Endowed With Freedom

"The Church alone, in its tradition, defends the absolute value of the person, from the first instant of conception to the last moment of old age, however decrepit and useless the individual may be. And what is this defense of the human being's value based on? How is it that man has this right, this absoluteness whereby even if the whole world were to move in one direction he has something within which gives him the right to stay where he is? He has something within by which he or she can judge the world from which he or she was born.

"This single human being [is] free from the entire world, free, so that the world together and even the total universe cannot force him into anything. In only one instance can this image of a free man be explained. This is when we assume that this point is not totally the fruit of the biology of the mother and father, not strictly derived from the biological tradition of mechanical antecedents, but rather when it possesses a direction relationship with the infinite, the origin of all the flux of the world,...that is to say, it is endowed with something derived from God....

"So here is the paradox; freedom is dependence upon God.... Either we depend upon the flux of our material antecedents, and are consequently slaves of the powers that be, or we depend upon What lies at the origin of the movement of all things, beyond them, which is to say, God."

--Luigi Giussani