Commentary: We Must Set Freedom Free.

To claim the right to abortion means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance (John Paul II)

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Catholic Online) - In 2001, Steven Levitt, an economist from the University of Chicago and John Donohue, a law professor from Stanford University, published an article entitled "Legalized Abortion and Crime" in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. This was the abstract to the paper:

"We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime."

In pre-World War II Germany, Dr. Karl Binding, a law professor and one of Europe's foremost authorities on criminal law, and Dr. Alfred Hoche, a psychiatrist and professor of medicine, laid out the results of their own academic "study" in two essays entitled "Permitting the Destruction of unworthy Life." They proclaimed that ".....a new age will arrive,operating with a higher morality and with great sacrifice,which will give up the requirement of an exaggerated humanism and overvaluation of mere human existence." The Hoche/Binding team laid the framework for the eugenics program of the National Socialist regime. The Levitt/Donohue thesis unleashed a danger equally as menacing in our own age. Both of these so called studies are infected with the poison which is killing millions of people and threatens freedom itself, moral relativism.

The abortion "right" has now trumped the true right to life. Its defenders argue that this "right" simply leaves the decision in the hands of the mother. Yet no other choice to kill the innocent is left in the hands of a private citizen... at least not yet. The "abortion right" is some kind of "super right" in the contemporary culture of death and it now has another victim, authentic human freedom. In "The Gospel of Life," John Paul II warned "To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom..." (No. 20)

Witness the Words of Jesus Come to Life

In "The Splendor of Truth," John Paul declared that "freedom itself needs to be set free." He reminded us that "Patterned on God's freedom, man's freedom is not negated by his obedience to the divine law; indeed, only through this obedience does it abide in the truth and conform to human dignity..." (No. 42) Freedom must always be exercised in relationship to the objective moral truth or what is claimed to be liberty swiftly degenerates into license. The claim to freedom is thus reduced to "a notion of freedom, which exalts the isolated individual in an absolute way, and gives no place to solidarity, to openness to others and service of them" in the words of the late Pope.

The West has been seduced by what Pope Benedict XVI called a "dictatorship of relativism." When nothing is true then nearly everything is permissible. When any nation loses its conviction that every human person must be protected and respected it loses freedom itself. It kills it - in the womb - or at the bedside of the suffering. Oh, it may continue to mouth the word and even develop a certain veneer of compassion and language of "tolerance" behind which it hides its barbarism. However, such a Nation is on a downward spiral resulting from what John Paul called the "eclipse of the sense of God and of man typical of a social and cultural climate dominated by secularism." We are now in that sad state.

In the Incarnation of Jesus Christ the God of the whole universe took up residence in a womb. He died on an instrument of torture reserved for the worst criminals in order to set all men and women free. From His wounded side He birthed a new creation which was clothed with the same power that raised His glorified Body from the tomb. That Church must point the path to a recovery of authentic freedom in this age. She is called to insist upon the existence of objective truths which can be known by all men and women through the exercise of reason because they are revealed by the Natural Law. She insists, as she always has, that those truths become the very framework for society in order to promote the common good of all. Sometimes such an insistence means speaking that truth to secular power and suffering the consequences. In doing so the Church has helped to expose the lies of the "cultures of death" for two thousand years.

Save Now | 15% Off Jewelry

However, the Church has done much more in this prophetic role; she has helped to build truly free societies. It was her insistence upon the legal recognition of the dignity of every human person because they were created in the Image of God; her defense and promotion of the primacy of marriage and the family; her insistence upon the existence of a Natural Law and the rule of law to which positive law must remain accountable; her instructions concerning our social obligations in solidarity to the poor, our call to peace... and so many other elements found within Christian social thought which have helped to inform our very understanding of the nature of a truly free and just society. They are all at risk now as the West wanders from her roots, following the pied piper of secularism and relativism.

We must set freedom free in this age, no matter what the consequences. Sometimes in history, just when the darkness looked like it would sweep away the truth; the Church led the way to a rebirth. So it can be in our age. The task of setting freedom free has, in a particular way, fallen to Catholic Christians. We have been given the treasury of the Church's Social Doctrine, which is offered to all men and women and not just to Christians or religious people. We must educate ourselves in it and build upon it if we hope to stem the growing threats to true freedom. We cannot retreat from this mission. With the insights this teaching offers we can help to transform western culture from within, elevate it as leaven raises the proverbial loaf, humanize it, civilize it and point it toward a recovery of authentic human freedom.

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'