It’s Time to Remember What Men Have Forgotten | Carl E. Olson | Catholic World Report
Three basic truths we must remember if we are to remain free.
The following address was given at the Stand Up for Religious Freedom Rally held in Eugene, Oregon, on Friday, June 8, 2012.
Good afternoon!
One of my heroes is the great Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent decades recording the horrors and history of Communism until his death four years ago. In 1983, he gave an address that began with this statement:
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”
The Communist revolution was, of course, a violent and bloody one. Like the French Revolution, which took place in the late 1700s, it was openly opposed to belief in God and Christianity. While the leaders of those respective revolutions directly attacked belief in God, their paths to power, tyranny, and terror were made easier because so many men had forgotten God.
The American Revolution is often compared to the French Revolution. In fact, when I was in high school, the two were presented as twins, as if they were essentially the same in character and intent. But they were not.
While the leaders of the French Revolution savagely attacked tradition and order, the American founders were deeply concerned to preserve and respect the rich tradition inherited from the Magna Carta (1215) and the English Bill of Rights (1689). And while the French revolutionaries sought to violently overthrow Christianity and to establish a secular religion with a secular calendar, the American colonists sought independence from Britain in order to peacefully govern themselves as free men.
Many of the American founders were Christians; all of them recognized the transcendent and rational basis for authentic freedom.
Which is why the Declaration of Independence stated: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The Declaration of Independence also refers, in the opening paragraph, to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God.” This past January, Pope Benedict XVI met with American bishops in Rome. During that meeting, he made the following remark about the founding of the United States and its founding documents:
At the heart of every culture, whether perceived or not, is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus about the conditions for human flourishing. In America, that consensus, as enshrined in your nation’s founding documents, was grounded in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God. Today that consensus has eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.
We could spend hours, I think, considering the many important points raised by the Pope in his statement. I want to highlight just three points, especially in light of the HHS mandate, which is a direct assault on religious freedom, political freedom, and the deeply held, principled beliefs of millions of Americans.
The first point is this: True freedom is a gift from God. This is true of religious freedom, political freedom, and every other authentic freedom enjoyed by humans.
What we believe about freedom says a lot about what we believe about truth, goodness, the meaning of life, the origin of our existence, and the purpose of our time here on earth.
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