By Lawrence
S. Cunningham
I met a lady once who described herself as a "recovering Catholic."
She was wrestling with a long series of personal mishaps that
more or less coincided in her mind with her upbringing as a Catholic.
She felt psychologically traumatized by a broken marriage, unruly
children, conflicted views of sexuality, guilt rising from a fear
of hell and, finally, a desire to chuck the whole thing. She wanted
to be free of her Catholicism the way an alcoholic wants to be
free from the craving for drink.
A psychologist once said to me that Catholics were his most
guilt-ridden clients. I said that might just be because Catholics
are the last people in this country who understand that there
are certain things about which we ought to feel guilty.
Still, does being a Catholic hold one in a kind of moral bondage,
as its many critics allege?
Our society is full of ex-Catholics who think the church restricts
their freedom. This is not a new charge. Martin Luther once blasted
the magisterial claims of Rome in his famous "The Freedom of the
Christian." Thirty years of classroom experience has taught me
that many students see the church devoting most of its time to
saying, "Thou shall not . . ." And these days I hear many people
describing themselves as "spiritual" rather than "religious" because
"spiritual" denotes freedom and largesse while "religious" means
rules and restrictions.
The Catholic church does have some stern injunctions as part
of its teaching. It does tell us that certain things are wrong
and certain things are true and, further, that we should act on
what is right and resist what is wrong. As Pope John Paul II has
said, the greatest truth the martyrs teach us is that certain
matters are so right that we should give up our lives for them.
This will to do what is right is not, however, a commitment to
a book of rules or a set of stipulations. It is a way of life
and a basic determination to choose this way of life
over that way.
Catholic moral theology has always recognized that free will
-- the freedom to choose -- can be, and often is, impaired. The
will is traditionally seen as dependent upon the intellect to
provide it choices, and some people are mentally dim
or incapacitated, addled by circumstance, intellectually underdeveloped,
confused by drugs or blinded by moments of passion. What the Catholic
tradition emphatically denies is that we are constitutionally
incapable of making a free choice. And Catholic thinking has always
argued against those who exalt total human autonomy and self-interest,
as well as those who insist that we are solely shaped by psychological
forces (behaviorists) or the unblinking forces of the environment
(Darwinians) or subterranean powers within ourselves about which
we have no conscious knowledge (Freudians).
Being Christian is to fundamentally affirm that everyone is
given the offer of salvation. If we are saved, then that salvation
comes from the grace of God. If we are not saved, then that derives
from a free, radical choice to say "no" to God's love. We are
saved by grace that is freely given.
It is striking how often Jesus offers choices to people. He
calls Simon and Andrew, James and John to follow him. He issued
the same invitation to Levi (Matthew) the tax collector. In all
cases, they took up his invitation and followed him. When he made
the same offer to the rich young man, the young man went away
sorrowing because, as the Gospel said, he "had many riches." In
both cases there was an element of choice. At the heart of the
Gospel is the idea of graced freedom -- a call from God.
The message Jesus preached and the acts he performed were all
about liberation. Jesus freed the blind from their darkness, opened
the ears of the deaf; he preached hope to the crowds, elevated
the marginalized from their low status as tax collectors or prostitutes.
Jesus, in a dramatic scene in a synagogue, applied to himself
the words of Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because
he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent
me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to
the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year
of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:18-19).
More crucially, even if we sophisticated moderns are skeptical,
Jesus drove out demons; he was an exorcist. Jesus freed people
from those malign forces that kept them in a state of despair,
lack of control, bondage. We may conjure up lurid images when
thinking about exorcism, but the Gospels affirm that some forces
attempt to control and dehumanize us. The Gospel insists, however,
that these powers are not superior to the power of God.
Every effort of the people of the church to overcome powers
that enslave people -- enslavements to sin or ignorance or evil
impulses or degradation or addiction or hate or evil or revenge
-- is a kind of exorcism done in Christ's power. To aid love,
provide forgiveness, demand justice is to extend Christ's acts
of exorcism, to move away from bondage and toward freedom.
Later theology would insist that the decision to say "yes" to
Christ's invitation is impelled by grace. This means there has
to be some interplay of freedom and grace, some nexus between
divine call and human response. In those subtle and mysterious
lines between human freedom and divine prompting are theological
issues that vex even the most sensitive Christians.
Martin Luther taught that the human will was a slave to sin,
incapable of choosing good and ineluctably bent to evil. Determinism,
predestination and other elements of the complex theological debate
have persisted since Christian antiquity. How could a person freely
choose if God already knew the outcome? If people could freely
choose good or evil, then what was the need for someone to save
them from sin? What was the need of God's grace? And if acts resulted
from evil, passion, physiological defects or conditioned responses,
what of personal responsibility and accountability and . . . free
will? We still seek those answers.
Unlike Martin Luther, Saint Thomas Aquinas asserts that humans
are oriented by nature to choose good. Even when someone chooses
what is morally evil, Aquinas writes, he does so thinking it is
good. Acting out of malice or ignorance or bad formation or socially
oppressive situations may lead a person to commit this or that
immoral act, but the person always thinks -- for whatever reason
-- that it is good. The purpose of preaching the Gospel is to
help people see and pursue what is authentically good.
Human freedom is intrinsically linked to social justice. A true
Catholic humanism would be woefully inadequate if it passively
accepted conditions that put stumbling blocks in the path of persons
making reasonable choices about the moral life or that diminished
their power to choose the good. Peter Maurin, one of the founders
of the Catholic Worker Movement, once said he struggled for a
world in which it was easy for a person to be good. The prophetic
voice calls others to resist those forces that degrade human dignity,
confine people to the struggle for mere survival and diminish
their capacity to enjoy the good things of this world. The bombardment
of propaganda that overwhelms people with pornography or false
promises of rewards for greed, or those socio-political systems
which take away basic rights all militate against human freedom
and weaken the will to choose good.
Therefore, all the energies of the church to preach the Gospel
and to live out its message are, at the most ideal level, an effort
to hold out a basic truth: There is freedom in Christ. The Catholic
tradition carries within it a message of freedom succinctly expressed
in a single line in the Gospel: "If you continue in my word, you
are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth
will make you free" (John 8:31-32).
What is that freedom? It is freedom from whatever it is that
makes us unhappy, insecure, doubting, addicted, self-loathing.
It is freedom from all those things that make us yearn to be something
else. It is the freedom that leads to the greatest freedom --
the freedom from want. And ultimately it is the freedom to love.
In fact, the desire to affirm the good and the freedom to choose
it is, in the Catholic tradition, an inchoate step toward recognizing
God even when a person does not use the word God. The Second Vatican
Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom asserts that humans,
"endowed with reason and free will," have both the right and obligation
to seek the truth and in its discovery to lead lives "in accord
with the demands of truth." It is a deeply held conviction of
the Christian tradition that the freedom to know good and to seek
truth is to come close to that God who is goodness and
truth. That drive for the ultimate object of the will is a kind
of yearning for something always in front of us as a further good.
For that reason we pray that God will help us see the good and
follow it. It is here that grace and freedom coincide.
* * *
Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology
at Notre Dame.
(July 2003)
