When framing out a room, everyone knows that the first corner must be square, or else the second will be off at the far end of the wall. Even if the first corner is imperceptibly off, the second corner will reveal the problem. The longer the wall, the more the error will be evident.
Ideas work the same way across time. Even if an idea is ever so slightly off in the beginning, down the road, the original error will become glaringly obvious. I am using this metaphor to describe the understanding of liberty that originates in the Enlightenment, which emphasized “negative liberties” and freedom from external interference. At the founding of our nation, the definition of individual liberty seemed Christian, when in fact it was not—at least not entirely.
“Classical” Liberalism gave primacy to the individual over the common good in basically all circumstances and endorsed each person’s absolute right to self-determination. The Church has always had difficulty with this philosophy precisely because of its unqualified blending with atomistic individualism and personal autonomy. Pope Leo XIII laid out the problem in his encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum (On Human Liberty, 1888, hereafter Libertas), as has nearly every pope since.
The Church has always embraced the good of human liberty but has struggled with the moral implications of Liberalism as a philosophy of social life. Pope Leo XIII distinguished natural liberty—our human capacity for voluntary acts of free decision and the various forms of civil liberty, which, for the Church, is the right to act according to the precepts of the natural law and the requirements of the common good (see Libertas, nos. 1–11).
From a Catholic perspective, even freedom of speech is tethered to capital T truth and the common good, or else a society will morally degenerate. Leo XIII explains it like this:
Men have a right freely and prudently to propagate throughout the State what things soever are true and honorable, so that as many as possible may possess them; but lying opinions, than which no mental plague is greater, and vices which corrupt the heart and moral life should be diligently repressed by public authority, lest they insidiously work the ruin of the State. The excesses of an unbridled intellect, which unfailingly end in the oppression of the untutored multitude, are no less rightly controlled by the authority of the law than are the injuries inflicted by violence upon the weak. And this all the more surely, because by far the greater part of the community is either absolutely unable, or able only with great difficulty, to escape from illusions and deceitful subtleties, especially such as flatter the passions. If unbridled license of speech and of writing be granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate; even the highest and truest mandates of nature, justly held to be the common and noblest heritage of the human race, will not be spared. Thus, truth being gradually obscured by darkness, pernicious and manifold error, as too often happens, will easily prevail. Thus, too, license will gain what liberty loses; for liberty will ever be more free and secure in proportion as license is kept in fuller restraint. In regard, however, to all matter of opinion which God leaves to man’s free discussion, full liberty of thought and of speech is naturally within the right of everyone; for such liberty never leads men to suppress the truth, but often to discover it and make it known. (Libertas, no. 23, emphasis added)
Such a statement before the digital age and the advent of social media is truly prophetic. It explains so much of what’s ill about our society today—e.g., pornography, identity politics, violence, the life issues, suicide, mental health, etc.
And yet, Leo XIII’s stance rubs uncomfortably against our American sensibilities. When one reads through Libertas, the Pope qualifies every form of civil liberty along similar lines, which leaves us not entirely able to embrace American liberalism even on the right. As he explains, if liberty is not grounded in truth and directed to the common good, it will degenerate into moral chaos. Thus, the government must assume its moral role to safeguard the basic tenets of natural law, without which we cannot have a free society. We might be tempted by the liberal belief in the neutrality of the state in such matters. However, the state never does remain neutral—and that’s the problem. Almost from the beginning, our society has been shifting slowly away from the precepts of natural law.
From its origins, Liberalism’s understanding of freedom was divorced from a traditional natural law framework and a proper theory of human nature. However, this is something some conservative Christians do not necessarily understand or like to hear. Some tend to side with Locke over Aquinas on the nature of human liberty. Hence, some Catholics who embrace the idea that America was fundamentally Christian at its origin argue that all we need is a return to our roots.
However, if we follow the Church’s critique of Liberalism over nearly 150 years, we will admit that this is not exactly what the Church would recommend. Were we once a nation comprised mostly of Christians? Yes. Is the Constitution a Christian system of law? Not necessarily. It’s a mostly secular piece of jurisprudence—albeit a fantastic one—that assumes a Christian people who maintain its moral rectitude.
Yet it cannot guarantee that we the people will remain Christian or embrace Judeo-Christian moral values. No civil law can do this, if we are honest, but when civil law is grounded in natural law, at least we don’t have legal grounds to support moral licentiousness. I believe the Framers knew this to some extent, but could not imagine a world where health professionals, educators, and politicians would ever advocate for abortion, euthanasia, and transgenderism in the name of individual liberty. Pope Leo XIII, however, had a strong sense that the Liberal experiment in freedom would degenerate morally, giving “right” to our most wayward passions exactly as we have seen. This is why the Church has always argued that civil law must be grounded by the government in the natural law.
To clarify, the problem is not with the Constitution as such, which is an unsurpassed source of sound jurisprudence, but with the Enlightenment’s concept of individual liberty that has historically specified the parameters of our civil liberties in a way that doesn’t square perfectly with Christian anthropology. What the Church saw with clarity is that the moral logic of Liberalism would end up exactly where we find ourselves—in a titanic struggle for the conscience of Western civilization.
Yet this poses a serious dilemma for conservative Christians who routinely advocate for a return to classical Liberalism, which, in fact, brought us to this point in the first place. The Church proposes a natural law framework and not a Liberal one, and some conservative Christians continue to ignore this warning. Pope Leo XIII goes so far as to set up a cause-and-effect relationship between the right and the left. Specifically, he states that classical Liberalism ends up creating the conditions for the rise of socialism and communism. He stated this over a century ago in his encyclical Diuturnum illud (On the Origin of Civil Power, 1881):
[T]here arose in the last century a false philosophy—a new right as it is called, and a popular authority, together with an unbridled license which many regard as the only true liberty. Hence, we have reached the limit of horrors, to wit, communism, socialism, nihilism, hideous deformities of the civil society of men and almost its ruin. And yet too many attempt to enlarge the scope of these evils, and under the pretext of helping the multitude, already have fanned no small flames of misery. (no. 23)
In another encyclical on atheistic communism, Divini Redemptoris (On Atheistic Communism, 1937), Pope Pius XI further explains how the propagation of the left’s agenda is the consequence of having rejected the Church’s warnings against classical Liberalism:
There would be today neither Socialism nor Communism if the rulers of the nations had not scorned the teachings and maternal warnings of the Church. On the bases of liberalism . . . they wished to build other social edifices which, powerful and imposing as they seemed at first, all too soon revealed the weakness of their foundations, and today are crumbling one after another before our eyes, as everything must crumble that is not grounded on the one corner stone which is Christ Jesus (no. 38).
If we look to the Church to understand better why conservative Christians find ourselves in a profound cultural struggle with the far left, we will see that a classical Liberal society is vulnerable to the adverse effects of moral relativism and hedonism, which in recent years has become painfully obvious and highly political at the same time.
Before the full force of the Woke revolution had crested the horizon of mainstream culture, Pope John Paul II presented an argument that some Catholics may not realize was a critique of Western democracies, including our own. This is what he says in Evangelium vitae (The Gospel of Life, 1995):
The basis of these [moral] values cannot be provisional and changeable “majority” opinions, but only the acknowledgment of an objective moral law which, as the “natural law” written in the human heart, is the obligatory point of reference for civil law itself…. [I]t is easy to see that without an objective moral grounding not even democracy is capable of ensuring a stable peace, especially since peace which is not built upon the values of the dignity of every individual and of solidarity between all people frequently proves to be illusory. Even in participatory systems of government, the regulation of interests often occurs to the advantage of the most powerful, since they are the ones most capable of maneuvering not only the levers of power but also of shaping the formation of consensus. In such a situation, democracy easily becomes an empty word. (no. 70)
Again, this is a hauntingly accurate description of where we are now. Over the past decade, we have seen the aggressive push to create a moral consensus with Critical Theory by means of government policy, media censorship, propaganda, and the cancel culture movement. Since Trump took office for a second term, we have seen his administration resume its aggressive pushback on the far left’s agenda. Trump has taken a wrecking ball to every one of those structures of influence and deployed his own to achieve his America First agenda.
Competing moral frameworks have become the driver of opposed structures of influence that shape public opinion in the name of securing a majority consensus, which is then imposed on the nation by powerful influencers and “majority” consensus politics. The propaganda machine issuing forth from every media outlet in recent years is striking in this regard. In America today, propaganda seems far more important than reasoned discourse to impose world views. The result has been a rise in political polarization and even violence, which Leo XIII predicted as the logical fruit of individualistic liberty. Charlie Kirk’s assassination has brought this into sharp focus.
Our nation is at a tipping point where what the Church has said about Liberalism all along seems remarkably accurate. As an American conservative Catholic, I would be less apt to accept that classical Liberalism harbors an innate flaw were it not for the Church’s constant witness to the contrary and her prophetic predictions about how it would play out over time. As the Church prophesied over a century ago, we now live in a society where the freedom to realize the most unnatural expressions of human subjectivity and individualism has made the West a laughingstock of absurdity. The relativism of today’s Liberalism has become truly tyrannical over the most ridiculous things a natural law framework would never even question—like men in women’s sports.
Like the wall metaphor I began with, over time and by way of logical necessity, the subtle error of Liberalism’s notion of individual liberty has finally been exposed for what it is—a parody of true freedom and the rule of law. If as Liberalism espouses, the exercise of individual liberty is checked only by the exercise of another person’s liberty through social contract—and if law (the just arrangement of things) originates in the will of the people by way of a majority (and not in natural law)—Christians will have no way to oppose the moral revolution of the far left except by resorting to the very mechanisms of social “revolution” against which the Church has consistently warned us.
The direction our society has taken is logically consistent with the Enlightenment’s philosophical definition of individual liberty. It is not, however, logically consistent with the Christian idea of liberty. And that is the huge problem we face. Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, we can finally see the subtle error of Liberalism’s deviancy from Christian anthropology. It leads to the tyranny of individual choice for those with the power to deploy their influence on others. And it further leads to the loss of the rights of all who might oppose them—even their right to life. We now find ourselves living amidst a destructive clash of Liberalisms that only a return to natural law will resolve.
What we need now is for Christians to stop filtering the remedy to our moral problems through the lens of Liberalism’s philosophical framework of individualism. As Catholics, we have such an amazing tradition on human nature, true liberty, and its relationship to law and governance. Maybe conservatives should take a deeper look at the Church’s wisdom rather than continue to embrace the philosophical Liberalism that has gotten us here.
As disciples of Jesus Christ, first and foremost, we need to change people’s hearts (not just their minds) on the issues. As Americans, we can still use due process and amend our Constitution by further specifying what life, liberty, and happiness mean according to a natural law framework. For example, we might pass an amendment stating that life begins at conception and ends with natural death. The Constitution works; we just need a more solid moral grounding for the exercise of our civil liberties. In the decade ahead, or so long as common sense holds the upper hand, we may have a span of time to accomplish this, although I’m not very optimistic. A return to the grounding principles of nature, which is the basis of all liberty, is what will ultimately safeguard the freedom for which Christ has set us free. In the long run, it will also bring peace to our nation.
(Editor’s note: This essay was published originally on the “What We Need Now” site in slightly different form and is republished here with kind permission.)
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“As the Church prophesied over a century ago…”
The Catholic Church which was locked in open combat with freemasonry clearly did have answers to their false philosophies and ideologies ; the post-conciliar modernist Church – which went silent on that combat with freemasonry, by embracing the modern world, no longer did.
Agreed, the “pre-conciliatory” Catholic Church had robust defenses of Catholic Truth. But these dissolved into the conciliar embrace of the zeitgeist : the Spirit of Vatican II.
We know that pagans and atheists do not adhere to any principles based on the Natural Law. Now, name me any religion other than Catholicism that proclaims, and promotes adherence to the Natural Law in their teaching. Here, I would include ALL protestant sects, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. If you disagree, show me how specifically each teaches principles of Natural Law.
Fiducia supplicans proclaims and promotes adherence to Natural Law in what way?
Oy veh. 🤦♀️
“What have the Jews ever done for us! Well, they gave us the 10 Commandments…”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QoBUmqyEaHE
Thank you Mr. Therrien for your article. I agree with you christians need to concentrate more on changing hearts not minds. However I’m not sure about, “Maybe conservatives should take a deeper look at the Church’s wisdom rather than continue to embrace the philosophical Liberalism that has gotten us here.”
If the Church, pope, cardinals and bishops would truly follow The Way The Truth and The Life, and lead The Church in Truth then we could all live in Truth. Which is why our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world (Jn.18:37).
Amen
This post sources itself well in the teaching of the Church. It’s very correct in critiquing the liberal Enlightenment mindset. I think it’s a waste of time, however, to plead for Conservatism to reform itself in the light of Christianity because Conservatism, as formulkated by its founders and continuers, is an ideology of the Enlightenment. It was founded to defend the Enlightenment regimes (themselves recent, seventeenth-century arrivals) that existed just before the eighteenth-century revolutions. It finds its truth in what society has evolved over time, and has profound difficulty with natural law. Burke and Scruton are obvious examples of this. A Catholic has to preserve objective doctrines that don’t change, so calling him a conservative Christian is problematic. Orthodox Christian would be more correct; any Christian who doesn’t adhere to the Faith is not truly Christian. Calling an orthodox Catholic a conservative Catholic is confusing because of the many and often incompatible meanings Conservatism has. Before the Enlightenment, society’s “ideology” was the Faith. Politics was about achieving social goals, not of articulating different worldviews. In first place, all societies were ultimately answerable to the otherworldly ends of individuals. This is where Catholics read Aristotle in the light of Thomistic teaching rather than in its original secularist, collectivist understanding.
Educated initially to be an architect, yours truly especially enjoys the opening line: “When framing out a room, everyone knows that the first corner must be square [!], or else the second will be off at the far end of the wall.”
And, then, there’s the further abuse of trying to “square” the circle.
Three points:
FIRST, take, for example, the double-speak of one “kissing car[di]nal” Fernandez (Fiducia Supplicans) and his semi-blessing which is not a blessing of “irregular couples” who are not “couples.” Atop the foundation of the Church, we find that “the longer the wall, the more the error will be evident”…
SECOND, as in the principled and public dissent of the Church in all of continental Africa (later semi-quarantined a “special case”), and then Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Peru, Kazakhstan, and parts of Argentina, France, and Spain, plus the Coptic Church, and with the “shock” of the patriarch of Budapest, and with the signatures of hundreds of prominent individuals. Not quite a heresy, but enabling heresy, according to Cardinal Muller https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/02/does-fiducia-supplicans-affirm-heresy. The recent publication from Der Synodal Weg comes to mind—guidelines which violate the Fiducia Supplicans fig leaf of remaining “non-liturgical, spontaneous and non-scandalous.”
THIRD, about the Constitution, we recall that Jefferson’s draft wording for the foundational and inseparable Declaration of Independence was not “self-evident and inalienable,” but rather the more centered “sacred and undeniable,” a phrased edited by Benjamin Franklin (the history by Paul Johnson). Meanwhile a female Supreme Court justice who could not define what a woman is, very much in step with Billie Boy Clinton who, about his lecherous multitasking on the Oval Office desk (not quite a squared “circle”) said it best about liberalism: “it all depends on what the meaning of the word is, is.”
SUMMARY: Long ago, my identical twin brother and I used to try to say two words at the same time, blended completely together. And, concluded that double-speak was not possible. We were four years old.
Thank you.
The Germans have a saying: We learn through suffering.
What we need now is a Savior to forgive our sins. The Good News is that we have Jesus Christ, Our Lord and only Hope. There will never be an effective Catholic revival until we preach Humanae Vitae and the freedom from sin and joy of a clean conscience from Confession.
As for the Constitution, forgetaboutit! It can’t save us. If you doubt me, read the 1936 Constitution under Stalin.
Why give any credence to a mere mortal who declared himself (stalin – man of steel) to be God’s greatest enemy?
This is how evil maintains its grip on the world.
The Church has always embraced the good of human liberty but has struggled with the moral implications of Liberalism as a philosophy of social life (Therrien).
Therrien by choice of subject locates this issue within the context of a recent Edward Feser discussion, ‘How not to limit free speech’.
Therrien adds “From a Catholic perspective, even freedom of speech is tethered to capital T truth and the common good”, that good a major premise in Feser’s argument, which of course is central to any discussion of freedom. Therrien then introduces the bête noire, individual freedom. His response is similar to Gregory of Nyssa’s synderesis, the intellect’s reflective, comparative assessment with the principles of natural law.
Do we fail to distinguish free will from Liberty? That Man must make a free decision to choose between good and evil, between God and the Devil, an apocalyptic choice due to original sin? Love is always a gift in that it is always conferred with freedom, whether due to God in accord with Justice, or freely gifted by God regardless of our unworthiness. The question of Liberty embroils around this capital T truth.
Augustine held that true freedom “cannot be reduced to a sense of choice: it is freedom to act fully . . . For a sense of choice is a symptom of the disintegration of will: the final union of knowledge and feeling would involve a man in the object of his choice in such a way that any other alternative would be inconceivable” (Augustine in the words of Peter Brown, “Augustine of Hippo,” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, p. 374).
Remember we’re dealing with words to describe a human act. Whatever words you use in the decision we all must make, the human act requires a ‘turning to’, a freely made act. A decision. To compare as distinctions ‘a sense of choice’ as distinct to “final union of knowledge and feeling would involve a man in the object of his choice in such a way that any other alternative would be inconceivable” is helpful in one manner, that a decision is apodictic, whereas some humans make an initial decision that is not yet fully understood and thereby convinced but nevertheless an act of faith. An example of this would be the initial response of the Apostles to Christ. As such we have to be aware of stumbling into word gaming.
To follow up on a significant issue, a choice between good and evil is of the greatest significance. Only Man possesses the capacity to distinguish between good and evil, Man’s definitive act. Any choice of action requires deliberation and the desire to choose one or the other. If a man were to be tempted to sin, frequently the sinfulness of the act is not absolutely clear, at least as it is proposed by the temptation.
Augustine’s framing of choice as frivolous in comparison to an act in which no “other alternative would be inconceivable” does not allow for temptation. That doesn’t square with the saints who suffered severe temptations. The Apostle suffered the thorn in his side, which Aquinas considered a moral matter.
All I know is that our country must find God…and quickly before it’s too late. Without God our country is doomed.
Ironic that this week’s Gospel reading was Christ using the parable of a corrupt judge acquiescing to an irrepressible widow who only acceded to her pleas to end them and asking if he would find any faith when he returns.
-Minus typos:
Ironic that this week’s Gospel reading was Christ using the parable of a corrupt judge acquiescing to an irrepressible widow and rendered a just decision only to end her pleas and concluding with Christ wondering if he would find any faith when he returns. I used to think he was referencing a sufficient amount, not any at all.
“What we need now is for Christians to stop filtering the remedy to our moral problems through the lens of Liberalism’s philosophical framework of individualism.”
Strawman. To the extent that this occurs, it is among a fringe. Everybody understands that whether or not something is “moral” is principally the result of its effect(s) on another or others, whether that something in some way injures another. Even those supreme acts of nihilistic self-dominion-suicide or sexual mutilation is injurious to the survivors, to society at large, and to God Almighty who created that life for a reason.
“gave primacy to the individual over the common good in basically all circumstances and endorsed each person’s absolute right to self-determination.”
If this occurred, it has long since evaporated. Candidly was the author playing Rip Van Winkle five years ago? It was determined by a hydra of Big Pharma and big government that people must wear masks, inject themselves with an experimental therapeutic confected from questionable means and isolate themselves. Individual needs were suppressed and subordinated to a contrive common good. No gathering in Churches visits to the confined, even outdoor funerals were cancelled.
There was the use of the “bully pulpit” to threaten a “winter of death”, use of state power to threaten employment for dissenters, a vast use of media dependent of pharmaceutic ad revenue to weaponize mobs, demand intolerance and in some cases imprisonment of dissent. Oh yes there was also the false promises of “two weeks to flatten the curve” and the promise that the injection would prevent infection and transmission. The “unvaccinated” were to be treated as vectors of disease, like rats or fleas.
Also I’m fatigued with the phrase “common good”. It lacks a fixed, objective meaning, so it means everything and nothing. Its use as a “true North” of public policy depends on who defines it and who enforces it. It may not be quite as useful in the hands of tyrants looking for a short cut as Rousseau’s “general will” that figures prominently in Robert Nisbet and others proposing that morally hideous figure as the father of totalitarianism but it serves them. Such amorphous phrases are the devil’s playground.
Maybe the reason that the Church has “struggled” here is because social commentary and theorizing is a tangential responsibility. In addition, much of it should be reserved to an informed laity who has subject matter expertise, who understand the nuts and bolts of a situation.
Consider Francis’ criticism of “speculators”. As an options writer, I am engaged in speculation. However, my actions serve two useful purposes-one price discovery and two putting the brakes on a market that might be inclined to freefall. If he really opposed speculation, why did he meet with George Soros who uses speculation for nefarious purposes.
The primary responsibility is butts in pews, but that’s hard work and getting harder-mostly because its largely left to the laity or Bishop Barron.
We read: “…[the common good] lacks a fixed, objective meaning, so it means everything and nothing.” Toward a definition of the “common good”:
Three comments:
FIRST, the common good “embraces the sum of those conditions of social life by which individuals, families, and groups ‘can achieve their own fulfillment’ in a relatively thorough and ready way” (Gaudium et Spes, 1965, n. 73, emphasis added).
SECOND, and this; “The common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains ‘common,’ because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it, increase it and safeguard its effectiveness, with regard also to the future” (“Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church,” 2004, n. 164).
THIRD, and, as for what the common good is NOT—in the complex and politicized secular world the art and science of mediation and arbitration can untangle, hopefully, the incongruous positions of multiple and competing “special interests,” often involving an additional outer ring of “stakeholders.” In such cases, the resolution is particular and architectonic—but we cannot agree with some prominent mediators who pontificate that “there is no such thing as the [larger and deeper] common good.” Instead, the process itself is pursued as part of the common good which is rooted, ultimately, in the inborn and universal Natural Law.
Similarly to the initial observation, if two roads diverge from a common starting point (fork), at the beginning, they may be only a block away, but after an hour or two they may be nowhere near each other. An error of only a fraction of a degree eventually throws a ship far off course absent a course correction.
As for amending the Constitution– I think that’s a splendid idea, but I can’t imagine getting the necessary supermajorities on board with anything in today’s polarized environment. That won’t happen without some sort of preparation of the political environment.
Andrew that bifurcation is SO true… tragically. Ecumenical New Church has indeed departed from the course projected by Sacred Tradition. This is evidenced in an example of “New Truth”: fiducia supplicans.
If I may, here is an appropriate quote from a title of O.M.D.’s English Electric album:
“The future was not supposed to be that!”
Precision:
“The future was not supposed to be like that”.
OMD, English Electric.2013.Track 4. The Future.
The political principle of individual liberty is premised not on the perfectibility of man but on the corruptibility of rulers. Name one state today in which censorship or opression is engaged in favor of the natural law. There isn’t one. Where censorship or opression are engaged is is always in opposition to the natural law, and always will be. It is an absurd fantasy to imagine it ever was or ever could be otherwise.
It all boils down to the difference between can and should. And this requires a well formed “collective “moral conscience.
Is possible for a non converted majority to legislate, regulate and enforce a natural morality? Will not self interest and concupiscence win out in the end? Perhaps as Catholic Christians we should be more interested in creating change toward a natural based morality through evangelism rather than political leverage. The ideals of democracy , as well as all other forms of civil governments, are negated by the fall in the garden.