Chad Pecknold: Against Indifference

Last year’s theme for the World Day of Peace was “no longer slaves, but brothers and sisters.”  As a result, we saw the Pope continually return to themes of freeing human beings from every form of enslavement and degradation. Yesterday, the Vatican announced the Pope’s new theme for 2016’s World Day of Peace: “Overcoming indifference to win peace.” Tying these two themes together, I think we can see two competing notions of freedom, and since the Pope is coming to the “Land of the Free,” it seems reasonable to expect that he will speak to our love of liberty. But what kind of liberty?

Chad Pecknold

There is a kind of freedom which might have “whatever” as its motto. This “freedom of indifference” can sometimes be heard in those kinds of sarcasm meant to insulate us from every morally serious claim put to us. This is actually only the appearance of freedom, or a kind of fake freedom that enslaves us to our enthroned desires. This kind of freedom sets up a series of buffers around ourselves, so that nothing can make any real claim upon us. If we think we are free in this way, we will scoff at the wisdom of tradition, we’ll dismiss rational claims that contradicts our desires, we’ll pretend our actions do not arise out of a past and we’ll pretend they don’t have future consequences. Even in this “social media age,” such freedom isolates us.

Pope Francis says this false freedom affects all of us: “The world tends to withdraw into itself and shut that door through which God comes into the world and the world comes to him. Hence the hand, which is the Church, must never be surprised if it is rejected, crushed and wounded. God’s people, then, need this interior renewal, lest we become indifferent and withdraw into ourselves.”

This kind of freedom pretends to make love supreme, but in the end it just makes our desires king. Our liberty will be nothing other than stated expressions of our whims, which means that liberty can only be secured by force, power, and coercion since it is detached from beauty, truth, and goodness.

The freedom of indifference makes our desires mysteriously rootless, detached from any proper sense of who we are as rational creatures. The Holy Father might suggest it is only the devil who would tell us that indifference is freedom, since it is through indifference to truth that we become slaves of infinite desire. Instead of a freedom which flows from the unity of intellect and will ordered to our Final Good, indifference makes us slaves of our own capricious will.

And this indifference is most likely a cipher for who we think God is too.

Yet God is not a distant, capricious commander. Pope Francis reminds us that, “He is not aloof from us. Each one of us has a place in his heart. He knows us by name, he cares for us and he seeks us out whenever we turn away from him. He is interested in each of us; his love does not allow him to be indifferent to what happens to us.” God tells us we are “no longer slaves.” God wants true freedom for his children, the freedom to live in accordance with truth, beauty, and goodness. God wants us to become his friends.

Again, Pope Francis: “The love of God breaks through that fatal withdrawal into ourselves which is indifference. The Church offers us this love of God by her teaching and especially by her witness….This happens whenever we hear the word of God and receive the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. There we become what we receive: the Body of Christ. In this body there is no room for the indifference which so often seems to possess our hearts.”

There is no room for indifference with respect to the cries of the human person, in the womb, or on the border, and there is no room for indifference with respect to God, and the cross of Calvary. When God’s love breaks into our hearts, through all our sarcastic buffers, through the “whatevers,” through the guardsmen of our capricious desires, we become truly free for the one friendship that will make us happy. When our will is joined to God’s will, when our minds are renewed and conformed  to Christ our head, the midnight shackles of indifference crack open, and the freedom for truth and goodness dawns. Our hearts are made for eternal peace, which is to say the eternal happiness of friendship with God. Indifference makes this impossible. Indifference is not our friend.

— Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies.