Sep 18, 2025
One of the most important encyclicals we need to rediscover is
Pope Leo XIII’s Libertas (1888), on the true nature of
human liberty. This encyclical explains what true liberty consists
of, followed by a lengthy exposition of the Church’s condemnation
of liberalism, in the Enlightenment/classical sense rather than
today’s narrower use of the word. Most people who call themselves
conservative now would, in certain ways, fall into the category of
liberalism as defined by Leo.
Prophetically warning of the evil consequences of political
liberalism, Leo also takes aim at various false liberties in which
modern people take such pride: freedom of speech, writing, thought,
and worship. In each of these instances, liberals fail to recognize
that freedom is not the right to do and say what one wants, but to
do justice and to speak truth. As starting as Leo’s teaching may be
to modern Catholics, his fundamental principle is the one that Pope
St. John Paul II enunciated when he said that “freedom consists not
in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we
ought.”
Pope Leo XIII: “Man, by a necessity of his nature, is
wholly subject to the most faithful and ever-enduring power of God;
and that, as a consequence, any liberty, except that which consists
in submission to God and in subjection to His will, is
unintelligible. To deny the existence of this authority in God, or
to refuse to submit to it, means to act, not as a free man, but as
one who treasonably abuses his liberty; and in such a disposition
of mind the chief and deadly vice of liberalism essentially
consists.
