.  This means the pleasure comes not so much in winning but in betting.  And like all physiological pleasures we must “up the ante:’ (pun intended) in order to reproduce the same response.  The stakes must become higher and higher to produce the same feeling.  We do not need to look to far to find examples of men (mostly) and women whose lives have been ruined because of this addiction.

We are Catholics and that means we do not flee from things simply because their abuse can lead to addiction.  As Chesterton once said, “In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe, and the Cross can all fit together.”  But recall that gambling was a morally legitimate means of recreation. Once it ceases to be that, either because we do as a source of income, or it becomes an addiction, it no longer serves its purpose.  In fact one must ask how exactly this type of recreation, even when engaged in as such, re-creates us especially given the obvious dangers.  Still it remains legitimate, even if I cannot personally see its merits.

Legal Approach

Chesterton’s quote also reminds us of a related historical failure in which laws were made to curb abuse by prohibiting all use—Prohibition in the 1920s.  At the time, drunkenness was a social problem that needed to be dealt with.  Unfortunately by prohibiting “the production, transport and sale of (though not the consumption or private possession of) alcohol” (18th Amendment), it opened the door to even greater social ills.  This was because they were not good Thomists, failing to recognize that you cannot outlaw every vice.  The Angelic Doctor thought that laws should only treat “the more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others…”  In essence, the Angelic Doctor is saying that when a law prescribes acts that are far beyond the virtue of the average person in society, then there ought to be no laws against it.  One of the reasons for this is that the law may become a pathway to further vice.  What instead should have happened at the time was further support of the Temperance Movement, even through legislation.  The law cannot create virtue, but it can clear the way for it.

The parallels to sports gambling are obvious, even if it does not quite effect the same percentage of society as Prohibition did in the 1920s.  There should be no laws prohibiting sports betting, but instead the aim should be towards forming and fostering the virtue of temperance, even if this requires oversight and rules that limit the amount of gambling a person may engage in.

Lifting the Sunday Obligation

Eucharist, Freedom, ,

It used to be that every time I got the two-week reminder for my dental cleaning appointment, I would start flossing my teeth again. It wasn’t that I had forgotten to floss, but that I wanted to avoid the floss-shaming from the hygienist.  I thought that floss was overkill seeing as my high-powered electric toothbrush already removed the food particles and plaque from between my teeth.  Then during one appointment the hygienist explained that one of the main purposes was to keep your gums healthy. No one had ever told me why I needed to floss and just assumed I knew why (and didn’t realize I was too proud to ask). Understanding lifted the “obligation” and desire followed.  I stopped doing it merely to keep from getting in trouble with the dentist and started doing it because it was what healthy people do. For many Catholics, Mass is like flossing. They may be aware of the obligation to go to Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, but because they do not understand why this is so important and the desire is lost.

In an age of exalted personal freedom, obligation is a dirty word—“I shouldn’t have to do anything, especially during my free time on the weekends.”  Not to mention, God doesn’t want people who are forced to go to Church but people who free love Him.  God doesn’t want a bunch of rule-followers but men and women who love Him.  With this as the prevailing mindset, the Sunday obligation conjures up images of the “pre-Vatican II” Church that was overly focused on rules.  Obligations reek of mechanical action and are devoid of love.

Why We Need Laws and Obligations

The problem with this line of reasoning though is that we easily forget why God imposes rules and obligations upon us in the first place. The giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses while the Israelites were reveling at the foot of Sinai was not arbitrary. They were given precisely at that moment because the people are pining for their days in Egypt and are beginning to act just like what they were before—slaves. God gives them the Ten Commandments to show them what they must do to protect their true freedom.  Like the obligation to floss, the obligations imposed by the Decalogue are things that keep the human person healthy and from falling into slavery to sin.

At the bottom of the first tablet of the Law is the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath, the same Sabbath that Christ tells us was made for man (Mk 2:27). In other words, keeping the Sabbath is what a free and healthy person does. By setting aside one day a week to worship God, it keeps us from worshipping the false gods that surround us and continually threaten our freedom. As the Catechism says, “the Sabbath brings everyday work to a halt and provides a respite. It is a day of protest against the servitude of work and the worship of money” (CCC 2172).

In truth, God does not need our worship, instead it is us that needs to worship Him. He has made us to appreciate His infinite goodness and we are only truly fulfilled when we do that. Worship is the way we do that. But not any worship will do—this is the lesson of the Golden Calf. There are certain forms of worship that show forth His goodness truly and certain forms which don’t. Worship is not so much us going up to God, but Him coming to us, showing us how He should be worshipped.

Why the Mass is Different

The Mass is the divinely revealed form of worship. God does care how we worship Him or else He would not have gone to such incredible lengths to give it to us. It is the Mass that Our Lord so eagerly desired to give to the Apostles (Lk 22:15) and that received His stamp of approval with His last word from the Cross. It is the most perfect prayer to God, because it is God Himself Who has written it with His blood.

The Law gives us guidance on how to act just as the Mass gives us guidance on how to offer right worship.  But the Sunday Obligation is also different than the giving of the Law because it actually empowers us to love God and move beyond obligation.  Our participation in Mass enables us to take ownership of the greatest act of love for God that mankind has ever offered and make it our own.  Not just by watching but by truly participating; a participation that is consummated in Holy Communion.  The love for the Father that motivated Christ to perform that self-sacrificial act now becomes mine and yours and the stone tablets of our hearts become His flesh and blood.  In short, the Mass is obligatory because there is no more efficacious way to grow in love of God—“He who does not eat my flesh and drink my blood has no life in him” (John 6:53).  We could never come to this conclusion on our own and it is the Church as Mother that commands what is for our own good.  Without this act of obligation we will never come to love God more than we love ourselves.  Obligation gives way to desire through the power of the Cross given to us in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Like my flossing revelation, understanding lifts the obligation of the Mass and allows desire to grow to full bloom.  Our Lord “earnestly desired to eat this Pascha” (Lk 22:47) with each and every one of us.  Go and allow your desire to meet His!

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The Primacy of Conscience

Church Authority, Conscience, Freedom

Could it be that the” primacy of conscience” will lead to its ultimate demise?  With Church leaders like Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago saying things such as: “If people come to a decision in good conscience then our job is to help them move forward and to respect that. The conscience is inviolable and we have to respect that when they make decisions, and I’ve always done that” one has to wonder if it already has.  As Pope Benedict XVI once said, the greatest danger facing the West is the “self-destruction of conscience.”  Conscience is being destroyed from within because we no longer understand what it is.  Therefore it is instructive to look at conscience and see why those who profess the primacy of conscience are misguided.

Thanks, in no small part to the magic of Disney, Conscience is often spoken of as a thing, like the proverbial angel on one’s shoulder or Jiminy Cricket guiding Pinocchio.  Conscience is not, however, a thing but an act of the intellect.  More specifically it is a judgment reason.  Conscience is not just any judgment like whether I should bring along my umbrella or not, but a moral judgment about what one ought to do in a certain situation.  The Catechism, succinctly defines conscience as “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (CCC 1777). Rather than being something outside of us, conscience is as Gaudium et Spes defines it, “the most secret core and sanctuary of a man” (GS 16).

Before looking more closely at the idea of the so-called primacy of conscience, it is helpful to examine the underlying cause for its unquestioned adoption.  The moral life seems to present us with a Catch-22.  Either one sacrifices their freedom by obeying an authority or embraces that freedom and becomes one’s own authority.  In other words, there seems to be a great divide between authority and freedom and we must choose one or the other.

Those who embrace the “primacy of conscience” have decided to assert their freedom.  One would be hard pressed to find a single mention of this phrase in any magisterial document.   Those who refer to it often cite the same passage from the Catechism that the author did — namely, a “human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience.” While this does put an emphasis on the necessity of following one’s conscience there is a key modifier that can’t be overlooked.  Advocates of the primacy of conscience consistently omit the modifier “certain.”  The Catechism says that we must obey a “certain” conscience so that if we are to speak of a primacy of conscience it is a primacy of a certain conscience.

Fr. John Hardon in his Modern Catholic Dictionary defines a certain conscience as “a state of mind when it has no prudent fear of being wrong about its judgment on some moral issue and firmly decides that some action is right or wrong.”

In other words, a certain conscience has two components.  It is a judgment that follows from sound deliberation and second it refers to the moral law.  It is not a mere moral opinion based on a superficial assessment of a situation nor is it looking for reasons why what we want to do can be justified.  We call that rationalizing.  Instead it is principled reasoning as to how the moral law applies to the situation at hand.

Interestingly, those who appeal to the primacy of conscience rarely ever actually refer to whether they are right or not.  All that matters is whether or not the person acted in accord with it.  Think of Archbishop Cupich’s respect for the fact that the individual has been true to themselves.  Conscience trumps truth. So embedded in our language is this understanding of conscience that we even refer to St. Thomas More as a “martyr for conscience.”  It is as if he merely made up his mind that the Church was right and Henry VIII wrong and dug in his heels.  But St. Thomas More died not as a “martyr for conscience” but, like all martyrs, as a witness to the truth. Herein lies the problem for those who hold the mistaken idea of “primacy of conscience.”   By their logic, both St. Thomas More and someone like Adolph Eichmann who said during the Nuremburg trials that he was only being true to his conscience were equally laudable

Within the Catechism’s definition of conscience, we find the blueprint for the bridge between freedom and authority. Recall that conscience is “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act.” By what standard does one determine the “moral quality of a concrete act”? Before we can answer that question, we must clarify what we mean when we speak of “morality.”

Morality, simply put, is the relationship between a human act — i.e., one done with knowledge and freedom — and the use of man’s nature in fulfilling his ultimate purpose, communion with God.  Some acts are in accord with the proper use of man’s nature and lead us to thrive (we call these good) and some are not and cause us to become slaves (we call these evil). Because human nature and its fulfillment are objective, certain goods are common to all men. Reason recognizes these goods as true goods, and commands that they be protected, preserved, and promoted. These commandments of reason comprise the moral law. Therefore, the “moral quality of a concrete act” can be determined by how it measures up to the moral law.   The moral law acts as a bridge between freedom and authority.

archbishop-cupich

It remains to investigate where the moral law comes from.  How can we see obeying a law as not somehow inhibiting our freedom?  The word for conscience in Latin, conscientia, gives us a clue. It is translated literally as “knowledge with.” Conscience is literally the “co-knowledge” that man shares with God.   This shared knowledge about reality shows why conscience has authority.

God governs all of creation by His Divine Providence.  Because He always acts in accord with reason, all things participate in His eternal law.  He has made all things with natural inclination towards those things that will fulfill its purpose or end.  Think of how a tree naturally grows towards the sunlight.  But unlike the tree, man, because he has an intellect and will, can know and choose to participate in this eternal law.  According to St. Thomas Aquinas, it is our participation in the eternal law of God that is called the natural law. Therefore, the natural law comes from within insofar as it is mediated by God through reason. But because it is a participation in the divine law, it has its source outside of man, in God Himself who is the Author of human nature.

It is in light of this understanding that St. Paul refers to the Gentiles, “who have not the law,” as a “law unto themselves” because they “do by nature what the law requires” (cf. Rom. 2:12) without any contradiction of either their freedom or the objective moral law.

The moral law comes to us through our intellect, but because of our fallen condition we also share in the “knowledge of good and evil.” Although our innate desire for the good cannot be extinguished, the darkening of the intellect that accompanied the Fall causes us great difficulty in discovering the good. Our reason, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, must now be “suffused with the light of God’s truth. In fact, when human reason humbly allows itself to be purified by faith, it is far from weakened; rather, it is strengthened to resist presumption and to reach beyond its own limitations.” The light of God’s truth flows through the Church. The Church informs conscience in much the same way the soul informs the body — giving it life and making it what it is.

St. Thomas teaches that we need revelation in the practical order for two reasons. First, since we are fallen creatures without revelation, the truth “would be known only by a few, and after a long time, and with the mixture of many errors.” Second, because man has a supernatural end, there are certain truths that surpass human reason. The Church, as described in Veritatis Splendor, is at “the service of conscience, helping it to avoid being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine proposed by human deceit (cf. Eph. 4:14), and helping it not to swerve from the truth about the good of man, but rather, especially in more difficult questions, to attain the truth with certainty and to abide in it” (no. 64). The Church does not impose the truths of man’s proper use of his nature from the outside, but instead proposes those truths to man’s reason so that he may recognize them as true internal values and accept them as his own.  Conscience indeed is primary, but only a conscience that is animated by a desire to become what we were made to be—saints.

On Free Will

Freedom, God's Will, Moralilty

What do we mean when we say that man has free will?  To address this question, we must first look at man in his totality, both body and spirit.  Man exercises powers of both animals and angels.  Each of these powers is naturally inclined towards a given object.  For example, hearing is naturally inclined towards sound and eyesight towards light.  If you clap beside someone’s ear or pass something before his eyes (assuming they are not diseased in any way), then he cannot help but hear the clap and see the thing.  Our spiritual powers of knowing and willing likewise are naturally inclined towards truth and goodness.  Focusing only on the will at the moment, we can say that the will is fixed towards always choosing the Good.

This is an important point to understand because it often leads to moral confusion.  It is not possible for us to act contrary to the Good.  Everything we choose is because we have perceived it to be good, even if we are objectively wrong.  As a thought experiment, think about the person who commits suicide.  Why do they do it ultimately?  Because they deem it better to be dead than alive.  So too with the teenage girl who cuts herself—the pain of the cut is better than feeling the interior angst.  We could come up with any number of other examples, but the point is that no one can choose something they know to be bad for its own sake.

Given that we are bound by necessity to choose the Good, in what ways can we say that we have free will?  We have free will with respect to individual goods.  This is because each individual good merely participates in the Supreme Good itself, namely God.  Thus it is lacking in some way and we are free to choose it or to choose another (albeit also limited good) in its place.  But this is not the only manner in which we can exercise our free will.  We can also choose the means towards those good and acts associated with them.

For example, because it is a limited good, I am free to choose to become a pianist or not.  Once I decide to pursue that goal, I am free to choose what kind of piano I will buy.  I am also free to choose how I will practice or even if I will practice at all.

Pin_puppet

This also helps us to understand the question as to how, if we cannot sin in heaven, we could still have free will.  The idea that the will is naturally inclined to the Good means when we sin, we are actually choosing only what are apparent goods and not real goods.  In Heaven because we are caught up in Goodness itself, there are no apparent goods, only real ones.  Therefore, we can no longer sin.

This naturally leads us to wonder about the relationship between our free will and God.  When I said that no one can force our will, this includes God Himself.  This immediately presents a problem in that it seems that God is then limited.  But properly understood this is not a limitation at all because He has the power to change our wills.  While this seems like a mere intellectual sleight of hand, it is an important distinction for us to understand.  God is always the divine pursuer and lover.  He will never force Himself upon us like a rapist but will woo us like a lover.

God can change our wills in two ways.  The first is to create a desire in us for some good that was not there before.  The second is by introducing what St. Thomas calls a “form.”  This could be something like an actual grace in which our minds our enlightened as to what is really a good for us here and now or by strengthening our wills to achieve the concrete good.  In either case however it is still the person who chooses, even if he has had assistance from God in knowing and desiring.

St. Thomas offers a helpful analogy (De Veritate q.22, a.8) that makes the distinction clearer.  He notes that a stone has a natural inclination (i.e. gravity) to fall to the earth.  To throw it up in the air, is to violently alter its inclination.  But God could also change the inclination by removing gravity so that the stone had a new inclination to go up.  In that way, the stone would still be acting “freely” according to its own inclination.

With a proper understanding of free will, not as the power to do whatever I want, but the power to want what is good, comes the ability to act with authentic freedom.  It helps us to see freedom not as an end itself (mere license) but as given to us for a specific purpose, moral excellence.  That is why the Second Vatican Council called freedom “an exceptional sign of the divine image within man” (Gaudium et Spes, 17).  God is totally free not just because He is God, but because He is Good.  His laws for mankind are only blueprints for sharing in His Goodness.  In this Lenten season when we atone for all of our failures of living freedom excellently, may we embrace the true freedom to live as children of God.

 

Happiness and Morality

Freedom, Natural Law

For many people in today’s world, the question as to whether they can live both a moral life and be happy is answered firmly in the negative.  However, if we turn to the beginning of the most famous sermon that Jesus gave, the Sermon on the Mount, and His beatitudes, He gives a different answer.  The Beatitudes are Christ’s definitive answer to the question of happiness.  All of the early Church Fathers and even up until the Middle Ages interpreted them that way.  It was not until around the Fourteenth Century that the question of happiness was set aside and the moral life became marked by obligation.  One of the tasks that John XXIII left for the Council Fathers of Vatican II to do was to make the faith more accessible to the world today.  Concretely, one of the ways to do that is to link the Church’s moral teaching back to the notion of happiness.  We see this expressed in the Catechism when it opens the section on the moral life with a discussion of the concept of happiness.  In doing this, the Church is implicitly making the connection between morality and happiness in an attempt to restore an “ethic of the good” or a “morality of happiness” (see CCC, nos.1716-1719).

In order to reconnect these concepts, we must first point out some obvious truths about humanity that may have been forgotten.  The first is that while each person is unique, we all have the same unchangeable human nature.  Times may change, circumstances may change, but there are certain things about mankind that do not.  For instance, the fact that man has a rational nature means that his actions are willed and proceed from calculation and deliberation.  In other words, man’s actions always have an intended purpose.

If then all human activity is end-oriented and we all have the same human nature then there must be a final or dominant end that governs and gives meaning to all other ends.  The Church, in agreement with many of the ancient philosophers says that this ultimate end is happiness.  St. Augustine said, “we all want to live happily; in the whole human race there is no one who does not assent to this proposition, even before it is fully articulated” in recognition of the universality of the desire for happiness.

When St. Augustine and his philosophical predecessors use the word happiness, they mean something different than we usually do.  To the modern mind, happiness is synonymous with contentment.  It is seen subjectively as a temporary feeling that is dependent upon chance.  That the word happy comes from the Old English word for “chance” is a perfect illustration of this.

Classically understood though, happiness is a translation of the Greek word eudaemonia.  Etymologically, it consists of the word “eu” meaning “morally good”, “daimōn” meaning “spirit” and “ia” meaning “state”.  Immediately it becomes obvious as to the connection between happiness and moral goodness.  As Peter Kreeft says, this definition of happiness is objective in that it does not rely merely on feeling, is a lasting state as a condition of the spirit or soul, and is dependent not on chance but on God’s grace and our own free choice.

moses_rosselli

This definition of happiness captures the intrinsic link between happiness and morality.  But it is not just the word happiness that has been abused.  It’s counterpart—morality—has been distorted as well.  Webster’s dictionary defines it as “a doctrine or system of moral conduct.”  Notice how this seems to refer to a set of rules that reside outside the person.  Instead morality is best understood as the relationship between a human act and the use of man’s nature in fulfilling his final end.  In other words, it intrinsically tied up with what makes us thrive as human beings or what makes us happy.

That morality and happiness are bound is also in the mind of St. Thomas as well.  He says something about sin that only make sense if we keep them together.  He says that “God is offended by us only because we act contrary to our own good.”   Many people view God as the Eternal Killjoy, demanding us to follow His rules.  But as the author of human nature He knows what is best for mankind.  Recalling Augustine’s quote about the innate attraction we all have to the Good, He has given us reason in order to discover those things that make us happy. As Father and not merely Watchmaker, He reminds us of those things that should be done and those that should be avoided through Revelation and the Church.

There is a further implication that can be drawn from the fact that man’s actions proceed from deliberation and that is that his actions are done freely.  As the Angelic Doctor taught us, a correct notion of freedom is important to understanding a morality of happiness.  This idea of freedom  or what is called “freedom for excellence”, is the means by which, exercising both his reason and will, man acts on the natural inclination for truth, for goodness, and for happiness that is part of his nature.  Freedom properly understood then is not primarily the power to do whatever I want, but the power to act according to my nature and according to my true fulfillment.

Once we have a deeper understanding of our own nature, we can see how when we view the moral life through the lens of happiness we can easily move from a rule-centered morality to a virtue-based morality.  Viewed in this fashion the rules no longer seem as arbitrary impositions from the outside, but true prescriptions for human thriving.  This is precisely why the Catechism presents the virtues before it presents the Ten Commandments in its treatment of the moral life.  In maintaining this connection, Christ’s promise that in keeping His commands our joy will be complete is fulfilled. 

The Pope, the President and Religious Freedom

Freedom, Pope Francis

Yesterday on the South Lawn of the White House, President Barack Obama and Pope Francis exchanged brief remarks.  To listen to the remarks one would think that there was near perfect agreement between the two.  They both spoke of the environment, immigration and religious liberty.  While they were using the same words, they each attach very different meanings to those words.  Once we begin to look at this more closely,  understood, we find that the apparent agreement is much less than initially thought, especially when it comes to religious freedom.

In his remarks, the Holy Father said that American Catholics “are likewise concerned that efforts to build a just and wisely ordered society respect their deepest concerns and their right to religious liberty. That freedom remains one of America’s most precious possessions.”  President Obama for his part said that “[H]ere in the United States, we cherish religious liberty…So we stand with you in defense of religious freedom and interfaith dialogue, knowing that people everywhere must be able to live out their faith free from fear and free from intimidation.”  Although it seems they are in support of the same thing, there is a subtle difference in what they are saying that makes all the difference in the world.  It is as if Pope Francis is saying that American Catholics like religious liberty because it is good and President Obama is saying Americans think religious liberty is good because they like it.  One is rooted in the objective natural law, the other as a concession made by the government so that its citizens can worship if and how they want.

For all the discussion of religious liberty, very rarely is it examined for what it is.  Before we can address religious freedom, we must know what kind of freedom we are talking about.  In other words, what is religion?  Philosopher John Carlson defines religion as a “set of beliefs, relations and activities by which people are united, or regard themselves as being united to the realm of the transcendent.”    This definition has four fundamental characteristics of all religions.  First, since religion is a set of beliefs it assumes that man can somehow grasp and relate to this transcendent order through the use of reason.  Religion as a set of relations means that religion is something that people do in common and not merely as isolated individuals.  Because religion is a set of activities these beliefs are not only theoretical but require a response in the practical order.  Finally, and most importantly, religion concerns a relationship between man and some reality that is distinct from or above the empirical order.  It seems that this four-fold definition is consistent with the understanding of religion that informed our founding fathers.  The author of the Bill of Rights, James Madison, defined religion as “the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, being under the direction of reason and conviction only, not of violence or compulsion, all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it according to the dictates of Conscience” (James Madison, Amendments to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 1776).

Pope and Pres

While the fourth US President thought that religion was rooted in the nature of man as “the duty we owe to our Creator, ” the forty-fourth President thinks it merely one of “our core views as Americans” (Press Conference with President Obama and President Hu of the People’s Republic of China, January 19, 2011).  This leaves us with the need to answer the fundamental question of whether freedom of religion is something that is natural or given by the State.

Recall that St. Thomas thought that the natural law directly followed from the natural inclination of man towards four fundamental goods that perfect him—to preserve their life, to procreate and educate his children, to live in society, and to know the truth, especially about God (ST I-II, q.94, a.2). Because man is naturally inclined towards these goods he has a duty to obtain them and a corresponding right arises to pursue these goods.  Furthermore, whatever pertains to each of these goods directly would be considered a natural right.  Because life is an intrinsic good there is a right to life.  Because marriage and the rearing of children is a single intrinsic good, there is a natural right to marriage and children have a right to be raised by their biological parents.  Since man is by nature social, each person has a right to contribute to the common good.  Finally, from the duty to seek the truth the natural right to religious freedom follows.

Furthermore, the four intrinsic goods represent a hierarchy.  This hierarchy proceeds from the most basic, life, to the highest good of seeking the Ultimate Truth, Who is not just a concept or set of propositions, but a Person.  From this it follows that freedom of religion is, as the US Bishops have labeled it, “our first liberty.” This is because it is directly related to man’s end and ultimate Good, God Himself.  Furthermore, the lower goods often must be freely sacrificed for the sake of the higher ones.  Therefore we must be prepared to forgo the other goods—being a part of society, marriage, and even life—in defense of this ultimate good.  That is why Cardinal George could say “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square” if the assaults on religious liberty continue without being accused of suffering from delusions of paranoia.

The Second Vatican Council issued one of its most controversial documents, Dignitatis Humanae, to address the issue of religious freedom.  The Council Fathers enumerated three principles that can serve to illuminate true religious freedom from its counterfeits that are threatening it today.  These three principles concern its foundation, its purpose, and its limits.

Foundation of Religious Freedom

As was mentioned above the foundation for religious freedom is the dignity of the human person.  The Council put it this way:

“It is in accordance with their dignity as persons…that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth… Therefore the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature.” (DH, 2)

This bears repeating here because one of the imposters that threatens religious freedom today is the notion of religious tolerance.  Recall that religion is considered a human good that ought to be promoted.  Therefore it should not be treated as an evil to be tolerated.  In recognition of the fact that it is a true human good, rather than tolerate the religious life of its citizens, the State should “take account of the religious life of the citizenry and show it favor.” (DH, 3)

Tolerance was initially proposed as a concession that confessional states such as Anglican England and Catholic France would make towards other Christians.  It was based upon the assumption that the state had recognized a certain religion as true and the state would tolerate other practices and beliefs as a concession to those in error.  As the Enlightenment project took further root, the idea of tolerance was extended to religion in general especially in non-confessional states like the United States.  The danger that is ever looming is that if the state views itself as extending tolerance to religion, it can also cease toleration altogether.  Religious freedom becomes merely a civil right and is no longer viewed as a natural right.  This would be the view of the President.

The Purpose of Religious Freedom

The Council Fathers also addressed the purpose of religious liberty as well.   Religious freedom is necessary so that persons may fulfill their duty to seek the truth, to embrace it, and to live in conformity with the truth, once it has been discovered and accepted (DH, 1-2).  Like all liberties it should not be viewed as an end in itself but instead as a means to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to come to know the truth and live in its fullness.  A society that respects religious liberty is one that contributes to a spirit of openness to transcendent truth especially through education and respectful exchanges.  This mutual search for the truth can act as a cohesive force to bind a society together.

Modern man views freedom and objective truth as somehow in opposition to each other rather than truth being a condition for freedom’s fulfillment.  If truth and freedom are in opposition with each other then one must be rejected.  The modern tendency is to reject the existence of objective truth.  In the absence of truth then the will becomes primary and so choice becomes the greatest good.

In his ad Limina Visit with US Bishops in 2012, Pope Benedict XVI said that based upon this reduced anthropology there is a “tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience.”  Once religion is no longer seen as a search for objective truth about the transcendent order but instead as a subjective preference then religion is a strictly private affair.  This creates a two-headed hydra of sorts in that freedom of worship is always accompanied by “freedom from religion” or, more accurately, “freedom from other people’s religion” in which people recoil from religious believers insist on “imposing their truth on others.”

Limits on Religious Freedom

The Council treats religious freedom as a two-edged sword with respect to limits.  First, religious liberty “means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others” but this freedom can only be exercised “within due limits.”

The right to use coercion is a defining characteristic of the state.  Not only is this power a means to protect the safety of people against evildoers, but it also serves a teaching function that helps the evildoer himself remove the obstacles to a life of virtue.  But this power also is limited in that it should not force anyone to act against the truth as he understands it.  This is the fundamental issue with things like the Gay Marriage SCOTUS decision.  The Church views this mandate as coercive in the manner in which it forces Catholics to act against the truth of what is truly good for the human person.

On the other hand, with the modern exaltation of liberty much of civil discourse centers around what Mary Ann Glendon terms “rights talk.”  This way of speaking of rights has led to the tendency to absolutize all rights without any reference to the limits of those rights.  Religious freedom is not an absolute right but instead is governed by “due limits.”  These due limits are based upon whether they inhibit the exercise of others’ duties and their effect on the common good.

There has been a great emphasis in the Church on the need to dialogue with those who do not understand or agree with the Church.  In fact, Pope Francis described his visit as “days of encounter and dialogue.”  While this is certainly necessary and laudable, this can never truly happen without first making sure we are speaking the same language.  Just because we are using the same words, doesn’t mean that we are talking about the same things.

At the Heart of Liberty

Freedom, Politics

As Americans gather this weekend to celebrate the Fourth of July, one can’t help but be nostalgic for the Founder’s vision for our country.  Each year I go back and read the Declaration of Independence and reflect on the great gift God has given us in our country.  What becomes obvious in reading this founding document is that the overall theme is one of liberty.  Americans are called a “free people” that has been endowed with liberty by their Creator.  This liberty was understood as not, what Lord Acton would write a century later, “the power to do what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”  One has to wonder how the Founders would respond to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s most recent contention that the Bill of Rights guarantees “certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices that define personal identity and beliefs.”  In other words, his belief is that freedom exists only for the sake of personal autonomy.  By equating freedom with autonomy there is a great danger that true freedom will be greatly compromised.

If freedom and autonomy are not the same thing, then how is freedom to be understood?  To answer this question we begin by looking at human nature itself, just as the Founders did in the Declaration of Independence.  They found it self-evident that man was created with the inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  They thought man was made for a very particular end and that end was called “happiness.”  Although it was probably not in the sense that Jesus used it in the Beatitudes, but most assuredly they used happiness in the Aristotelian sense of a naturally virtuous life.  They listed the two rights only because they were indispensable means to the pursuit of happiness.

What made this self-evident to the Founders was that in looking at man, they knew he had the power both to reason and to will.  They also recognized that man’s will had two categories to it—the necessary and the free.  The necessary meant that no matter what, man must will the good in its universal aspect.  In other words, man cannot choose contrary to his own good.  He may be wrong as to what the good consists in, but universally man will always choose the good (i.e. happiness).  We are not free to choose our own end, it is written into our very nature.

The will is also free insofar as in this life we are not confronted with the universal good, but particular goods.  Our free will is given to us to choose the means by which we will achieve our fixed end.  In other words we have liberty in pursuing happiness and the Founders saw the role of government to protect and promote these “inalienable rights” by which man thrives.

Some may dispute the contention that we cannot choose contrary to our own good.  What about someone diving on a grenade to save his platoon?  One could argue that only someone who sees a good beyond this life that is obtained by selfless acts would do something like that.  Only someone who ultimately (even if they don’t explicitly say it) believes “he who loses his life will save it” would do that.  In fact even the person who commits suicide is acting a manner they think is beneficial to them.  They believe that what awaits them after their death is better than what they are enduring now.

Some of the confusion stems from equivocating on the terms surrounding freedom.  We tend to equate free will with freedom and freedom with liberty.  But these terms should remain distinct if we are to avoid falling into the pitfall that ensnared Justice Kennedy.  When we speak of free will, we are really referring to freedom of choice.  Freedom of choice is the mechanism by which we choose means to achieve our destiny.  This includes freedom from coercion so as not to be interfered with.  As we will see in a moment, this tends to be the current American understanding of liberty as well.

But liberty is something distinct.  It is freedom in its truest sense.  It is a conscious willing of the true end that fulfills our nature.  It is found only in the person who has completely mastered himself so he is not constrained by impulses from within (i.e. concupiscence) nor can he be coerced or forced from the outside to deviate from the good.  This is the truly free man.  It is the “liberty of the sons of God” (Romans 8:21) that St. Paul speaks of because he knows that only the man who is in Christ has liberty.  It also helps us understand how grace can never “force” us because it acts in cooperation with our liberty which is ordered to our true good.

The point is that Thomas Jefferson listed liberty among the inalienable rights not because he was looking for a catchy word but because he recognized this was the highest freedom in man.  He recognized only when man acted in liberty could he properly pursue his end or happiness.  He knew that when this liberty was not protected and promoted, both individual men and society would greatly suffer.  That is why they sought to be free from what they viewed as a tyranny when their liberty was threatened.

As proof of how far we have gotten from this understanding, read Justice Kennedy’s most famous quote from Planned Parenthood vs Casey in 1992, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”  If liberty truly means to determine one’s own concept of the meaning then freedom, liberty and autonomy are all the same thing.  These are not merely the ramblings of a single Supreme Court Justice, but instead a reflection of our culture as a whole.  Freedom of choice is a god in our culture.  It is an end rather than a means.  Personal freedom is the highest good and all things are subordinate to it.  This is nothing more than a recipe for slavery as we are blown to and fro by our whims and the incoherent ramblings of Supreme Court Justices.  Slowly but surely we are all becoming enslaved to personal freedom and in great need of a Declaration of Independence of our own.  On this Fourth of July, let liberty ring!