September 16, 2006 – Pope John Paul II, Freedom and Constitutional Law

This article examines Supreme Court jurisprudence as it pertains to substantive due process. The Supreme Court has absorbed certain elements of the larger U.S. culture, especially with regard to the accepted understanding of liberty. It argues that Pope John Paul the Great offered a more compelling understanding of freedom essential to lasting peace and order, that is, that freedom or liberty is intrinsically connected to truth.

Thus, authentic freedom of conscience is not the liberty to determine what is moral, but the freedom to obey an objective moral law inscribed in the human heart. Without this objective moral law, the will to power is all that remains, and tyranny inevitably results from competing human interests unchecked by any objective standard of right and wrong.