(LifeSiteNews) — We live in a culture and an age that has succumbed to a false understanding of freedom and has all but lost its hope.
In a stirring address to the leadership of the Diocese of Rome on June 10, 2008, the late Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the need for an “education to hope.”
He expressed remorse over the fact that “our civilization and our culture … too often tend to place God in parentheses, to organize personal and social life without him, to maintain that nothing can be known of God, even to deny his existence.” The Holy Father continued:
But when God is laid aside, … all our hopes, great and small, rest on nothing. In order, then, to ‘educate for hope’ … it is necessary, in the first place, to open our hearts, our intellects and all our lives to God, in order to be his credible witnesses among our fellow man.
As I read his remarks, I was reminded of a moving homily given by the late Pope St. John Paul II at a closing outdoor Mass, attended by 150,000 Christian faithful from Slovakia, in the year 2003. He spoke of the need for an “education to freedom” in which he said:
In our days, many baptized Christians have not yet made their faith their own in an adult and conscious way. … They call themselves Christians and yet they do not respond in a fully responsible way to the grace they have received; they still do not know what they want and why they want it. … This is the lesson to be learned today: An education to freedom is urgently needed. … Especially in the family, parents must educate their children to a correct freedom, so as to prepare them to respond properly to God’s call. … The family is the nursery where the little plants, the new generations, are nurtured. In the family, the future of the nation is forged.
Both successors of Peter recognized the desperate situation in the contemporary age. They called for a new kind of education, with the Church as the Instructor. This “education to hope and freedom” is the real antidote for a Western culture that has become diseased, drunk and debauched on what John Paul II called a “counterfeit notion of freedom” and is losing its hope because it has, in the words of Benedict XVI “put God in parentheses.”
This culture has hidden the intrinsic evil of killing innocent human life in the first home of the whole human race, the womb, behind the language of “freedom of choice.” Yet the truth is that some choices are always evil and wrong everywhere. They should not be called freedom. In fact, they are criminal choices – even if the taking of the lives of innocent children in the womb is not currently deemed to be so in the positive law of some States.
This culture has also given legal protection to the commercial trade in pornographic images that turns the bodies of women and men into objects to be used for self-centered deviant sexual gratification. This is also not freedom. True freedom is promoted when a society recognizes that the whole person, body and soul, is an image of God.
A truly free society protects and esteems the dignity and beauty of sexual relations within the stable bond of heterosexual marriage and builds itself upon the natural fruit of that bond, the family. This culture is failing to protect its first, vital cell, the family.
Instead, some holding public office, and some seated on the bench, use their position to promote a social and cultural revolution with the explicit goal of giving promiscuous, non-unitive, non-procreative sexual acts between men and men and women and women, equal legal status with authentic marriage.
Too many misguided elected officials, some of whom are even professing Catholics, have jumped on the bandwagon of this march to disaster. This counterfeit of marriage is increasingly being forced upon us all and enforced with the power of the State.
The effect could be the demise of true marriage – the plan that is written in the natural law for human fulfillment, flourishing and the continuation of the human race – as well as the erosion of a healthy social fabric.
Some new Caesars in black robes hid their fundamental error concerning the meaning of life and sexuality under a banner of a counterfeit freedom for people to do whatever they please as long as it can be found within some “penumbra” of privacy.
Such a “brave, new world” as the one they want to force upon others will be hell for all, including those who struggle with homosexual temptation.
We desperately need an education to freedom and hope.
