Plenary, 21 Jun 2006

Meeting date: Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Official Report 376KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection, as it is every Wednesday. Our time for reflection leader today is George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul II.

Fifteen years ago, the 77-year-long civilisational emergency that began with the guns of August 1914 ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the most lethal form of tyranny in human history. Freedom, it seemed, had come safely through the perfect storm that was the 20th century.

Pope John Paul II—who, in 1979, ignited the revolution of conscience that eventually produced the non-violent revolution of 1989 in central and eastern Europe—had some important things to say about freedom's 20th century victory over tyranny when he addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1995. Let me commend some of his words to you this afternoon:

"Freedom is the measure of man's dignity and greatness. Living the freedom sought by individuals and peoples is a great challenge to man's spiritual growth and to the moral vitality of nations. The basic question which we must all face today is the responsible use of freedom, in both its personal and social dimensions. Our reflection must turn then to the question of the moral structure of freedom, which is the inner architecture of the culture of freedom.

Freedom is not simply the absence of tyranny or oppression. Nor is freedom a licence to do whatever we like. Freedom has an inner ‘logic' which distinguishes it and ennobles it: freedom is ordered to the truth, and is fulfilled in man's quest for truth and in man's living in the truth. Detached from the truth about the human person, freedom deteriorates into license in the lives of individuals, and, in political life, it becomes the caprice of the most powerful and the arrogance of power. Far from being a limitation upon freedom or a threat to it, reference to the truth about the human person—a truth universally knowable through the moral law written on the hearts of all—is, in fact, the guarantor of freedom's future."

Pope John Paul II concluded:

"The politics of nations … can never ignore the transcendent, spiritual dimension of the human experience, and could never ignore it without harming the cause of man and the cause of human freedom. Whatever diminishes man—whatever shortens the horizon of man's aspiration to goodness—harms the cause of freedom. In order to recover our hope and our trust … we must regain sight of that transcendent horizon of possibility to which the soul of man aspires … And in doing so, we shall see that the tears of this century have prepared the ground for a new springtime of the human spirit."

May all of us—heirs to the sacrifices of so many centuries in which freedom's cause was imperilled—be skilful custodians and stalwart defenders of the garden of freedom.