The 213th anniversary of the French Revolution was celebrated last Saturday week.

The storming of the Bastille, which took place on 14 July 1789, heralded a new era in European history. The French monarchy that had governed the country for entire centuries collapsed in three years. Old ideas concerning tradition and hierarchy of monarchy, aristocracy, and religious authority were suddenly crushed and replaced by the novel Enlightenment principles of nationalism, citizenship, and inalienable rights. The French Revolution, with its secular emphasis on equality, liberty and fraternity, put individual freedom as an absolute value on the human map of ideals. Is human freedom truly liberating?

When personal freedom goes unchecked, it becomes a catalyst for promoting a culture of death. In the words of Dr William Brennan, a Professor of Social Work in the Saint Louis University School of Social Work, Blessed John Paul II “defined the culture of death as a lethal mentality possessing an unlimited capacity for engulfing a wide range of victims and employed an inclusive perspective for highlighting ‘whatever is opposed to life itself,’ such as genocide, abortion, euthanasia, suicide, experimental exploitation of human beings, slavery, torture, mutilation rituals, and a host of other infamies”. For the Polish Pontiff, the latter evils find their raison d’être from “a notion of freedom which exalts the isolated individual in an absolute way, and gives no place to solidarity, openness to others and service to them” (Evangelium Vitae, 19).

Unfortunately, in the prevailing post-modern culture, there is the unhappy and diffused trend of making freedom “absolute, uncurtailed by any limits or sense of responsibility” (Redemptor Hominis, 21).

Therefore, freedom ends up becoming an end per se, and, consequently, man is regarded as being free when he uses his God-given freedom to do what he likes. This distorted view of freedom leads to a promotion of self, which necessarily demands complete autonomy up to the point of excluding the other. Hence, any other person is regarded as an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. For that reason, society risks becoming a mass of individuals placed side by side and devoid of any reciprocal bonds. Hence, freedom refutes and annihilates itself and becomes a crucial instrument in the destruction of others.

Blessed John Paul II maintained that the saving power of freedom is seriously weakened when it is separated from the objective truth.

There is an intrinsic relationship between freedom and life. In his encyclical on the value and inviolability of human life, the Holy Father stated: “These are inseparable goods: where one is violated, the other also ends up being violated. There is no true freedom where life is not welcomed and loved; and there is no fullness of life except in freedom. Both realities have something inherent and specific which links them inextricably: the vocation to love. Love, as a sincere gift of self, is what gives the life and freedom of the person their truest meaning” (§ 96).

Real freedom consists in subordinating one’s will to serve his brothers and sisters in need. As he said in his first encyclical he wrote as Pope, ‘Redemptor Hominis’, “Christ teaches us that the best use of freedom is charity, which takes concrete form in self-giving and in service” (§ 21). The Holy Father explained what liberating freedom in Christ is made up of when he delivered a powerful catechesis on the subject on 10 August 1983. Authentic freedom in Christ means “the freedom of giving ourselves. The perfect expression of freedom is communion in true love. Following upon this call there opens up before every human person the space for a decisive and dramatic alternative: the choice between a (pseudo) freedom of self-affirmation, personal or collective, against God and against others, or a true freedom of self-giving to God and to others. He who chooses self-affirmation remains subject to the slavery of the flesh, alienated from God; he who chooses self-giving, is already living the eternal life”.

Liberating freedom is fruitfully accomplished when one “desir[es] the good of the person loved … for his own sake, and not merely for the sake of the one who loves”. Can we live it?

Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap

SAN GWANN