Each year on July 4, Independence Day, we Americans celebrate the anniversary approximately one month before the anniversary of the signing of our justly revered Declaration of Independence. (Perhaps you might spend part of your holiday, before or after grilling out,0 watching the really good movie 1776, which depicts the Second Continental Congress’s deliberations about American independence, with show tunes. I watch it every year, and among other things I tell myself that I’ve got to read David McCullough’s bio of John Adams … and then another year goes by and I find that I never got around to it.) For somewhat complicated historical reasons, we tend to read the Declaration in a way that heavily emphasizes Thomas Jefferson’s claims about “unalienable rights.” Of the three “unalienable rights” listed by Jefferson, we are perhaps interested especially in “liberty” or freedom.
When I say “interested,” I mean among other things that we discover something of a range of opinions today regarding its meaning and importance. Sometimes the supposed universal hunger for political freedom seemed to be President George W. Bush’s go-to “theory of everything” in the area of international relations. Possibly less common, but not irrelevant, is the opposing dismissal of this as “freedumb.” With regard to the question of what freedom or liberty is, on the one hand, we encounter nonsense like the infamous sentence from the execrable O’Connor-Kennedy-Souter opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (happily, struck down two years ago in Dobbs): “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.” On the other, according to some strands of conservative thought, there can be little tension at all between being compelled to do what is objectively just, and being treated with due respect for one’s freedom.
The question of the meaning of human freedom - the topic of human freedom is treated, by the way, early in Part Three of the Catechism, the part on Christian morality - is an important one, because our understanding of what sort of thing freedom is will condition or even determine our understanding of how it is to be used. The “is” of freedom, and the purpose of freedom, go hand-in-hand; freedom is, in fact, defined by its purpose. This is seen especially obviously in PP v. Casey; if freedom is the right to define for oneself, well, pretty much everything, then it does seem fairly obvious that respect for freedom will entail recognition of a right to abortion (and more). St. John Paul II elaborates on this point in his analysis of what has gone wrong in a culture of death (and what needs to be done in order to build a culture of life) in his great 1995 encyclical The Gospel of Life 19:
There is an even more profound aspect which needs to be emphasized: freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim.
Now, that freedom must be understood as oriented toward truth - and see St. John Paul II’s earlier (by a year and a half) The Splendor of Truth for more on this - seems in fact to have become something of a commonplace among Catholic commentators; George Weigel comes to mind. And this is of course good as far as it goes. But I want to suggest that it is not quite enough, including as an interpretation of St. John Paul II’s thought.
In the “Who am I, anyway?” section of my About page on Substack, I mention that I fall within the communio school of thought in Catholic theology, a school that takes its name from the international family of journals Communio, founded in 1972 by Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Besides these very great founders, one of the most eminent members of this school, and probably my favorite American theologian, is the late David L. Schindler, who taught at the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and who was the longtime editor of the American edition of Communio. In very numerous books and articles over the decades - which I found persuasive and which therefore influenced me a lot - Schindler argued, in a nutshell, that if we don’t think about freedom in the right way - as oriented toward truth, and, indeed, ultimately toward the full truth about the human person, namely, that we are made to participate together in the Trinitarian communion - then we will end up with tyrannical politics.
Schindler’s “foil,” so to speak, is, very frequently, liberalism. By this, he does not mean the opposite of conservatism! Indeed, Schindler recognizes that, to paraphrase Milton Friedman (sort of), we are all liberals now - we all think in terms of “rights,” like “liberty,” and conceive of politics as the means by which these are “secured.” Again, if you’ve ever read the first part of the Declaration of Independence, this will sound familiar. And of course Jefferson didn’t make up this political philosophy in June 1776; it had a history, as will be known to those who’ve read, for example, John Locke. Unavoidably to oversimplify, it is this understanding of the human person and politics that Schindler means by “liberalism.”
What’s wrong with this? Again, “we are all liberals now”; which is to say, for “all” of us, nothing at all. But Schindler disagrees, and I think he’s right.
It isn’t, I would say, that liberalism doesn’t capture any of the truth about the human person. It does! I think - and here I differ with some of my conservative friends - that we do have rights that need to be respected. This is a truth. When I use my freedom in a way that respects your rights, I am using it in a way that is oriented toward the truth. And when you use your freedom in a way that respects my rights, you are using it in a way that is oriented toward the truth. And for a lot of liberal (in the broad sense in which I’m using the term here) conservative (in the conventional American political sense) Catholic thinkers, that’s enough. Addressing today’s practical political disputes - regarding, say, abortion - is largely a matter of sorting out which rights-claims are legitimate and which ones aren’t: is it true that an unborn baby has a right to life, or is it true that a pregnant woman (or, nowadays, a “pregnant person,” I guess) has a right to an abortion? What matters most is convincing people (as individuals and as a culture) that it is true that an unborn baby has a right to life and it isn’t true that a woman has a right to an abortion.
What I’m suggesting here is that something more is needed: namely, an understanding that the truth about the human person goes deeper than his or her being a bearer of rights. Most notably, we need an understanding that the human person exists fundamentally for God and neighbor (brother and sister), as participants, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, in Jesus Christ’s divine Sonship. Our exercise of our rights is meant to be to the end that we are able to give ourselves back to the God who made us and gave himself to us in Christ, and to give ourselves to those he has given us to be our brothers and sisters in him. As the Second Vatican Council taught in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes 24 - a favorite passage of St. John Paul II’s - “man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”
We are often told that freedom must be coupled with responsibility. Quite so. We know, as I have said, as St. John Paul II says, that freedom must be linked with truth. This is foundational. But which truth? In a word, the truth about communion: the truth that we are made for communion, including that overflowing, as I call it, of communion into human society that the Church’s social teaching terms solidarity.
And the alternative to a culture - and politics - of solidarity, as it turns out, is not one of atomization, but rather one of, as I suggested above, tyranny. In brief, if I don’t see my use of my rights as meant to enable me to make a gift of myself, I will end up seeing it as meant to enable me to take from others. There is, unfortunately, no neutral ground in between these options. Such a neutral ground is metaphysically impossible. Yet another part of the basic truth about me is that I’m partly constituted by my desire for the communion for which I’m made. I can’t evade this desire any more than I can evade anything else of the truth about me. I can allow my actions to be formed by it, or I can try to resist it, but, again, there is no neutral in-between in which it somehow ceases to be relevant. And if I try to resist the object of my desire - communion with God and with my brothers and sisters - then I not only won’t do what that communion requires of me; I will do the opposite of what it requires of me.
Of course, when I say “I” here, I don’t mean that I, as an individual, will inevitably become tyrannically selfish if I am not self-giving. What I mean, rather, is that a culture will, over time, move in the direction of having these kinds of tendencies - strong ones - and that these will inform the politics that is intertwined with that culture.
Ultimately, what all of this means is that, as I have said elsewhere, the Church’s social teaching is inseparable from her call to preach the Gospel. It is in fact the Gospel of Jesus Christ that makes known to us the full truth about God, and therefore also about ourselves, inasmuch as we are made in his image and called to communion with him, as Gaudium et Spes 22 tells us (another passage very important to St. John Paul II):
The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.
A blessed and happy Independence Day to all. May we celebrate our independence from England, and our dependence, as persons and as a society, on the Triune God.
Ceterum autem censeo Putin et Cyrillum esse deponendos.
Ideas for future topics? I aim to please!
Excellent read -- thanks!