Emmaus Roundtable

A lot of people think that joining the Catholic Church would take away some of their freedoms. Freedom to use contraception, freedom to divorce and remarry — these and many other “freedoms” conflict with Catholic morality. But this is due to a one-sided understanding of freedom.

There are two sides of freedom: freedom from and freedom for. Freedom from means getting rid of restraints, like a slave being freed from his shackles. This is licence: being able to do something you otherwise couldn’t. In the natural realm, an example of freedom from is that a working man is free in America either to go to work or to stay at home and give in to laziness. Nothing restrains the working man, legally, from either choice. But staying at home would be irresponsible. Going to work even though you might want to stay at home is freeing because laziness is the restraint which must be overcome to do what you ought. Would you say you won’t go to work because it takes away your freedom to be lazy? No, that’s getting your priorities out of order.

You only remove restraints because they keep you from something important — that’s freedom for. Like independence in the case of the slave, and gainful employment in the case of the working man. You free yourself from one thing, restraints, for the sake of something better — “freedom for.”

Catholic morality is a restraint, but only from what is bad. Really, Catholic morality is freeing, because it frees you from what is bad for the sake of something better: holiness and righteousness. In this sense, immorality is the restraint, because it keeps you from moral uprightness, and morality frees you from what you want for the sake of what you ought.

So although we have some “freedoms” that conflict with our morality, these freedoms of immorality should not be put ahead of our freedom to do what is right. So do what the Saints do, and put away slavery to the world to become a slave of Christ. You’ll find it’s not only freeing in this life, but rewarding in the next.

God bless!
Dan Marcum

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Education, General Apologetics, Protestantism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.