Lenten prayer, fasting and almsgiving can save us from the idolatry of Western ‘freedom’

Angus Milne• March 6, 2025

When US Vice President JD Vance stood up at the Munich security conference and told European elites that the internal threats to Western values alarmed him more than external menaces, he voiced concerns held by many citizens across European.

Yes, falling under the iron rule of China or Russia is a fearful prospect; but more urgent is the erosion of individual freedom right now at the hands of the very European governments supposedly responsible for protecting it.

It is all very well knowing what we are defending ourselves from, warned Vance, but do we know what we are defending ourselves for? The latter is well worth pondering this Shrove Tuesday and as we embark into Lent.

Vance’s point echoes the warning by both the Russian dissident Aleksandyr Solzhentizyn and Pope St John Paul II at the end of the Cold War. The West had won, the Soviet Union collapsed. In part, free market capitalism had proven a more effective means of generating wealth and lifting people out of poverty than a state-run economy. The human cry for freedom had triumphed.

But, warned Solzhenitsyn and John Paul II, while the West has grasped that freedom is important, it remained in danger, because it does not understand what freedom is for.

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In the years since that collective warning, the West has made an idol of freedom. Equating it with licence to do whatever one chooses; it has been used as justification for moral relativism and sexual perversion.

This lack of understanding regarding the importance of freedom makes our civil freedoms precarious ones. Most grasp that there is something good about freedom, but few, when pushed, can articulate why. And, when faced with some of the catastrophes that can occur at the result of abuses of freedom, you can see why many question whether freedom is really all it’s cracked up to be.

Ultimately, such a question is a theological one and requires a theological response. When my students consider the problem of evil, many are quick to identify human freedom as playing some intimate role in understanding why there is suffering. But eventually the question arises: is our freedom worth the price of such evil? If freedom can see men turn millions of others into dust, would it not have been better to have never given man freedom in the first place?

It is crucial to grasp that freedom is not valuable in and of itself but rather that it derives its value as the fundamental and necessary means to a higher value which cannot be reached without it: Love.

It is impossible for us to have a meaningful and loving relationship with God and with one another unless we are free to choose. It is this highest of values (after all, God is love) that the West has lost sight of.

For the West to rediscover Love as the ultimate value, the West needs to rediscover what is meant by love. In contrast to the various disordered ideas offered by today’s popular culture, the Church’s teaching is this: Love is seeking the good of the other. It is most clearly shown – as expressed in Gaudium et Spes and supported by John 15:13 – by making a radical gift of oneself to the other.

Choristers from Winchester Cathedral take part in a pancake race at Winchester Cathedral, with money raised going to local charities, Winchester, England, 5 March 2019. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)

Freedom is not licence, or unbridled self-expression, but an essential and inseparable condition for making a gift of oneself in love.

Such a teaching runs contrary to much of European politics today. The Marx-inspired message of many of the governing elites today is this: fund the State through your taxes, and then let us take care of your neighbour and of everything else for you. The individual need bear no responsibility for the good of his fellow man; he need simply obey the State.

The Church says otherwise: take responsibility, master yourself and then put yourself at the service of others, in so doing following your Lord and King.

Christ’s Passion offers us the exemplar of how to make a perfect gift of oneself to others, while the Church’s Lenten call to prayer, fasting and almsgiving gives us practical steps to imitate Him.

Prayer

God is love, and all true love comes from God. We can only make a true and perfect gift of ourselves by asking for the grace to do so. We need to remember that salvation will come through God alone.

Politicians come and go: both the bad and the good. Prayer offers the time to remember that the most powerful persons in the universe are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The viciousness of the attacks on Christians and the family in the West today has the fingerprints of the demonic. Church fathers and saints have taught for years that one of the greatest weapons against the dark side is the rosary.

As one Vatican exorcist put it: once Our Lady shows up at the scene of an exorcism, it really is game over for the demonic. And of course, Our blessed mother demonstrates the power and beauty of someone whose heart is committed to love, in other words, who is full of grace. We do well to remember this Lent that the fight is ultimately a spiritual one, and to pray accordingly.

Fasting

The advantage of fasting is it practices detachment from worldly goods. The luxuries and excesses of the West all too often turn our heart inwards to ourselves: what do I want?

Lent offers us the opportunity to detach our heart from ourselves and our idols, and turn it outwards to our neighbour.

Almsgiving

And finally, what better way to turn our hearts outwards to the other than by practising concrete acts of mercy this Lent? Christian Love is not simply a question of certain feelings and emotions but an act of the will; a resolve to act for the good of the other.

Do not wait for your heart to bleed for your neighbour, but choose deliberately to serve him.

Perhaps, by the grace of God, through practising prayer, fasting and almsgiving this Lent, and by meditating on the passion of our Lord, we can rediscover what it means to love and that to which our freedom should be ordered.

We can then, as JD Vance puts it, understand what it is we’re fighting for.

RELATED: Is JD Vance right that free speech for Christians is under attack?

Angus Milne teaches Religious Studies at a Catholic School in the South East.

Photo: People protest the removal of the word “transgender” from the Stonewall National Monument website during a rally outside of The Stonewall Inn in New York City, USA, 14 February 2025. The US National Park Service removed the word from its Stonewall National Monument website and now only refers to those who are lesbian, gay and bisexual. Located in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighbourhood, the Stonewall Inn became a national monument in 2016 under former President Barack Obama, and was the country’s first national park site dedicated to LGBTQ+ history. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.)