Libertas scholastica is for the most part today a dead letter. What we have instead is “academic freedom.” Early 20th century scholars tried to connect the two in a grand genealogy from the libertas scholastica of the medieval universities, to...https://t.co/VfcqSy7098
— Church Life Journal (@ChurchLifeND) June 11, 2020
Dr. Patitsas speaks on the topic of “Ethical Justification for Christian Rights and Freedom”...
Posted by Orthodox Christian Network on Thursday, April 7, 2016
Christian Rights and Freedom Institute Holds its 2nd Annual National Symposiumhttp://myocn.net/christian-rights-and-freedom-institute-holds-its-2nd-annual-national-symposium/
Posted by Orthodox Christian Network on Saturday, April 2, 2016
Though this can be taken in more than one way, one literal reading is that “Servant of justice” is said only “because of the infirmity of your flesh”. Servitude is properly only of evil habits; good habits are precisely what constitute liberty and freedom. The fatal mistake of habits is to see the slavery and bondage of the habits we know best as characteristic of all human habits. This is yet another way in which we confuse what is most known to us with what is most knowable in itself.
Papal Address to Netherlands Envoy
"Globalization Needs to Be Steered Towards the Goal of Integral Human Development"
VATICAN CITY, OCT. 2, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is the address Benedict XVI gave today to Baroness Henriette Johanna Cornelia Maria van Lynden-Leijten, the new ambassador from the Netherlands to the Holy See.
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Your Excellency,
I am pleased to welcome you to the Vatican and to accept the Letters accrediting you as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the Holy See. I would like to express my gratitude for the good wishes that you bring from Queen Beatrix. For my part, please convey to Her Majesty my cordial greetings and assure her of my continuing prayers for all the people of your nation.
In a world that is ever more closely interconnected, the Holy See's diplomatic relations with individual states afford many opportunities for cooperation on important global issues. In this light, the Holy See values its links with the Netherlands and looks forward to strengthening them further in years to come. Your country, as a founder member of the European Economic Community and home to several international juridical institutions, has long been at the forefront of moves to strengthen international cooperation for the greater good of the human family. Hence the mission on which you are about to embark is rich in opportunities for joint action to promote peace and prosperity in the light of the desire that both the Holy See and the Netherlands have, to help the human person.
The defence and promotion of freedom is a key element in humanitarian engagement of this kind, and it is one to which both the Holy See and the Kingdom of the Netherlands frequently draw attention. It must be understood, though, that freedom needs to be anchored in truth -- the truth of the nature of the human person -- and it needs to be directed towards the good of individuals and of society. In the financial crisis of the past twelve months, the whole world has been able to observe the consequences of exaggerated individualism that tends to favour single-minded pursuit of perceived personal advantage to the exclusion of other goods. There has been much reflection on the need for a sound ethical approach to the processes of economic and political integration, and more people are coming to recognize that globalization needs to be steered towards the goal of integral human development of individuals, communities and peoples -- shaped not by mechanical or deterministic forces but by humanitarian values that are open to transcendence (cf. Caritas in Veritate, 42). Our world needs to "reappropriate the true meaning of freedom, which is not an intoxication with total autonomy, but a response to the call of being" (ibid., 70). Hence the Holy See's conviction regarding the irreplaceable role of faith communities in public life and in public debate.
While some of the Dutch population would declare itself agnostic or even atheist, more than half of it professes Christianity, and the growing numbers of immigrants who follow other religious traditions make it more necessary than ever for civil authorities to acknowledge the place of religion in Dutch society. An indication that your Government does so is the fact that faith schools receive state support in your country, and rightly so, since such institutions are called to make a significant contribution to mutual understanding and social cohesion by transmitting the values that are rooted in a transcendent vision of human dignity.
Even more basic than schools in this regard are families built on the foundation of a stable and fruitful marriage between a man and a woman. Nothing can equal or replace the formative value of growing up in a secure family environment, learning to respect and foster the personal dignity of others, acquiring the capacity for "acceptance, encounter and dialogue, disinterested availability, generous service and deep solidarity" (Familiaris Consortio, 43; cf. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 221) -- in short, learning to love. A society, on the other hand, which encourages alternative models of domestic life for the sake of a supposed diversity, is likely to store up social consequences that are not conducive to integral human development (cf. Caritas in Veritate, 44, 51). The Catholic Church in your country is eager to play its part in supporting and promoting stable family life, as the Dutch Bishops' Conference stated in its recent document on the pastoral care of young people and the family. It is my earnest hope that the Catholic contribution to ethical debate will be heard and heeded by all sectors of Dutch society, so that the noble culture that has distinguished your country for centuries may continue to be known for its solidarity with the poor and the vulnerable, its promotion of authentic freedom and its respect for the dignity and inestimable value of every human life.
Your Excellency, in offering my best wishes for the success of your mission, I would like to assure you that the various departments of the Roman Curia are ready to provide help and support in the fulfilment of your duties. Upon Your Excellency, your family and all the people of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, I cordially invoke God's abundant blessings.
© Copyright 2009 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana
In seeking the source of these profound differences in the concept, organization, and teaching of moral theology I was led, by a study at once systematic and historical, to the idea of freedom undergirding the two systems. On the one hand was the freedom of indifference, whihc brought Ockham into opposition with St. Thomas, while its concept went back to two compatriots, Gauthier of Bruges and Henry of Ghent, contemporaries of St. Thomas but outliving him. On the other hand, in Aquinas we find a freedom rooted in the intellect and will according to their natural inclinatiosn to the true and the good, and this is what we call a freedom of ecellence or of perfection.
The idea that a polis should rule itself was called “eleutheria”—“freedom”—by the ancient Greeks, by the way. As the example of Sparta shows, freedom in the Greek sense did not necessarily have anything to do with democracy.
Pope's "Lectio Divina" on Paul's Letter to Galatians
"Only a Shared Freedom Is Human Freedom"
VATICAN CITY, FEB. 23, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the "lectio divina" Benedict XVI delivered Friday during a visit to Rome's Major Seminary on the eve of the feast of the seminary's patroness, Our Lady of Confidence. The "lectio divina" is a reflection on St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians.
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Lord Cardinal,
Dear Friends,
For me it is always a great joy to be in my seminary, to see the future priests of my diocese, to be with you under the sign of Our Lady of Confidence. We go forward with her, who helps and accompanies us, and who really gives us the certainty of always being helped by divine grace.
Let us now see what St. Paul says to us with this text: "You were called to freedom." At all times, freedom has been humanity's great dream, since the beginning, but particularly in modern times. We know that Luther was inspired by this text of the Letter to the Galatians, and his conclusion was that the monastic Rule, the hierarchy, the magisterium seemed a yoke of slavery from which he had to free himself. Subsequently, the age of the Enlightenment was totally guided, penetrated by this desire for freedom, which it was thought had already been attained. However, Marxism also presented itself as the path to freedom.
Tonight we ask: What is freedom? How can we be free? St. Paul helps us to understand the complicated reality which freedom is by inserting this concept in a context of fundamental anthropological and theological divisions. He says: "Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another." The rector has already told us that "flesh" is not the body, but, in St. Paul's language, it is the absolutizing of the I, of the I that wants to be all and have everything for itself. In short, the absolute I, which does not depend on anything or anyone, seems really to possess freedom. I am free if I do not depend on anyone, if I can do everything I wish. However, precisely this absolutizing of the I is "flesh," namely, the degradation of man, it is not the victory of freedom: libertinism is not freedom, instead, it is the failure of freedom.
And Paul dares to propose a strong paradox: "Through charity, be of service " (in Greek "douleuete"); in other words, paradoxically, freedom is realized in service: We are free if we become one another's servants. And so Paul puts the whole problem of freedom in the light of the truth of man. To reduce oneself to the flesh, apparently raising oneself to the rank of divinity -- "I, man alone" -- introduces a lie. Because in fact, it is not like this: Man is not an absolute, being able to isolate himself and behave according to his own will. This goes against the truth of our being. Our truth is, above all, that we are creatures, creatures of God and we live in relationship with the Creator. We are rational beings, and only by accepting this relationship do we enter into truth, otherwise we fall into falsehood and, in the end, are destroyed by it.
We are creatures, hence dependents of the Creator. In the age of the Enlightenment, especially for atheism, this dependency seemed like something from which it was necessary to free oneself. In reality, however, it would be a fatal dependency only if this Creator God was a tyrant, not a good Being, only if he was as human tyrants are. If, however, this Creator loves us and our dependence implies being in the realm of his love, in this case, in fact, dependency is freedom. Thus, we are, indeed, in the love of the Creator, we are united to him, to the whole of his reality, to all his power. This, therefore, is the first point: To be a creature means to be loved by the Creator, to be in this relationship of love that he gives us, with which he provides for us. From this derives above all the truth about ourselves, which at the same time is a call to love.
And because of this to see God, to orient oneself to God, to know God, to know the will of God, to insert oneself in his will, that is, in the love of God is to enter increasingly into the realm of truth. And this path of knowledge of God, of the relationship of love with God, is the extraordinary adventure of our Christian life: Because in Christ we know the face of God, the face of God who loves us even to the cross, to the gift of himself.
However, the creaturely relationship also implies a second type of relationship: We are in relationship with God but, at the same time, as human family, we are also in relationship with one another. In other words, human freedom is, on one hand, to be in the joy and great realm of the love of God, but it also implies being only one thing with the other and for the other. There is no freedom in being against the other. If I absolutize myself, I become the other's enemy, we can no longer coexist on earth and the whole of life becomes cruelty and failure. Only a shared freedom is human freedom; in being together we can enter the symphony of freedom.
Hence, this is another point of great importance: Only by accepting the other, by accepting also the apparent limitation that respect for the other implies for my freedom, only by inserting myself in the network of dependencies that makes us, finally, only one human family, will I be on the way to common liberation.
A very important element appears here. What is the measure of this sharing of freedom? We see that man needs order and law, to be able to realize his freedom, which is a freedom lived in common. And how can we find this just order, in which no one is oppressed, but each one can make his own contribution to form this sort of concert of freedom? If there is no common truth of man as it appears in the vision of God, only positivism remains and one has the impression of something imposed even in a violent manner. Hence the rebellion against order and law as if it was a question of slavery.
However, if we can find the order of the Creator in our nature, the order of truth that gives each one his place, order and law can be in fact instruments of freedom against the slavery of egoism. To serve one another becomes an instrument of freedom, and here we can include a whole philosophy of politics according to the social doctrine of the Church, which helps us to find this common order that gives each one his place in the common life of humanity. The first reality that must be respected, therefore, is truth: Freedom against truth is not freedom. To serve one another creates the common realm of freedom.
And then Paul continues, saying: "For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" After this affirmation the mystery of the Incarnate God appears, the mystery of Christ appears who in his life, Death and Resurrection becomes the living law.
Immediately, the first words of our reading -- "You were called to freedom" -- point to this mystery. We have been called by the Gospel, we have really been called in baptism, to participate in the death and resurrection of Christ, and in this way we have passed from the "flesh," from egoism, to communion with Christ. And so we are in the fullness of the law.
You probably all know St. Augustine's beautiful words: "Dilige et fac quod vis -- Love and do what you will." What Augustine says is the truth, if we have truly understood the word "love." "Love, and do what you will," but we must really be penetrated by communion with Christ, having identified ourselves with his death and resurrection, being united to him in the communion of his body. By participation in the sacraments, by listening to the Word of God, the Divine Will, the divine law really enters our will, our will identifies with his, they become only one will and thus we are really free, we can really do what we will, because we love with Christ, we love in truth and with truth.
Therefore, let us pray to the Lord that he will help us on this path that began with baptism, a path of identification with Christ that is always realized again in the Eucharist. In the third Eucharistic Prayer we say: "To be one body and one spirit in Christ." It is a moment in which, through the Eucharist and through our true participation in the mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ, we become one spirit with Him, we identify with his will, and thus we truly attain freedom.
After this word -- the law has been fulfilled -- after this unique word that becomes reality in communion with Christ, all the figures of the saints who have entered into this communion with Christ appear behind the Lord, in this unity of being, in this unity with his will. Above all, the Virgin appears, in her humility, her goodness, her love. The Virgin gives us this confidence, she takes us by the hand, guides us and helps us on the path of uniting ourselves with the will of God, as she was from the first moment, expressing this union in her "Fiat."
And, finally, after these beautiful things, the letter points out once more the rather sad situation of the community of the Galatians, when Paul says: "But if you bite and devour one another take heed that you are not consumed by one another ... walk by the Spirit." It seems to me that in this community -- which was no longer on the path of communion with Christ, but in the external law of the "flesh" -- naturally controversies also emerged and Paul says: "You become wild beasts, one bites the other." He refers thus to the controversies that arise when faith degenerates into intellectualism and humility is substituted by the arrogance of being better than the other.
We see clearly that also today there are similar things when, instead of being inserted in communion with Christ, in the Body of Christ which is the Church, each one wants to be better than the other and with intellectual arrogance wants to be regarded as the best. And thus controversies arise which are destructive, born is a caricature of the Church, which should be one soul and one heart.
In St. Paul's warning we should find today a reason to examine our conscience: not to think of being better than the other, but to meet one another in the humility of Christ, in the humility of the Virgin, to enter into the obedience of the faith. Precisely in this way the great realm of truth and freedom in love is really opened also for us.
Finally, we want to thank God because He has shown us his face in Christ, because he has given us the Virgin, the saints, because He has called us to be only one body, one spirit with him. And let us pray that He will help us to insert ourselves ever more in this communion with his will, so as to find love and joy in freedom.
[At the end of the dinner with the community of the Roman Seminary, the Holy Father said]
I am told that yet another word is expected from me. I have already spoken perhaps too much, but I would like to express my gratitude, my joy at being with you. In my conversation now at table I have learned something more about the history of the Lateran, begun by Constantine, Sixtus V, Benedict XIV, Pope Lambertini.
So I have seen all the problems of the history and ever-new rebirth of the Church in Rome. And I have understood that in the discontinuity of external historical events lies the great continuity of the unity of the Church at all times. And also in regard to the composition of the seminary, I have understood that it is an expression of the catholicity of our Church. From all the continents we are one Church and we have the future in common. Let us only hope that vocations will grow because, as the rector said, there is a need for laborers in the Lord's vineyard. Thank you all!
[Translation of Italian original by Inma Alvarez]
© Copyright 2009 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana
Archbishop Forte on Religion and Freedom (Part 3)
"Those Who do Not Pray Will Not Live by Faith"
LEEDS, England, DEC. 6, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is the third part of the address given by Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti-Vasto, Italy, a member of the International Theological Commission, to a Nov. 12 meeting of the bishops of England and Wales.
Part 1 appeared Tuesday, and Part 2 appeared Wednesday.
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3. Consequences: What to Do to Respect and to Promote a True Relationship Between Religion and Freedom in Church and Society Today?
How can believers and nonbelievers, how can believers of different faiths meet and dialogue in truth given the challenges of the described landscapes? How can freedom be experienced as true and religious freedom be possible in truth and reciprocal respect between them?
To respond adequately to this question from the point of view of theological and pastoral responsibility, we must show how Christians, engaged in living and working in this changing world, are required more than ever today to give an account of the hope that is in them, with gentleness and respect for all (cf. 1 Pt 3,15).
At both individual and community levels, this means that Christians must be disciples of the One and Only, servants out of love, and witnesses to what it means to follow their Lord. At the same time, in the interplay between faith and nonbelief -- to which the adventures of modern atheism and the restlessness of nihilistic postmodernism make us especially attentive -- believers are called to go beyond every reduction of Christianity to ideology, and to be sincerely attentive to others in all their dignity, whatever their beliefs may be.
Thus, we discover that the atheist, the only atheist that can be taken seriously, may live in the very heart of believers themselves, because only someone who believes in God, and has experienced God as the loving Father-Mother, can also "know" what it would mean to deny him, and what infinite suffering his absence would be. The nonbeliever is not outside believers, but within them: This insight leads to a particular understanding of the life of faith itself, lived now not presumptuously, as something possessed, but in humble awareness of the constant need to put oneself at the service of the truth, and to do this not as so many private adventurers, but in the communion of the Church, which has been raised up and is nourished by the Spirit.
a) Believers, prisoners of the invisible. To believe is to be taken prisoner by the Totally Other. This is precisely why believers can bring the truth of faith to bear on human thought, as they let themselves become prisoners of the Invisible, not immediately available and certain. Thoughtful belief does not claim to have an explanation for everything, to throw light on everything, but lives rather as if by night, charged with expectation, suspended between the first and last coming of the Lord, already strengthened, certainly, by the light which came into the darkness, and yet still longing for the dawn.
Thoughtful belief is not yet totally lit up by the day, which belongs to another time and to another homeland, but it still receives enough light to bear the burden of keeping the faith. Thoughtful belief is humble: It hangs on the cross, which in the world's darkness is, and always will be, the disciple's guide, the star of Redemption, the revelation of the God welcoming us in love. In their turn, nonbelievers, once they have crossed the ford of modernity, live in the selfsame state of search and expectation. This is on condition that their nonbelief is more than a label, that it is the fruit of their experience of suffering and struggle with God and of their being unable to believe in him.
True nonbelief is not an easy denial, with little effect on the person concerned. Serious, thoughtful nonbelief, which pays attention to the true questions of the world and of life, means suffering; it is a passion for truth that pays a personal price for the bitter courage of not believing.
One who does not believe, and who lives this condition in a responsible way, is aware of the acute pain of absence, feeling himself orphaned, deeply abandoned: Only the death of God can cause such sorrow in the human heart and in the history of the world. Thus it is that the thinking nonbeliever, just as the conscientious believer, wrestles with God. "My religion is to wrestle with God": According to Miguel de Unamuno, a voice speaking for the "tragic sentiment of life," the whole of religion lies in this "wrestling with God." And since "to live is to yearn for eternal life," living is inevitably marked by the tragedy of having to fight this unequal combat.
Out of respect for the dignity of such nonbelief, which emerged in all its clarity after the tragically heady days of ideological atheism and its fall, believers are called to question their faith and rediscover the struggle with God as a part of their love for him. The company that faith and nonbelief keep with one another in this way has its origins in the one human condition: When human beings ask the deepest questions about their vulnerability to pain and death, they do this not as people who have already arrived, but as searchers for the distant homeland, who let themselves be permanently called into question, provoked and seduced by the furthest horizon.
Human beings who stop, who feel they have mastered the truth, for whom the truth is no longer Someone who possesses you more and more, but rather something to be possessed, such persons have not only rejected God, but also their own dignity as human beings.
To be human, to be free, means to go on a journey outward: Human beings are on an exodus, called permanently to go out of themselves, to question themselves, in search of a home, glimpsed but not possessed, in search of the loving Father-Mother who welcomes them. If human beings are by constitution pilgrims toward life, begging for heaven (Jacques Maritain), the true temptation is to stop journeying, to feel they have arrived, no longer to think of themselves as pilgrims in this world, but masters of an impossible eternal instant. This illusion of feeling we have arrived, the presumption of thinking we are already fulfilled, that we have achieved the goal of our existence, this is the fatal illness.
All this can be applied analogously to the things of God: In the life of faith, too, the greatest temptation is to stop. Because Christians are called to follow the cross, where God spoke in the silent, disquieting eloquence of the passion, they are constantly placed before this great choice: to crucify their own expectations on the cross of Christ, or to crucify Christ on the cross of their expectations. This is exactly the way in which the cross is the gospel of freedom, as Jesus showed us in the way, he went out of himself in choice after choice, to the point of deepest self-abandonment!
In everyday experience, as in the journey of faith, human beings are called to be free by paying the painful price of this continual, inevitable choice, a choice that constantly places us on the threshold, sensing the dizzy alternative of going one way or the other.
b) Faith: struggle and submission. As human beings constantly go out of themselves to struggle against death and walk toward life, they are joined by the Word who comes from the divine mystery, from that God who, according to Christian faith, "has time" for them. God comes to us so that our history may enter the mystery of home and there find rest. This meeting between human beings who go out and God who comes, between exodus and advent, is faith: It is struggle and agony, not the repose of a certainty possessed.
Whoever thinks they can have faith without a struggle risks believing in nothing. Faith is what happened to Jacob at the ford of Jabbok (cf. Genesis 32:23-33): God is the one who attacks under cover of dark, who comes upon you and wrestles with you. If you do not know God in this way, if for you God is not a consuming fire, if for you the encounter with him is always going through the same comfortable motions, your God has stopped being the living God, and is dead.
That is why Pascal said that Christ would be in agony until the end of time: His agony is the agony of Christians, the struggle to believe, to hope, to love, the struggle with God! God is other than you, he is free with respect to you -- as you are other than him, and free with respect to him. Woe to us if we lose the sense of this distance and the suffering involved in our difference from God!
In a beautifully naif medieval insight, to believe (credere) comes from "cor-dare," to give your heart, and this involves a continual struggle with God's total otherness which does not let itself be "solved" or "possessed." God is other than you. That is why faith is always challenged by doubt.
Only those who do not know are shocked by the Baptist's words, when at the sunset of his life, and evidently restless with doubt, he sent to ask Jesus: "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" (Matthew 11:3). This is the trial of faith: to struggle with God, knowing that he is the Other, who escapes from our certainties, and does not allow himself to be tamed by our presumption.
So faith is struggle: The voices that witness to this are innumerable. St. John of the Cross speaks of this scandal through the metaphor of the "noche oscura": "On a dark night, anguished, with burning love, oh blessed fate, I went out, unnoticed, all were asleep at home. Night, you led me! Oh, night more loveable than dawn, oh, night that joined the Lover with his beloved, the beloved transformed into the Lover" (Noche oscura, 1 and 5). Dark night is both the place of scandal and of betrothal: God is not to be found in easy earthly possessiveness, but in the poverty of the cross, in death to self, in the night of the senses and of the spirit. This is the place of greatest joy!
Darkness is the place of love, and of faith experienced as struggle. Christ is not the answer to our questions; above all, he subverts them. And only after leading us into the fire of desolation, does he become the God of consolation and of peace.
Finally, faith is submission: In the combat there comes the moment when you understand that the loser really wins, and so you give yourself up to him, you submit to the one who attacks at night, you allow your life to be marked forever by that meeting. Then it is that faith becomes self-abandonment and forgetfulness of self and the joy of entrusting yourself into the arms of the Beloved. Faith means entrusting yourself like this to the Other. "O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. [...] If I say, 'I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,' then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot" (Jeremiah 20:7,9).
In these words of Jeremiah we hear the voice of one of the greatest witnesses to what it means to submit in faith: Jeremiah wrestled mightily with God, but in the midst of the combat he learned how to give in, to submit in love and to entrust himself to God. This is how faith can become a homecoming of beauty and peace. This is not the beauty the world knows, the seduction of a truth explaining everything; it is instead the beauty of the man of sorrows, the beauty of crucified Love, of Jesus' total offering of himself to the Father and to us.
c) Consequences. If faith, then, is all this, if it is struggle and submission, inseparably joined, then believers will not be looking for vulgar signs which exhibit the fidelity of the God in whom they believe. They will still believe in him even when the answers to the true questions of human suffering remain hidden in his silence. Consequently, believers are, in the end, those who try every day to begin believing, and nonbelievers, as they suffer from the infinite pain of God's absence, are perhaps people who try anew every day to believe, but fail. If believers did not struggle every day to be faithful to the living God, their faith would be nothing more than worldly reassurance, one of the many ideologies that have fooled the world and alienated human beings.
Against every ideology, faith is to be understood and lived as continual conversion to God, a continual handing over of the heart, beginning every day afresh the effort to believe, hope, and love: In consequence, faith is prayer, and those who do not pray will not live by faith! But if believers are those who struggle with God and submit themselves to him anew every day, then what of the struggle of nonbelievers who try anew every day to believe, but fail? Not the superficial atheists, but those who struggle with an upright conscience, who have sought but not found, and who feel all the pain of God's absence: Will they not be true companions of those who believe?
From this way of understanding the relation between religious experience and conscience, dialogue between believers and nonbelievers can be understood as an exercise of reciprocal respect and a witness to religious freedom. In the first place, we must say "no" to a lazy, static, habit-worn faith, made of comfortable intolerance, which defends itself by condemning others because it does not know how to live the suffering of love.
To this "no" we must add a "yes" to a questioning, even doubting, faith, capable of beginning anew every day to entrust itself to others, to live the exodus with no return, ever journeying toward God's mystery, disclosed and hidden in his Word. There also arises, however, a "no" to every superficial atheism, to every ideological denial of God and of the holy mystery, as well as a "yes" to the unceasing search for the hidden Face, for the love beyond every word, the love which opens itself to embrace our searching hearts.
In this age of ours that lacks great hopes, perhaps more than ever the real difference is not between believers and nonbelievers, but between those who think and those who do not, between, on the one hand, men and women who have the courage to face life's pain, to go on trying to believe, hope and love, and, on the other, men and women who have given up the struggle, who seem to content themselves with the penultimate horizon, and no longer know how to burn with desire and yearning at the thought of our last horizon and last home.
Believers thus make their own -- in the name, too, of nonbelievers -- the prayer with which St Augustine closes the most beautiful, the most deeply considered, and perhaps the most tormented of his works, the 15 books of the "De Trinitate": "Lord my God, my only hope, grant that when I am weary I may never cease to seek you, but may always passionately seek your face. Give me strength to seek you who let yourself be encountered, and give me the hope of meeting you more and more.
"Before you I place my strength and my weakness: Conserve the first, heal the last. Before you I place my knowledge and my ignorance; where you have opened, welcome me as I enter; where you have closed to me, open when I knock. Let me remember you, understand you, love you!" (15, 28, 51).
In the restlessness of questioning, the faith of the believer meets the invocation of those who would like to believe: on the basis of a common poverty and of a common search, but also on the basis of listening to the other who dwells in the depth of both partners in a meeting. Dialogue between believers and nonbelievers is one of the highest and most enriching challenges in the cultures marked by nonbelief and religious indifference, which are particularly those of our postmodern Europe.
Are we ready as believers and as Church to accept this challenge without fear, with spirit and full hearts, trusting in the faithful God? And are the various expressions of culture and society marked by the modern spirit of emancipation ready to respect the freedom of believers and to take seriously the challenge of their values and of their vision of life and death? Our ability, as persons, as society and as an ecclesial community, to serve today, in our historical context, the quality of life and the dignity of every human being depends on our answers to these questions.
[Text adapted]
Archbishop Forte on Religion and Freedom (Part 2)
"There Is a Return to the Father, Who Sets Us Free"
LEEDS, England, DEC. 5, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is the second part of the address given by Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti-Vasto, Italy, a member of the International Theological Commission, to a Nov. 12 meeting of the bishops of England and Wales.
Part 1 appeared Tuesday. Part 3 will appear Thursday.
* * *
2. Principles: "Religion and Freedom From Modern to Postmodern Time"
We move now to the second archway of our bridge. Within the horizon of the search for the infinitely loving Father-Mother it is possible to distinguish two different attitudes regarding the relationship between religion and freedom: the first one, marked by rejection of the Father-Mother figure in the name of the emancipation of human being; the second one, characterized by the conviction that without the acceptance of a transcendent truth there is no possible freedom and no religious freedom at all.
a) The metaphor of light provides us with the most expressive way of talking about the principle which inspired modern reason's ambitious claim to understand and master everything. This project -- which lies at the foundations of the Enlightenment in all its manifestations -- maintains that to understand the world rationally means to make human beings free, masters of their own future, emancipating them from every possible dependence.
Emancipation: This was the dream which pervaded the great processes of historical transformation in the modern age, born with the "Enlightenment" and the French Revolution, from the emancipation of the working classes, the oppressed races and the peoples of the so-called third world, to the emancipation of women, in all variety of different cultural and social contexts. This dream of total emancipation strained forward toward a reality entirely enlightened, where the radiating power of reason might express itself without constraint.
Where reason triumphs, there rises the sun of the future; in this sense, it may be said that modernity is the age of light. Freedom -- interpreted as self-consciousness, self-determination and self-realization -- is light: The light is being set free from every dependence, from every Father-Mother who could decide for us. Freedom is precisely emancipation, liberation from every transcendent Lord, from every historical slavery. Revolutionary freedom as well as the bourgeois one are both aspects of the modern spirit of emancipation. The fullest expression of this spirit is "ideology": modernity, the age that dreamed of emancipation, was also the time of those all-embracing ways of understanding the world proper to ideologies.
Ideologies tend to impose the light of reason on the whole of reality, to the point of equating ideal and real. In pursuit of this ambition, the "great ideological narratives" tended to construct a "society without fathers," where there are no vertical relationships -- unfailingly thought to imply dependence -- but only horizontal ones, of equality and reciprocity.
"Liberté, égalité, fraternité": The sun of reason generates liberty and equality, and hence fraternity, according to an egalitarianism founded on the light of reason, which governs the whole world and all life. The critique of the "father-lord" figure thus leads to the complete rejection of God. Just as on earth there must be no fatherhood creating dependence, so in heaven there must be no Father of all.
"Religious freedom" is freedom from religious slavery, from every fear in front of the divine: Human beings alone are the heroes of their own destiny and of the future of society. There are no divine "partners," there is no other world; there is only this history, this horizon. The only idea of God allowed to stand before the court of adult reason is of a God who is dead, meaningless and with no practical purpose ("Deus mortuus, Deus otiosus"). This collective murder of the Father is carried out in the conviction that human beings must manage their own lives for themselves, molding their destiny with their own hands. The modern ideologies, whether of right or left, pursued this ambitious aim of emancipating human beings in a way so radical as to make them the sole subject of their history, and at the same time both the source and goal of all that happens.
There can be no denying that this is a mighty project, and that we are all in some measure in debt to it: Who would want to live in a society that had not undergone this process of emancipation? And yet, this dream has also led to satanic consequences: Precisely because of its all-embracing ambition, ideology becomes violent.
Reality is forced to bend to the idea; reason's will for power (F. Nietzsche) strives to dominate life and history so as to make them conform to its own goals. Inexorably, this all-encompassing dream becomes totalitarian: Totality -- as understood by reason -- produces totalitarianism. Neither by chance nor by accident, all the enterprises of modern ideology, of right and left, bourgeois and revolutionary, eventually issue in totalitarian and violent expression. And it is precisely this historical experience of totalitarianism that leads to the crisis and twilight of the claims of modern reason: "The fully enlightened earth -- affirm Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno -- radiates disaster triumphant" (Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), New York 1969, 3).
Thought without shadows becomes violent; far from emancipating, it generates suffering, alienation and death. The modern "society without fathers" does not bear children who are freer and more equal, but, instead, dramatic dependent on those who at various times offer themselves as "surrogate" fathers. The "leader," the "party," the "cause," these become the new masters, and the freedom promised and dreamed of turns into a painful, grey manipulation of the masses, held in place by violence and fear.
The collective murder of the father did not prevent the proliferation of these new, barely camouflaged, fathers and lords. The dream of emancipating life and the world seems, then, to have dashed itself against the unheard-of violence produced by the age of emancipation. Where are the new heavens and new earth promised by the great ideological narratives? This is the drama with which the 20th century closed: a moral drama, a crisis of meaning, a vacuum of hope. Freedom and religious freedom in a world without God have not made us more free, more equal, more fraternal.
b) The need for a transcendent horizon arises from the crisis of the suppositions of the modern era. If, according to modernity, everything found meaning within one all-encompassing process, for the "weak thought" of the postmodern condition -- shipwrecked on the great sea of history after the collapse of ideology's claims -- nothing seems to have meaning any more.
In reaction to the failed claims of "strong" reason, then, there emerge the contours of a time of shipwreck and collapse; this crisis of meaning is the special characteristic of postmodern restlessness. In this "night of the world" (Martin Heidegger), what seems to triumph is indifference, a loss of the taste for seeking ultimate reasons for human living and dying. And thus, too, we reach the nadir of the parable of modern ideologies, nihilism: Nihilism is not simply a matter of giving up values for which it is worth living. It is a much more subtle process: It deprives human beings of the taste for committing themselves to a higher cause, of those powerful motivations which the ideologies still seemed to offer.
Our worst contemporary ailment is this lack of "passion for the truth": This is the dramatic face of our postmodern age. In this climate of nihilism, everything conspires to lead us not to think anymore, to flee from any passionate striving after truth. In the dark light of nihilism, to be freed means to be "condemned" to freedom, compelled to make choices, not free to be or not to be free, and religious freedom has no meaning, because there are no gods and no free human beings!
The result of such a cultural process is the triumph of the mask over and above truth: Even values are often reduced to banners hoisted to camouflage the lack of meaning. Human beings seem to be reduced to a "useless passion" (Jean-Paul Sartre: "l'homme, une passion inutile"). One could say that the most serious malady of this so-called postmodern age is the abandonment of the search for a father-mother toward whom to hold out our arms, while we no longer having the will or desire to seek a meaning worth living and dying for.
Orphaned by the ideologies, we all run the risk of being more fragile, more tempted to shut ourselves up in the loneliness of our own selfishness. This is why post-ideological societies are increasingly becoming "crowds of lonliness," in which people seek their own self-interest, defined according to an exclusively selfish and manipulative logic: Faced with the vacuum of ultimate meaning, we grasp at penultimate concerns, and seek immediate possessions.
This explains the triumph of the most shameless consumerism, of the rush toward hedonism and whatever may be enjoyed at once; but this is also the deep reason for the emergence and affirmation of forms of thought which are sectarian, narrowly ethnic, nationalistic or regional. Without the wide horizons offered by truth, we easily drown in the selfish loneliness of our own particular situation, and our societies becomes archipelagos, collections of separate islands.
It is exactly this process which shows that we all need a common father-mother to free us from our selfishness, to offer a horizon of hope and love -- not the violent one of the ideologies, but one which truly frees all, and respects all. So if the "society without fathers" ran after the dream of emancipation, and to achieve this dream sought to destroy the father, it is precisely the bitter fruit of totalitarian and violent emancipation -- and the vacuum it created -- that evokes the newly felt need for a transcendent father-mother who welcomes us in freedom and love and guarantees the dignity of each person, the freedom of all, and the ultimate meaning of life.
This is the longing for the Totally Other, of whom Horkheimer and Adorno spoke as they foresaw the crisis of the ideologies. It is the yearning for the hidden Face, the need for a shared home, which provides horizons of meaning without violence. There are signs of such an expectation: There is a "longing for perfect and achieved justice" (Max Horkheimer), which can be perceived in the contemporary restlessness and "search for lost meaning."
This is not simply "une recherche du temps perdu," not mere nostalgia, but a striving to rediscover meaning beyond shipwreck, to discern an ultimate horizon, against which to measure all that is penultimate, and to give an ethical foundation to that we do.
There is a rediscovery of the other, in the recognition that my neighbor, by the mere fact of existing, can give me a reason to live, because he or she challenges me to go out of myself, to take the risk of an exodus with no return by committing myself in love to others. The new concern for the weakest -- especially for foreigners fleeing from situations of deprivation and poverty of every kind -- and the growing awareness of the demands of local and global solidarity may be counted -- even if still beset by many contradictions -- as signs of this search for lost meaning and for a freedom based on respect for each human person and his infinite dignity.
At the same time, there seems also to be a rediscovery of the longing for the Totally Other, a kind of rediscovery of the Holy over against every nihilistic denial. There is the reawakening of a need, which may be described in general as religious -- for an ultimate horizon, understood not in the manipulative and violent way of ideology. A transcendent womb which allows us to affirm that the value of creation is promoted and not undermined by the Holy.
Under very different forms, there is a "return to the Father," who sets us free, even though not always without ambiguity or even a certain ideological nostalgia. To witness to such a need of the Other, able to offer reasons for life and hope, and to proclaim the Face of this transcendent loving Father-Mother, is the most important commitment of the Church's mission today. The Second Vatican Council expressed this intuition in a particularly deep way when it said: "One is entitled to think that the future of humanity is in the hands of those who are capable of providing the generations to come with reasons for life and hope" (Gaudium et Spes 31).
In these words we can espy the role of a fundamental paternal-maternal mediation, of a kind of paternity-maternity of meaning, which might be able to stop the future from falling into nothingness. The Other -- ultimate foundation of all true reasons to live, and to live together -- seems to be offering himself as the answer to the truest and deepest question revealed by the crisis of our present age; and the yearning for his hidden face seems to lead us toward a father-mother who has a loving welcome for us all.
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