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19. Why Obedience to God Is Not the Loss of Freedom
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“If therefore the Son make you free, you shall be free indeed.”
Many hesitate at the gate because they fear that Catholic will take possession of their lives. They see commandments, fasts, Confession, Sunday obligation, moral law, ecclesiastical , and the discipline of prayer. They hear that the intellect must submit to revealed truth and that the will must submit to God. The whole structure appears to threaten the freedom by which they have learned to define themselves.
This fear cannot be answered by pretending that Catholicism asks little. Our Lord asks the whole man. He claims the mind, body, household, work, worship, suffering, and final end of the soul. The question is not whether the Catholic Faith demands . It does. The question is whether to Truth enslaves a man or restores him to the liberty for which he was made.
Sin Makes Promises It Cannot Keep
Modern freedom is commonly imagined as the ability to choose without receiving a law from above. Yet a man who refuses God's rule does not become unruled. He comes under another master: appetite, fashion, fear, money, , resentment, public opinion, or his own unstable will.
Our Lord speaks without ambiguity:
“Amen, amen I say to you, that every one which committeth sin, is the servant of sin.”
Sin first presents itself as permission. Later it reveals itself as bondage. The indulgence that seemed voluntary becomes the habit that commands. The lie told for convenience becomes the life that must be defended by further lies. Anger becomes an interior tribunal before which every memory is retried. trains the eyes and imagination to disobey reason. makes correction unbearable. A man may insist that nobody rules him while being driven from within by masters he can no longer dismiss.
The commandments expose this slavery and mark the road out of it.
Law Does Not Oppose the Nature God Created
A railway remains free to carry its passengers by remaining upon its tracks; leaving them does not enlarge its liberty but destroys its motion. The eye sees freely when it acts according to the nature given it. The intellect becomes free by possessing truth, not by acquiring an equal right to falsehood. The will becomes free by choosing the true good, not by becoming indifferent to good and evil.
St. James therefore calls the divine rule a law of liberty:
“But he that hath looked in the law of perfect liberty, and hath remained in it, not made a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work; this man shall be blessed in his deed.”
— James 1:25, original Rheims New Testament (1582)1
God's law comes from the Author of human nature and orders man toward his supernatural end. Pope Leo XIII teaches that true liberty belongs to rational nature and reaches perfection when reason and will adhere to the true and the good; liberty severed from truth degenerates into license and servitude.2
The Catholic does not because commands are arbitrary demonstrations of power. He obeys because God is Truth, Goodness, and sovereign Lord, and because the creature finds order by returning to Him.
Obedience Is Not Servility
This teaching must never be used to protect abuse. to God governs every lower . Parents, priests, employers, rulers, and spiritual directors possess limited under divine and natural law. None may command sin, contradict revealed doctrine, authorize false worship, or make personal domination a religious duty.
says, “Do not judge the command; surrender because a superior spoke.” Catholic asks whether the superior truly possesses in this matter and whether the command falls within the law of God. Once those conditions are present, restrains self-will. When they are absent, refusing sin is to the higher of God.
The danger exists on both sides. A frightened soul may submit to an abusive man as though he were God. A soul may invoke abuse whenever legitimate crosses its preference. , doctrine, competent guidance, and honest self-examination are needed to distinguish them.
Obedience Forms the Soul for Heaven
St. Paul describes conversion not as escape from every service but as a change of master:
“And being made free from sin, you were made servants to .”
— Romans 6:18, original Rheims New Testament (1582)1
He later gives the fruit and end of that service:
“But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto sanctification, but the end, life everlasting.”
— Romans 6:22, original Rheims New Testament (1582)1
This is the liberty of the saints. They are not free because nothing binds them. They are free because binds them to God so firmly that lesser tyrannies lose their hold.
Our Lady reveals this freedom in her fiat. She does not disappear beneath God's will. She becomes most perfectly herself within it: Mother of God, faithful Virgin, and Queen formed entirely for Jesus Christ. True devotion to Mary trains the soul in the same liberty. The servant of Our Lady places self-will into her hands so that she may lead him to her Divine Son: “Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye.”
Begin with the Next Known Duty
The thought of total may frighten a beginner because he imagines every future sacrifice at once. usually asks for the next faithful act.
Keep the commandment already known. End the dishonest arrangement. Attend true Catholic worship. Make the overdue Confession. what was taken. Guard the eyes. Speak the truth. Resume morning and night prayer. Seek sound spiritual guidance. Do not wait until feels like self-expression.
Our Lord does not conceal His yoke, but He reveals the Heart of the One Who gives it:
“Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek, and of heart: and you shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet, and my burden light.”
— Matthew 11:29–30, original Rheims New Testament (1582)1
The yoke remains a yoke. It becomes sweet because it joins the soul to Jesus Christ and carries it toward the end for which it was created.
God does not ask you to surrender freedom so that you may become less human. He delivers your freedom from sin so that you may become holy.
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Continue to The Will under Grace and Conversion as Obedience.
Sources and Editorial Notes
Footnotes
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The New Testament of Jesus Christ, Translated Faithfully into English, out of the Authentical Latin (Rheims: John Fogny, 1582), original translation with spelling modernized; typographical ampersands expanded and annotation markers omitted. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
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Pope Leo XIII, encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum (20 June 1888), especially §§ 1–10; Latin original in Acta Sanctae Sedis 20 (1887–1888), pp. 593–613; historical English translation in The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1903), pp. 135–163. ↩