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| Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures |
That is not the pope's notion of freedom. His notion is that we are free only to the extent that exercising our freedoms does not take the life of, or violate the essential dignity of, a human person — including ourselves.
Most of the time, our untrammeled, individualistic self-expression is not circumscribed by the pope's twin criteria of the inviolability of life and the sanctity of personal dignity. But there are times when the two points of view diverge.
One of these times is when a woman considers having an abortion. If her "freedom to choose" gets exercised, her fetus's life gets snuffed out.
Other situations in which the pope would find a divergence are those involving questions of chastity. A woman considering an abortion has not necessarily been unchaste, since her gestating infant may well have been conceived within the confines of holy wedlock. But other hot-button issues surrounding church teaching today are often questions of chastity.
Sex without marriage. Sex between people of the same gender. Using contraceptive devices such as condoms and technologies such as birth control pills. These are three hotly debated topics that divide the pope's notion of freedom from the secular view that all of the above are fine as long as they are acts of individual self-expression that hurt no one. In the pope's view they are all offenses against life, dignity, and chastity.
I personally struggle with such questions myself. For instance, last night I squirmed as I watched the recent excellent movie "V for Vendetta."
Though it occurs in the year 2020, it's set in a 1984-like British dystopia in which an all-powerful High Chancellor and his minions have stripped the people of all real freedom in the name of "peace," "order," and, yes, "faith." One masked man, "V," strikes a blow for freedom by blowing up the courtrooms of the Old Bailey — now symbols of injustice — and pirating the television airwaves to broadcast a call-to-arms to the oppressed. In exactly one year, on the November 5th anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day, the people are asked by "V" to rise up and incinerate the Houses of Parliament, and thereby the dictatorship.
Great stuff ... except that the plot makes clear that the filmmakers' stance with regard to freedom is centered around what the pope would assail as offensive to life, dignity, and chastity.
One of the movie's more sympathetic characters, played by Stephen Fry, takes in the story's heroine, Natalie Portman, "V's" sometime henchwoman, when she is on the run from the police. He is actually her boss at the un-BBC of the day, and as much of a dissident as one can be under the circumstances of the oppression. As such, he has his secrets. One of them is that he reads the Koran for its beautiful poetry — the Koran having been banned by the government because it supposedly underwrote 9/11-type terrorism.
Another of his secrets is that the people he would like to love and be intimate with are not permitted to him — a veiled reference, one assumes, to his homosexuality.
Portman is eventually put in prison and finds, concealed in a rat's hole in her cell, the life story of another prisoner, written stealthily on toilet paper. This testament of her female predecessor tells of how she and her equally female lover had been sharing an idyllic life together for three sweet years when the government murdered her partner and incarcerated her. Their lesbian relationship was, it seems, impermissible under the law.
So we would seem to have, ostensibly, a stark choice between freedom, on the one hand, and what the pope would call the call to chastity. If we choose chastity — no sex outside heterosexual marriage, and so forth — we ipso facto lose all freedom.
Put another way, if we circumscribe sexual freedoms in any way, we are on a slippery slope to complete tyranny. That would seem to be the subtext of "V for Vendetta."
The question is, is it true?
It would arguably be true if, as the filmmakers (who also made the "Matrix" series) seem to feel, any restriction, self-imposed or otherwise, on our radical freedom of self-expression is tantamount to tyranny. Certainly the dictates of chastity qualify here, for chastity calls us to observe self-imposed limits on how we express "who we are."
That is, they do so under the assumption that we "are" whatever it is that we want to do, and have the power to do, now. If we want to "hook up" now, and if we have the power to keep from making babies when we do so, fine.
The pope would say that the exigencies of "want to" and "now" enslave us, expunge our true selves from our very own view. Our true selves are ordered to life, dignity, and chastity, not "want to" or "now." The true tyrant in all of this controversy over freedom is at work inside us, the pope would say. The true tyrant is the one who would conceal from us who we really "are."
(To be continued in "C for Chastity" ... )
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