This weekend, we celebrate our countries independence. In 1776, the United States of America came to be. This nation was to be free and independent of a king (especially the king of England). The question for us today is this: Is our country truly free? And what does freedom mean? To answer these questions we have to look at the word freedom which comes from the word free. What is the definition that we are using for this word? I looked at what the definition of free is in a dictionary online and I found seven different definitions. What amazed me is that none of them truly encapsulated what the word meant. Many think that freedom is not being a slave. But if that were the case, most people in this country would be free in a narrow sense of the word, but in the wider sense, most of us are not free, as we all sin and most of us today could not stop certain sins if we tried. So in that sense we are not in a free nation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines freedom as: “Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude” (1731, emphasis mine). We are only truly free when we willingly follow God’s direction for our lives!!!
Fr. Thomas P. Galarneault