Freedom and Responsibility

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Freedom and Responsibility

Because God has made us with a will that seeks the good freely, we are responsible for how we use our wills. If we use our will to pursue goods in disordered, selfish, short-sighted and damaging ways, then we’re responsible for that. If we use our will to pursue goods in an orderly, generous, integrated way, then we’re responsible for that as well.

This is a connection many people would rather not make. Because we are free, we are also responsible. For better and for worse.

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Proving the Connection

The best way to show the connection between freedom and responsibility is to show that no one is held responsible for events which are completely determined by factors beyond their control.

For instance, I don’t get any credit for the Grand Canyon. No one thanks me or praises me for the loveliness of the Grand Canyon.

That’s because the Grand Canyon was completely determined by factors beyond which I have no control.

Likewise, if someone committed a crime today in Istanbul, no one would blame me for it. Why? Because it was entirely determined by factors utterly beyond my control.

We’re not held responsible for what’s not within our control; but the implication is that we should get credit, and we should be held guilty, for what we do freely bring about. Which is just another way of saying that freedom and responsibility always go together.

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Can’t have one without the other

If you emphasize the importance of Freedom, you can’t downplay the importance of Responsibility. Yet that’s precisely what we do, particularly in this country, which has emphasized freedom since its founding. Freedom is a good thing but once you celebrate freedom, you can’t go around saying that people’s problems “aren’t their fault” and you can’t be constantly trying to excuse yourself every time you let people down, every time you fail to do the right thing.

To celebrate freedom at the broad societal level, and then try to get out of responsibility at the individual, particular level, is to live a schizophrenic national life. No, if there is freedom, there is responsibility. If there is responsibility, then there is guilt when that freedom is abused.

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American “freedom” and Catholic “guilt”

The great joke is that Americans, who talk more about freedom than any people on earth, are also the ones who complain about all the Catholic “guilt”. They don’t understand that the Catholic Church is the one who takes the idea of freedom most seriously. Catholics understand that freedom is real and that it’s real enough to carry responsibility with it. As surely as night follows day, the misuse of freedom is blameworthy, and a rightly guilty conscience follows in its wake.

Ironically, by boosting freedom, we’ve closed off any escape route. We’re locked into our freedom, which means we have to take responsibility for how we choose. When we feel crushed under the weight of our freely chosen sins, under the guilt we’ve brought down on our own heads we can’t look around for something or someone else to blame. Our only hope is to find a redeemer who can save us from our sin, and who can somehow transform the evil we’ve done into a source of blessings. We need to stop looking for excuses, and start looking for a Savior.

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Bringing Balance to Our Country    

Our country is founded on the desire to give our wills sufficient political space so that we can choose freely. That implies, of course, that we have been given a will that can pursue the Supreme Good, the perfect Happiness of union with God, by freely choosing the appropriate created goods. Really, that’s one way to interpret the Declaration of Independence’s statement that man has been equipped by God Himself with a tendency towards “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

But that freedom needs to be balanced with the reminder that our actions will henceforth be either meritorious or guilt-ridden. There is no alternative.

Viktor Frankl, the famous holocaust survivor, put it perfectly when he said that the United States will never realize its full integrity until we put a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast to balance out the Stature of Liberty on the east. In the meantime, taking responsibility for our own actions, asking for forgiveness to those we wrong, especially in the confessional, and accepting the consequences of what we’ve done without the evasion of excuses will be the first step in renewing the bond between freedom and responsibility in our society.