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| Freedom |
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Follow Christ's footsteps! He is your goal, your path and your prize.
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Audience with Youth
from Madrid, Spain
Rome
6 April 2009
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| Freedom |
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The Church does not cease to remind us that true human freedom derives from our having been created in God’s image and likeness.
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Homily
Valencia, Spain
9 July 2006
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| Freedom |
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We want the true, great freedom, the freedom of heirs, the freedom of children of God. In this world, so full of fictitious forms of freedom that destroy the environment and the human being, let us learn true freedom by the power of the Holy Spirit; to build the school of freedom; to show others by our lives that we are free and how beautiful it is to be truly free with the true freedom of God's children.
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Homily
Vigil of Pentecost
St Peter's Square
3 June 2006
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| Freedom |
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History has demonstrated the absurdities to which man descends when he excludes God from the horizon of his choices and actions, and how hard it is to build a society inspired by the values of goodness, justice and fraternity, because the human being is free and his freedom remains fragile.
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Homily
The Esplanade
Brno, Czech Republic
27 September 2009
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| Freedom |
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True freedom presupposes the search for truth - for the true good - and hence finds its fulfilment precisely in knowing and doing what is right and just. Truth, in other words, is the guiding norm for freedom, and goodness is freedom's perfection.
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Vespers
The Cathedral
Prague, Czech Republic
26 September 2009
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| Freedom |
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The freedom of a human being is the freedom of a limited being, and therefore is itself limited. We can possess it only as a shared freedom, in the communion of freedom: only if we live in the right way, with one another and for one another, can freedom develop. We live in the right way if we live in accordance with the truth of our being, and that is, in accordance with God's will. For God's will is not a law for the human being imposed from the outside and that constrains him, but the intrinsic measure of his nature, a measure that is engraved within him and makes him the image of God, hence, a free creature.
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Solemnity, Immaculate Conception
of the Blessed Virgin Mary
8 December 2005
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| Freedom |
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No small number of people today ... are afraid that the faith may limit their lives, that they may be constrained in the web of the Church’s commandments and teachings, and that they will no longer be free to move in the ‘broad space’ of modern life and thought. However, only when our lives have reached the heart of God will they have found that ‘broad space’ for which we were created. A life without God does not become freer and broader. Human beings are destined for the infinite. The heart that has opened itself to God becomes generous and broad in its turn.
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Address to participants
'Deutscher Katholikentag'
22 May 2008
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| Freedom |
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We call this drop of poison "original sin". Precisely on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we have a lurking suspicion that a person who does not sin must really be basically boring, and that something is missing from his life: the dramatic dimension of being autonomous; that the freedom to say no, to descend into the shadows of sin and to want to do things on one's own is part of being truly human; that only then can we make the most of all the vastness and depth of our being men and women, of being truly ourselves; that we should put this freedom to the test, even in opposition to God, in order to become, in reality, fully ourselves.
In a word, we think that evil is basically good, we think that we need it, at least a little, in order to experience the fullness of being. We think that Mephistopheles - the tempter - is right when he says he is the power "that always wants evil and always does good" (J.W. von Goethe, Faust I, 3). We think that a little bargaining with evil, keeping for oneself a little freedom against God, is basically a good thing, perhaps even necessary.
If we look, however, at the world that surrounds us we can see that this is not so; in other words, that evil is always poisonous, does not uplift human beings but degrades and humiliates them. It does not make them any the greater, purer or wealthier, but harms and belittles them.
This is something we should indeed learn on the day of the Immaculate Conception: the person who abandons himself totally in God's hands does not become God's puppet, a boring "yes man"; he does not lose his freedom. Only the person who entrusts himself totally to God finds true freedom, the great, creative immensity of the freedom of good.
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Homily; Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
8 December 2005
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