by Dale Ahlquist
"Mary, Sign of Salvation" by Fr. Brian Daley, S.J.
October 2004
"Catholic Social Teaching and the Law" by Michael Scaperlanda
"The Catholic Church: Defender of Freedom?" by H.W. Crocker III
November 2004
"Prayer" by Bishop Thomas J. Welsh
"What is 'Church Authority'?" by Peter Kreeft
December 2004
"How Tradition Gave us the Bible" by Mark P. Shea
"God Speaks to Us: The Liturgy of the Word" by Rev. Peter Stravinskas
January 2005
"Angels and Demons" by Alfred Freddoso
"The Da Vinci Code" by Bishop Robert Morlino
"The Year of the Eucharist" by Bishop Robert Morlino
The Catholic Church: Defender of Freedom?
By H. W. Crocker III
Question: name history’s greatest defender of freedom.
Answer: the Catholic Church.
You won’t often hear that. But it’s true. You can start with the Catholic doctrine of man’s free will—a doctrine that puts the Church at odds with the world, including many of your professors. It is the world that tells us the fate of nations and individuals is determined by race, economics, history, psychology, genetics, fate, astrology, the will of Allah, or even predestination—anything but the free-will decisions of individuals with regard to the truth.
Secularists and liberals, of course, take a very different view of freedom; they take Biblical sins, like homosexuality, and make them human rights, while making up their own list of secular sins—like smoking, condomless sex, riding a bicycle without a helmet—and prohibiting them.
And they do worse. They act as thought police. In Canada, we’ve already seen the courts tell the Church that it cannot affirm that homosexuality is wrong, because homosexuality is a legal right. In California, we saw the courts affirm the government’s right to compel Catholic charities to cover contraceptive services, regardless that the Church considers these sinful. Or think of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973, which struck down the abortion laws of all fifty states—laws enacted by popularly elected legislatures—on the basis of a right to abortion supposedly based on a right to privacy, both of which rights are manifestly not in the Constitution.
It should be no surprise that freedom—one of the great gifts of Western Civilization—gets short shrift when secular liberals chuck out as irrelevant the most influential book and philosophy in the making of the Western world (the Bible and Catholicism).
This simply won’t work, because, as Pope John Paul II wrote in Veritatis Splendor, “Authentic freedom is never freedom ‘from’ the truth but always freedom ‘in’ the truth.”
Freedom in the truth is the Church, and as Pope John Paul II has said, “Christianity is not an opinion and does not consist of empty words. Christianity is Christ! It is a Person.” A Person, I might add, we find in history, in fact, and who tells us that the truth will set us free.
In the modern equation, freedom has somehow been reduced to getting and spending and power and consumerism as applied to everything, which makes the sacrifice of total self-giving taken on by priests and religious inexplicable, just as it makes the self-giving of a housewife and mother, who puts children—caring for other people and their happiness—above career inexplicable.
Catholics don’t suffer from these delusions because Catholics don’t worship at the altar of Mammon. Catholics know that possessions are not the measure of life. Living is the measure of life.
That’s why G. K. Chesterton wrote, in joy not scolding, that the rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. That’s why in the films of the Catholic director John Ford one finds a plethora of joyful fisticuffs. That’s why, indeed, Martin Luther found the Catholic Church to be the Whore of Babylon. Catholics have never tried to ban human nature. Instead, if we understand authentic freedom as freedom in the truth we understand that creation is good, the natural law is written on men’s hearts, and happy are those who march beneath the sign of the Cross—but there is a Cross, and our lives are a drama, a lifelong journey of sin and redemption.
So when skeptics complain that the evidence for God is not clear or that a God who allows suffering and evil is Himself sadistic and evil, the Catholic responds, “Our God has made us as free men. True freedom always comes with costs and challenges. You see, ours is not a religion of make-believe where actions have no consequences. Ours is a religion of pilgrimage, freely accepted, to grow in Christ.”
Or to put it another way, the way Pope John Paul II put it in Redemptor Hominis: “The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order that Christ may walk with each person the path of life.”
That path runs through your campus, as it runs everywhere else. And if you pray and attend Mass and study the history of the Church, you’ll be ready to repel any highwaymen who attack you along the way.
For example, you might hear in your classes that the Protestant Revolt was a blow for freedom. Professors of a liberal bent say this because they understand the Protestant Revolt as a blow against the Church, a shattering of Christianity into pieces, the beginning of the secularization of the West.
But the fact is, the Catholic Church stood—as it has always stood—for freedom, the freedom most spectacularly of the Renaissance, against which Luther revolted. Indeed, he revolted against it because it was free. Luther opposed the Church’s sponsorship of classical learning, because classical learning was a heathen plague. He opposed the freedom of a universal Church, because he believed in state-subordinated churches (a German church for the German people). He opposed the doctrine of free will, because he believed in predestination.
Lutheranism had “but two objects at heart,” Erasmus wrote, “money and women”—that is, greed for church property and a lust to break the bonds of celibacy. And, Erasmus warned, where “Lutheranism flourishes the sciences”—patronized by the Church—“perish.”
The Protestants stood for sola scriptura, the Bible alone, as Christianity’s sole authority; other books could go. The Reformation Protestant churches were opposed to art—the religious art sponsored by the Catholic Church—for this was idolatry. They smashed altars, crucifixes, and stained glass. They slapped coats of paint over religious murals. In Calvin’s Geneva they legislated and enforced severe laws based on the Old Testament. When you hear that what Islam needs is a Reformation, a Martin Luther, we should remember that the Reformation Protestants were the Muslims of the Christian world: opposed to art, religious hierarchy, and secular learning.
The Reformation Protestant critique of Catholicism was that it was too free. Catholics were drunks and layabouts and party animals, insistent on celebrating every possible saint’s day with booze, brawls, and flirtation. The Church was full of art- and luxury- and pagan-book-loving sensualists who forgave all rather than condemned all. It was Merrie England when it was Merrie. Protestant England was Cromwell, the Puritans, and the banning of Christmas. The crypto-Catholic Stuart restoration was the restoration of Christmas, horse-racing, and the theatre.
The Church was and is on the side of freedom: celebrating life, the joys of creation, and the nativity. Reformation Protestants, secular liberals, and the state are on the side of abolishing sin (variously defined) and enhancing the power of the state.
The state does not like the Church because the Church is a check on state power, the Church is the protector of the family against the State, the Church is the upholder of the individual against the State and against the State’s desire to regulate and control.
Reading history, and doing so honestly, who can deny that the greatest check on state power throughout the entirety of European history, from the conversion of Constantine through the twentieth century, was the Catholic Church?
Remember the Roman Emperor Theodosius, commander of all Rome’s legions, stripping himself of all imperial insignia to do penance before an unarmed cleric, St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan. It was the Catholic Church that brought a moral check to bear on the exercise and perquisites of power.
Think of the martyrdom of Sir Thomas Beckett and Sir Thomas More. Think of the Protestant revolt, which argued that the power of the state was scriptural and the power of the papacy—the power of Christ’s church—against the demands of the state, was not.
Think of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Kulturkampf of Bismarck, and later intellectual and political currents, including fascism, communism, and the secular liberalism of our own time, all of which saw—or see—the state as the essential thing, centralization of state authority as the central task, state direction as the essential instrument of reform. And what was—and is—the roadblock before these “reformers”? The Catholic Church, which ever asserted the freedom and necessity of subsidiary institutions independent of the state, which ever asserted the rights of the family against the state, which ever protested, in the words of Pope Pius XI, against the “pagan worship of the state,” by which he meant, in particular, fascism.
And who today, stands for the freedom of every unborn child to the right to life? Who stands today for the absolute integrity of every individual life against genetic or other engineering of the human person? What institution in the United States is the greatest non-government provider—that is, non-coercive provider—of education, medical care, and aid to the poor? And even here the freedom for which the Church stands is under threat by interest groups and bureaucrats who would compel the Church to turn its hospitals into abortuaries, to force its insurance providers to cover the costs of artificial contraception that the Church considers sinful, and even potentially to dictate what is taught in Church schools.
They do so in the name of progress—which is supposed to be the name of freedom, but which is more often freedom’s enemy. When our forefathers defined their political freedom they did so in terms of the inherited, the natural, rights of Englishmen. When men in England defined their rights, they did so in terms of the common law, grounded in the Magna Carta, which itself had been shepherded by the Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton, and in rights that stretched back into the mists of Saxon England.
Freedom in the truth is the natural right of man. We will find freedom—and we can defend freedom—if we pursue the truth. When modern men adopt the cynicism of jesting Pilate, of “What is truth?” we can tell them. We have not washed our hands of the responsibility of searching for it. We have found the truth through reason, revelation (which is history), and—most important—in our free-will acceptance of it through the gift of the Holy Spirit.
The spirit of Catholic freedom will always be vibrant, because it is a key to the faith. The true Catholic is a natural Tory Anarchist—someone who believes in loyalty to persons and institutions, fidelity to the faith, and otherwise letting the good times roll. So keep freedom alive; keep the faith.
H. W. Crocker III is the author of Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History; the prize-winning comic novel The Old Limey; and Robert E. Lee on Leadership; all are available in paperback.
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