“It Was For Liberty That Christ Freed Us”

 Sermon of Father Richard Cipolla, Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, July 8, St. Mary Church, Norwalk 

From St Paul’s epistle to the Galatians: It was for liberty that Christ freed us.

We just celebrated Independence Day, invoking freedom in so many ways:  from every mountainside, let freedom ring! This just past celebration of Independence Day was both unusual and in some ways special for Catholics.  For the bishops of the Church in the United States called for a fortnight for freedom beginning with the feast of SS Thomas More and John Fisher, two martyrs associated with persecution by the state– and ending with July 4, American Independence Day.  We could quibble about the title of this period of praying and thinking about religious freedom since the great majority of Americans do not know what a fortnight is. But alliteration is important.  The closing Mass of the fortnight on July 4 had an overflowing crowd at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.  But this does not say anything about what impact this really had on the millions of Catholics in this country.  We in this parish said the Leonine prayers after all Masses, in which the priest prays for the well-being and the liberty of the Church.  That prayer from Leo XIII came out of post-revolutionary Europe towards the end of the 19^th century, and that Pope certainly knew first-hand about efforts by the state to stifle of the freedom of the Church.

 But American Catholics, at least for the past century or so, have not known active persecution of the Church.  They have never gone through what so many Europeans have gone through, where persecution of the Church is part of European history.  Americans have never gone through what Catholics in England and Ireland went through, when to celebrate or attend Mass was a capital crime.  It is true that the Catholic immigrants from Europe encountered real prejudice when they came to this country, and in certain instances, mobs directed violence against Catholics.  But when one contrasts this with the terrible persecution of the Church in Mexico in the last century, we can only thank God that the Catholic Church in this country has been free from that savagery.

 But we find ourselves now under increasing attack from a vigorous and offensive secularism that is trying to re-define what religious freedom means in the American context.  That context is the documents of the founding fathers of this country, especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  The concept of freedom in those documents is in many ways admirable and has helped make this country a beacon of freedom for so many in the world.  But what has happened is that the concept of freedom, of liberty, has been severed from its basis in the moral law, or if you will, in the natural law.  The Declaration of Independence grounds freedom in Nature and in Nature’s God.  Now that is certainly not Christian per se, but it recognizes that personal freedom is founded upon and contingent on objective moral truths.  Without this grounding of personal freedom in objective truth, freedom then can become, and it has become this, merely an exercise is making sure that there are no strictures on what I want to do without any nod to objective moral truth.  When historians write about the 20th century in the future, they will not only write about that time as a century of the worst wars in the history of mankind.  They will also point to the post-war period, especially the 1960s, as a water-shed in the history of this nation and its understanding of freedom.  The redefinition of freedom in terms of individual rights without consideration of an objective moral foundation for those rights may be the single most important political and social event of the last century.  This involved not only the sexual revolution that severed entirely sexual behavior from morality.  It lay the foundation for the greed and accumulation of personal wealth that threatened and still threatens the financial being of our society. At its base, it involved an embrace of that radical individualism that always lay below the surface of the American experiment, and in that embrace, made the fulfillment of the individual self the basis of freedom. 

 Catholics were asleep for many years while this was going on.  There was all sorts of talk of a new spring time for the Church, an optimism about the future that invoked images of the peaceable kingdom.  There were those who argued, with some justification, that Catholicism could flourish in new ways in this new climate of self-realization.   But what we forgot is that our understanding of freedom does not in the end come from either natural law or the state:  the Christian understanding of freedom is inseparable from the truth of God as seen once and for all in the cross of Jesus Christ.  St Paul’s letter to the Galatians is the basic text:  It was for liberty that Christ freed us. My brothers, remember that you have been called to live in freedom, but not a freedom that gives rein to the flesh. Out of love put yourselves at one another’s service.  That last line precludes, for the Christian, any understanding of freedom that puts the individual at its center. It precludes the separation of freedom from truth and love, and this not in general, but that truth and love of God shown forth in the person of Jesus Christ. 

 It is when we understand Christian freedom that we see what is at stake in the current situation vis a vis the dictates of the Affordable Health Plan, Obamacare for short.  What is at stake here is not freedom of worship.  The secularists care not a whit about what we do here on a Sunday morning.  It is fine to worship God just as long as you don’t hurt the environment—St Mary’s may be soon fined for using too much incense—or practice some form of santaria that involves killing innocent animals.  Freedom of worship is not the problem, at least not yet.  What is at stake is freedom of religion, meaning freedom to be Catholic in all that means.  And that freedom must include the freedom to refuse to participate in a state-sponsored program that violates what it means to be a Catholic.  The Catholic cannot separate moral actions from truth that comes from God and which truth is found in Church teaching under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  This has nothing to do with blind obedience or lack of thought.  This is an act of the will that is entirely rational in the best sense of that world. 

 A representative of the ACLU in an editorial recently accused the bishops of trying to force their morality on the whole country.  This argument is mendacious and foolish.  The abolition of slavery and civil rights for blacks was imposed on the whole country as a moral imperative. And quite rightly. But there is no moral imperative for the state to define contraception as a good for all women.  This is almost laughable as the state panders to the desires of the naked self in an attempt to define morality in an amoral way.The proximate argument vis a vis freedom that is being played out here is the freedom to be Catholic. But the deeper question goes beyond religious freedom per se.  And it is this question that will be much more difficult for the bishops to confront in the years ahead with a Catholic population whose goal has been to assimilate themselves into the prevailing American culture, even when that culture contradicts basic Catholic beliefs.  To Catholics who have gotten used to thinking of themselves as just another Christian denomination, who have embraced contraception and abortion and euthanasia as justifiable means to an end, who have been accepted into the elite reaches of American society by accepting the rights of the individual as the basis of freedom, who have no idea about the basis of freedom in the truth and love of God:  to these Catholics, it will be a monumental task on the part of the bishops and priests of the Church in the coming years to convince them that their freedom to be Catholics must and will put them into conflict with an aggressive secular culture that will not tolerate their beliefs and will not tolerate their putting their beliefs into practice, a culture that echoes Nietzsche and Sartre:  if God does not exist, everything is permitted.

 We invoke the intercession of the martyr saints today, as we pray for the courage not only of our bishops and priests but for all Catholics, especially the laity, to be Catholics in this world.  This will demand a deepening of our faith, and that includes an intellectual understanding of our faith. It will demand a deeper prayer life. It will demand a deeper liturgical life. And above all it will demand a love not only for those who believe but even more: it will demand a love for those who do not believe and persecute us. It will demand that we never withdraw from the world for which Christ died. It will demand that we engage the world, and that engagement has to show the world our joy that comes from our Catholic faith and that the heart of who we are is the one who said: fear not, little flock, for I have overcome the world.