May the Land of the Free Be the Home of the Brave

Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote an excellent article recently called “The Power of the Powerless.” I will repeat much of it here. It’s like a firework that I want to direct your attention to, so that you can appreciate its beauty.

Archbishop Chaput starts by reminding us of the tragic murders of the last century under various governments. While we know them as Socialist and Communist systems that claim to be atheistic, Chaput marks out that they really are types of false religion, idolatrous. They claim to save our world, but leave a path of destruction in their wake.

<<The good news is that our country was created to be a different and better place. It was designed to be, and always has been, an experiment in ordered liberty, a mix of biblical realism and Enlightenment hopes. It has never been perfect. Nothing human ever is. But in so many ways, it actually works. And it’s worth fighting for. We have the kind of laws and freedoms, the public institutions and civic consciousness, which ensure that things like the murderous obsessions that ruined the last century can never happen here.

Or at least, that’s what we think. The not-so-good news is that we can lose everything we have. As Solzhenitsyn once said, “prosperity breeds idiots.” The proof is in our current political terrain, and especially in the leaders who now shape it.

Václav Havel, the playwright and political dissident, wrote [an essay entitled] “The Power of the Powerless” in 1978 at the height of communist repression in his native Czechoslovakia. The content is brilliant, but Havel’s main point is very simple: Even in a world of persecution and state control, the individual is never really powerless. He or she?always?has the power to say no, to refuse to believe lies, and to search out other people who share a love for truth and are willing to suffer for it.

Havel was never religious. But his friend and fellow Czech dissident, Václav Benda,?was.?And Benda’s the man whose example I want us to remember in the coming weeks and months. Especially in yet another election year.

A husband and father of six, Benda—when he was pressed in the 1970s to join the Communist Party for professional reasons—declined. It killed his career. He was hounded out of academia. He was forced from one menial job after another. He was harassed for his peaceful resistance activities, which were technically legal under Czechoslovak law. He was arrested and jailed for four years. But none of it deterred him. He and his family had a profound Catholic faith, and they lived it intensely. At Easter in 1985, in the midst of all his political problems and government bullying, Benda wrote an extraordinary defense of Catholic teaching on divorce, contraception, and abortion—this, despite knowing that part of the Czech Church was collaborating with the regime, and some of her leaders were both corrupt and cowards.

Through it all, he never lost his gratitude for the beauty of his family and the gift of his faith. Nor did he lack a sense of humor about his own sufferings. At the height of his government troubles, he wrote that “I consider it extremely unreasonable, once you’ve shown some eccentric willingness to throw yourself to the lions, to complain that their teeth are not very clean.”

All of this man’s energy, creativity, and courage flowed out of one source: his identity and fidelity as a believing Catholic layman—the vocation which began at his baptism and shaped his whole life. Which is why, even in his prison cell, Václav Benda was a free man; free in a way his persecutors could never be.>>

Freedom does not live in the laws of the nation—it lives in the hearts of her people. Freedom must not be abused to do anything; that would include doing evil. Freedom must be directed to what is good. And if you freely choose or elect to do what is good, you make our nation better. That daily election is in your hands; no one can take that power from you. As we celebrate the birth of our nation, let us remember that we live in the glorious freedom of the children of God. May our exercise of freedom under difficult times make us brave. May our Lord bless our nation.

With my prayers,

Fr Jerome