Question 6.106

6.106 If we follow the reasoning of Benedict XVI, liberty is in danger of being no longer a choice but an obligation, echoing somewhat the words of the French Revolutionary Saint-Just: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.”

God created man free; the latter has freedom because he comes from God, who is the very source of all liberty. Saint John writes elsewhere: “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (Jn 8:36). A person living in a state of captivity still possesses one treasure that the cruelest dictator cannot take away from him, for God has given every being interior freedom.

But liberty does not consist of emancipation from all limits or norms. Such liberty is a myth. For liberty must always be guided by the truth; it is intrinsically connected to our creaturely nature. The liberty of one individual must, furthermore, take into account that of his neighbor. Today, I think that the liberty of some is being imposed on others. Recently, the great French demonstrations against the distortion of marriage were able to prove that. This false liberty is the extension of a godless egalitarianism.

Man has the right to express himself according to his conscience without being obliged to undergo external pressures. Thus, interior freedom absolutely must be something that is constantly being won and built up. Liberty without truth is deceitful; the absence of a moral connection between liberty and truth can only produce a form of anarchy. Liberty continues to be real when it truly accomplishes the supreme good of human existence, which is to live in the truth of God.

Today all our freedoms are threatened. Economic, political, and media pressures never cease to diminish the connection between liberty and truth. But I think, too, that we must not give up when faced with this daily combat to win our true liberty. For man, shackled and thrown into a prison, whether physical or symbolic, is a free being. In captivity, he has a prodigious power to decide for himself, to choose and to orient his life toward the good. He also has the dizzying ability to love his torturers; this is the ineffable and eternal message of the Gospel. But liberty requires interior discipline, choices and acts of self-denial that lead our life toward whatever disposes us to be at the service of others. This struggle is collective; it is unthinkable to wage a battle alone. Mankind needs the Church and personal and communal prayer in order to be brought to the truth.

The evangelist John expresses this problem perfectly when he writes: “Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’ They answered him, ‘We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How is it that you say, “You will be made free”?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not continue in the house for ever; the son continues for ever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me, because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.’ They answered him, ‘Abraham is our father.’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were Abraham’s children, you would do what Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God; this is not what Abraham did. You do the works of your father.’ They said to him, ‘We were not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.’

Jesus said to them, ’If God were your Father, you would love me, for I

proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but he sent me’ “(Jn 8:31-42).

For his part, Saint Augustine forcefully testifies that what shackles man’s liberty is sin. Liberty is given to us when we have chosen God freely.

Yes, God created man free, endowed with free will. He can choose between good and evil. However, man will be fully himself only by choosing good and by submitting in a filial way to God. But the Father was excluded from this “freedom of the children of God”, as Saint Paul says, by original sin.

I often think of this realistic reflection by Saint Augustine in his treatise on lying: “So great blindness, moreover, has occupied men’s minds, that to them it is too little if we pronounce some lies not to be sins; but they must needs pronounce it to be sin in some things if we refuse to lie.”⁴

All human life is a struggle against the shackles of evil, against the slavery of sin, in order to regain true freedom.