ROME, Italy — Pope Francis extolled the importance of human freedom Monday, insisting it must be “fought for every day.”
“Without freedom there is no true humanity, because human beings were created free and to be free,” the pope told a group of clergy and catechists in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava.
“The dramatic periods in your country’s history are a great lesson,” he continued. “When freedom was wounded, violated, and crushed, humanity was degraded and storms of violence, coercion, and deprivation of rights raged.”
Given the choice between freedom and security, many people choose security, the pontiff noted, which seems to make life better but is a great mistake.
“Freedom is not an automatic conquest, which is achieved once and for all,” Francis reflected. “No! Freedom is always a path, sometimes tiring, to be continually renewed and fought for every day.”
Freedom “calls us to be personally responsible for our choices, to discern, to carry forward the processes of life. And this is tiring, it frightens us,” he said.
Pope Francis leaves the Saint Martin Cathedral where he attended a meeting with bishops, priests, religious consecrated persons, seminarians, and catechists in Bratislava, Slovakia, on September 13, 2021. (Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images)
Sometimes it can seem “more comfortable” to go on repeating the past “without the risk of choice,” he said. It can seem easier “to live our lives doing what others decide for us, whether it is the masses or public opinion or the things that the media try to sell us.”
“This is not good,” he stated.
Today, “many times we do the things that the media decide for us,” he added, “and freedom is lost.”
The pope then recalled the history of the people of Israel and its slavery under the tyranny of the Egyptian pharaoh. Freedom for Israel was costly, he noted, and meant crossing a desert with little to eat.
The Israelites were tempted to think they had made a mistake, that they had been better off with their security in Egypt, even though they were slaves, the pope suggested.
Jewish worshippers draped in prayer shawls perform the annual Cohanim prayer (priest’s blessing) during Sukkot, or the feast of the Tabernacles, holiday at the Western Wall in the old city of Jerusalem on September 30, 2015. (Gil Cohen Magen/AFP/Getty Images)
“Better some onions than fatigue and the risk of freedom,” he said, in reference to the biblical passage from the book of Numbers when the Israelites became nostalgic for Egypt, “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost — also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.”
“Always this temptation, the temptation of onions. Better a little onions and bread than fatigue and the risk of freedom,” he noted. “I leave it up to you to think about these things.”
We often prefer “laws to be observed, security, and uniformity, rather than being responsible Christians and adults,” he declared.