When the founder of Opus Dei, Josemaria Escriva, was attending a retreat, a young priest was ardently preaching on how the greatest gift that we could receive from God as Christians was that of personal liberty. Josemaria grew increasingly nervous about the approach the priest was taking and started worrying that the priest would send the wrong message to the whole congregation, so he decided to do something he had never done before. He promptly stood up and asked the startled priest to stand down and continued the talk himself. This he did, not out of anger or in order to enforce discipline but out of a sense of humility to God’s will, as he was really afraid that the message of the gospel would be warped. For Josemaria, humility was not to be defined as having a false condescending or “easy” disposition to difficulties, but rather by having the real fortitude and prudence to accept the will of God, which as St. Bernard finally asserts in his lengthy treatise on the subject, is the final distillate of real humility. He went on to explain that although human freedom was in fact one of the most important gifts from God, the greatest gift to man from God was in fact Divine filiation. As St John the Evangelist says, through redemption by Christ, God gives all men the grace and power to become children of God. His children, with the ability to inherit his kingdom, a kingdom which exists within each and every one of us and which needs to be sought out by our daily efforts of the intellect and will.

St Thomas Aquinas listed the final end of every political action as being versed towards the common good, which is not a simple addition of the good of the majority of the population but action versed towards doing what is good based on the absolute truth. The common good does not achieve its calculus by considering personal ambition, power or fame but by considering the good of the nation as a whole.

Backbench MPs are sometimes in the unenviable position of feeling that their personal ambitions are not being well served by decisions taken by the party and government. Sometimes they feel that they are being used, which they in fact are, and then thrown away and this obviously irritates them. They feel that they are not adequately consulted on certain important decisions that they need to vote on. However, they need to resist acting on these feelings and fears when they need to act in the interests of the common good. When the common good becomes subservient to personal interests, or when it becomes a tool in the hand of persons in order to reach personal objectives, then the finality of political action becomes warped.

Political frontbenchers are not entirely off the hook on this issue. They too should behave in ways that are conducive to the common good. Sometimes however they do not always do this. Blind ambition and efforts to extend their power also get in the way at this level so that they sometimes act from purely personal motives which do not achieve the interests of the common good at all. People do feel used and thrown away like a squeezed lemon, and when this happens, as Kant so clearly points out, the categorical imperative to do good and avoid evil is betrayed. People should not be used as a means but are an end in themselves. It sometimes transpires in politics that people need to be used as both ends and means, which is acceptable, but they ought not to be used only as means. Ordinary people using common sense and reason often realise when this has happened and there is concurrently a feeling of betrayal of the common good leading to a loss of sense of purpose and common moral and political aims so important for a healthy esprit de corps. It is said that all democratic systems start off as democracies but end up evolving towards oligarchies.

The fact remains that the Kingdom of God lies within us all and we must all wrestle with what the world gives us to establish through grace and intellect and by free will, what action best brings this kingdom about. There will be times as in all wrestling matches when we succeed and there will be times when we fail. Some say that death is the only real leveller. Not so. We should all cultivate the virtue of fortitude, as we are all, in the final analysis, children of the same God.

Michael Asciak MD

BIRKIRKARA