Editorial: Needed, An Education to Hope and Freedom

We live in a culture and an age that has succumbed to a false understanding of freedom and has lost its hope. We need an education to hope and freedom.

LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - In a stirring address to the leadership of the Diocese of Rome 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 his predecessor, the Servant of God, Pope John Paul II in 2003 at a closing outdoor Mass, attended by 150,000 faithful from Slovakia. He spoke of the need for an "Education to Freedom":

"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 of these successors of the Apostle Peter recognized the desperate state of affairs in the contemporary culture. They called for a new kind of education, with the Church as the Instructor.

This "education to hope and freedom" is the antidote for a Western culture that has become diseased, drunk and debauched on what John Paul II called a "counterfeit notion of freedom". This culture 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". The truth is that some choices are always and everywhere evil and wrong. They should not be called free. In fact, they are criminal even if not currently deemed to be so in the positive law.

This culture gives 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 deviate sexual gratification. This is 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. Instead, this society uses the police power of the State, through the judicial branch, to protect even child pornography under a misguided notion of free speech.

This culture now refuses to protect its first, vital cell, the family. Judges unilaterally 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 marriage.

Misguided elected officials, some of whom are professing Catholics, have jumped on the bandwagon in this march to cultural disaster. This counterfeit of "marriage" is now being forced upon us all and enforced with the Police Power of the State.

The effect, if unchecked,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.

Judges are becoming new Caesars in Black robes. They hide their fundamental error 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 are trying to force upon others will be hell for all, including those who struggle with homosexual temptation.

Finally, though this culture has the most potential for expanding economic freedom, opportunity and participation, perhaps of any society in history, it too often fails to hear the cry of the poor.

It allows its vibrant economic order, with so much potential to truly liberate people to instead protect the misuse of the goods of the earth, which have a universal destination.

This kind of a notion of "economic freedom" can devolve into a sanctioned selfishness that fails to recognize that for the market to be truly free it must be at the service of the person, the family and the common good.

Both of these Pope's insights and teachings can and will have revolutionary potential. They can help to reverse the slide and lead to a true liberation and rebirth of freedom and hope. It is up to the Catholic faithful to come to understand them, embrace them in our own lives and then offer them to the people of this age.

We desperately need an education to freedom and hope.The Church, through her members, must now take up the task.

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