John Paul Shimek is writing about freedom in the context of Harvard President Faust's decision, despite her abhorrence, to tolerate a Black Mass (later moved off-campus) based on the demands of academic freedom:
Here's the point: freedom and truth are not extrinsic to one another. The truth isn't incidental to the nature of freedom. For freedom to be free, it must stand in dialogical communion with the truth. Freedom has content. To round out the point, we aren't made free in circumventing the truth. We're made free on account of - because of - the truth. When freedom is severed from the truth, all that remains is the will or rule of the powerful.
Harvard's President wants to cultivate the sort of academic environment where creeds like those of the Satanists are welcome to express themselves. The beliefs of individuals are sacred and cannot be transgressed, so goes the doctrine of the hour. No roadblocks must impede the individual from searching out her or his self-expression. To impose limits on freedom, to tether it to truth, makes freedom less free. All that's starting to sound indistinguishable from the Satanic creed, isn't it?
When St. John Paul II went up against and did battle with the Nazis and later the Communists, he didn't speak about freedom in a vacuum, divorced from the truth. He staked his claim on a freedomtethered to the truth about God and man.
Yet, Harvard's President Drew Gilpin Faust disagrees. Her role as Harvard's 28th President isn't to ensure that the freedom of that school's students, staff, and faculty stands in the service of truth. Harvard can't impose truth on the members of its academic community. All it can do is offer a freedom divorced from the truth in the hopes that Harvardians will come to the truth, nonetheless. That is, if such an end is deemed desirable.
The frightening thing is this: none of this reasoning is itself far afield of Satanism.
A while back, while I was a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, I was assigned to work with a Satanist. I was charged with the task of bringing him along to God's truth. That was a frightful experience. Imagine a freshman pastoral intern, sitting across the table from a high-school aged Satanist, battling out the most important questions about God and human existence. I learned more about the faith in the course of those conversations than in the whole of seminarian formation, but I digress.
The Satanist told me that the individual is the sacred center. Nothing prevails over the will of the individual. Love is a charade. Seek first, not God's kingdom, but the reign of one's will and desires. It is better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. Freedom comes through the assertion of the self. Think Ayn Rand. You'll be close enough. That's the Satanist creed in a nutshell.
Now, Harvard's campus isn't a Satanic stomping ground. Not all Crimsonians or Cambridgians are Satanists. One doesn't have to be a Satanist to claim a rightful spot on Harvard Yard. And, President Faust seems altogether lovely. That's all clear enough.
But, in another sense, Satanism has all the world to do with academic life at Harvard.What galls me - what I think should gall all of us - is the duplicitous nature of the decision of Harvard's President to permit the re-enactment of the Black Mass. She said her decision was about taking a stance against censorship and it was made in order to honor academic freedom. But, truth be told, the decision itself was an exercise in censorship. It censored the rightful relationship that ought to exist between freedom and truth, it placed the will of Harvard's President over and against the demands of freedom-in-truth, and it turned a deaf ear to the persecution of Catholics -- in effect, suggesting that their complaints didn't have the character of public reasonableness.
The classical notion of the existence of truth must be recaptured. We've allowed, for too long, truth to be ignored or worse, redefined.
Finish the piece with Mr. Shimek. Heed his warning.
Truth demands it.
Carry on.