“Use it or lose it”. It isn’t only the prospect of caducity that brings this adage to mind. I think of it when I reflect on my teenage grandchildren’s vanishing skill at cursive writing. Though taught it in early grades, they have no occasion to use it – everything is typed – and consequently their ability to write it (let alone read it) is disappearing.
One could say the same about freedom. Do we who reside in the USA appreciate our freedom? Do we still resonate to the cry ‘live free or die’? Do we actively defend it against the encroachments that threaten it: especially those social, and even political, forces that jeopardize our rights enshrined in the First Amendment? Paramount among these, of course, is the freedom of religion.
A review of the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Liberty, promulgated almost sixty years ago, would inspire and reinforce our commitment to this quintessential right. It opens with:
“More and more people are demanding that men should exercise fully their own judgment and a responsible freedom in their actions and should not be subject to the pressure of coercion but be inspired by a sense of duty. At the same time they are demanding constitutional limitation of the powers of government to prevent excessive restriction of the rightful freedom of individuals and associations”
The Declaration goes on to say (Section 3):
This becomes even clearer if one considers that the highest norm of human life is the divine law itself – eternal, objective and universal, by which God orders, directs and governs the whole world and the ways of the human community according to a plan conceived in his wisdom and love. God has enabled man to participate in this law of his so that under the gentle disposition of divine providence many may be able to arrive at a deeper knowledge of unchangeable truth. For this reason everybody has the duty and consequently the right to seek the truth in religious matters so that, through the use of appropriate means, he may prudently form judgments of conscience which are sincere and true.
The search for truth, however, must be carried out in a manner that is appropriate to the dignity of the human person and his social nature, namely, by free enquiry with the help of teaching or instruction, communication, and dialogue. It is by these means that men share with each other the truth they have discovered, or think they have discovered, in such a way that they help one another in the search for truth. Moreover, it is by personal assent that men must adhere to the truth they have discovered.”
Though it is archaic, the word caducity, referenced above, is appropriately used here. Many of us today deem truth and religion – and therefore religious freedom – to be archaic and irrelevant concepts. Like our grandchildren’s fading skill at cursive writing, they are vanishing from our awareness.
Fortunately, philanthropists informed by the Jewish and Christian heritages understand that freedom – the true freedom addressed in the above excerpt – is essential for human development. They realize that ‘the truth shall set you free’ and therefore dutifully commit their resources to a defense of liberty and to a fuller understanding and response to truth, the ultimate guarantor of freedom.