Jul 21, 2008 / 15:35 pm
The archbishop of Valencia in Spain, Cardinal Agustin Garcia-Gasco, said this week that man has an innate desire to live in freedom, but he also warned of the promises of ideological utopias, which end up destroying man’s dignity and society itself.
In his recent pastoral letter on freedom and dignity, the cardinal recalled that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights warns that ignorance of or scorn for these rights “has resulted in acts of barbarism offensive to the conscience of humanity.”
He pointed out that despite the devastating experience of totalitarianism, mankind is always “exposed to the danger of abandoning his intelligence and his moral sense, and to being carried away by the attractiveness of a collective force that promises ideological utopias,” which end up destroying the person. “When politics seeks to take the place of God it leads to monstrous social practices that destroy human dignity,” he said.
The cardinal went on to note that the human being finds his freedom in God. The Church’s social teaching, he said, firmly proclaims that, faced with totalitarian seductions, “man can move towards what is good only in the freedom that God has given him as an evident sign of his image.”