Happy Fourth
July 4, 2015
MY family once vacationed in a campground in the White Mountains of New Hampshire where we unfortunately pitched our tent next to a group of campers who were having a wild time. They included a man who every fifteen minutes or so would call out ecstatically for everyone around to hear, “Freedom! Free-ee-ee-eedom! Free-ee-ee-dom!” As the night progressed, and the emptied cans of Budweiser piled up around him, his praise of freedom grew louder and louder. Finally, in the early morning hours, he proved just how committed to freedom he was. He sat right in the middle of the campfire. After that, there was a hush. We never heard from him again.
Freedom as an end in itself doesn’t make sense. If freedom is the power to harm or even destroy oneself it is not freedom at all, but a kind of slavery. On this national holiday, when we love our country and celebrate our heritage, we can commit ourselves to a wiser understanding of freedom than the one mindlessly promoted as the epitome of American patriotism. There is no political freedom — for individuals or society — without moral freedom. Moral freedom consists in the power to act in accord with the order of being and eternal law.
As Pope Leo XIII wrote in his majestic encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum, On the Nature of Human Liberty, dated June, 20, 1888:
10. From this it is manifest that the eternal law of God is the sole standard and rule of human liberty, not only in each individual man, but also in the community and civil society which men constitute when united. Therefore, the true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases, for this would simply end in turmoil and confusion, and bring on the overthrow of the State; but rather in this, that through the injunctions of the civil law all may more easily conform to the prescriptions of the eternal law. Likewise, the liberty of those who are in authority does not consist in the power to lay unreasonable and capricious commands upon their subjects, which would equally be criminal and would lead to the ruin of the commonwealth; but the binding force of human laws is in this, that they are to be regarded as applications of the eternal law, and incapable of sanctioning anything which is not contained in the eternal law, as in the principle of all law. Thus, St. Augustine most wisely says: “I think that you can see, at the same time, that there is nothing just and lawful in that temporal law, unless what men have gathered from this eternal law.”[5] If, then, by anyone in authority, something be sanctioned out of conformity with the principles of right reason, and consequently hurtful to the commonwealth, such an enactment can have no binding force of law, as being no rule of justice, but certain to lead men away from that good which is the very end of civil society.
11. Therefore, the nature of human liberty, however it be considered, whether in individuals or in society, whether in those who command or in those who obey, supposes the necessity of obedience to some supreme and eternal law, which is no other than the authority of God, commanding good and forbidding evil. And, so far from this most just authority of God over men diminishing, or even destroying their liberty, it protects and perfects it, for the real perfection of all creatures is found in the prosecution and attainment of their respective ends; but the supreme end to which human liberty must aspire is God.
Happy Fourth of July! Our battle for freedom has only just begun.
