Freedom gone awry

MANILA, Philippines - I remember that when the Iron Curtain collapsed, Pope John Paul II warned the world to the effect that while freedom was restored in the Communist bloc, freedom in the West needed also to be recovered. In fact, that is the more urgent and important task.

Implied was that the freedom in the West, heavily infused with the capitalistic ideology, was of the trickier kind, since it tended to scream that it was free when in fact it was not.

So the effort to recover it would be more challenging, more demanding, since we cannot easily point a finger at what’s missing with the freedom so far practiced and enjoyed in the West. In the communist and socialist system, these missing elements could easily be identified.

The Western freedom has the appearance and trappings of freedom but without its proper substance. It’s a self-generated freedom, which starts and ends with oneself or with a certain collective subject, as in a family, group, country or even the whole world. It’s a freedom gone astray.

It’s a freedom that refuses to acknowledge where it comes from and for what and for where it should be used and directed. It’s a freedom incapable of transcending itself.

That’s the meanest cut it inflicts on itself, the most subtle and pernicious virus that can attack it. With that understanding, freedom gets totally imprisoned in its subjectivity with no link to its objective nature.

It’s a freedom intoxicated with its own powers and privileges, very vulnerable to getting abused and spoiled. Detached from its basis on truth, from its proper origin and end, from God, it can easily get blinded. It gets its impulses from improper if not false sources.

This is the freedom we see in the world today, deeply embedded in the culture and people’s way of life. This is also the kind of freedom that gives shape and direction to the vision and authority of some world leaders.

It’s a freedom that acknowledges no absolute law outside of oneself or of some subject. Everything is made relative to the subject who now considers himself his own God, perhaps with some support from a consensus.

We need to recover the true and objective nature of freedom from the clutches of subjectivism, secularism and relativism. And perhaps the more challenging predicament from which freedom has to be extricated is the double-life culture so widespread even among professed Christians.

It’s this culture that fails either to distinguish or link, or both to distinguish and link God and us, what’s inside us and what’s outside us, the subjective and the objective, our freedom and autonomy in relation to law and the virtue of obedience, the mundane and the sacred in our affairs and concerns.

For me now, the US has become a big, interesting and illuminating theatre where the battle for the true nature of freedom is waged. Of course, the drama of freedom is played everywhere. But it’s in the US where this drama of freedom gone awry is writ large and closely monitored, as if you’re watching YouTube.

At the moment, I cannot get over that view of President Obama who says he is still for abortion but wants it to be as rare as possible. It’s a crude, Solomonic if foxy way of resolving an issue, as if a baby can be divided into two to satisfy the opposing parties.

And this mindset seems to be widespread, and even supported by a systematic ideology with practical script and methods. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, is now promoting worldwide abortion-on-demand and other questionable causes.

A bill is now pending approval in the US Congress to create among other things an Office for Women’s Global Issues in the State Department, a thinly veiled effort to promote abortion all over the world and to overturn pro-life laws in other countries, including ours.

In fact, in our country there is already a slow but steady trend to approve population-control laws and decrees in the city level. Of course, the Trojan horse used are concerns like Reproductive Health and now, Health Care.

We have to help one another in understanding the true nature, meaning and purpose of our freedom. We have to learn how to overcome the obstacles to this understanding, exposing the many myths and lies about freedom and showing the practical ways true freedom can be lived and enjoyed.

But for all this, let’s never forget to pray, offer sacrifices, study and act! – Fr. Roy Cimagala, Chaplain, Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City