Freedom--Pt 1

Homily for the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Given at St. Patrick's Wareham
By Rev. Ronnie P. Floyd, STL

Near the end of World War II, two men both 47 years of age died outside the Polish village of Oświęcim. Both had been born to Catholic families, had learned their Catechism and served as Altar boys at the Holy Mass, both were meticulous souls, who labored to do their best at whatever they undertook and yet one died within the walls of the prison camp the Nazis called Aushwitz, a Martyr for Love, while the other died outside these walls, convicted of atrocities and sentenced to death for his part in the Holocaust.

What was the difference between these two men? Who were in so many ways alike? Freedom.

As we approach the celebration of our country’s birth on the fourth of July I always find myself reflecting on freedom. Freedom as it is currently understood, freedom as it was understood in 1776, but most importantly freedom as God made it to be.

You see, freedom is central to Biblical Faith! And because of this, while the Catholic Church is not, was never, and never will be a democracy—none-the-less, freedom, has always been central to our Catholic faith.

As St. Paul insists: “For freedom I have set you free.”

St. Augustine taught that freedom was the way that we were made in the image of God and that it was the means God gave man to be in the likeness of God. You see all other creatures, though they can make choices, which might in some sense seem free, are in fact slaves to their created, material nature. Slaves to a nature, which many pessimists about humanity have concluded we share: selfishness; the innate desire to survive, thrive, and propagate, what Darwin called “survival of the fittest.” Darwin was speaking of evolutionary biology, but sociologists quickly adapted this genetic theory to human behavior.

Of course we do in fact share this animalistic nature, after all we have bodies and are animals. But as Christians and Catholics WE MUST BELIEVE that we are more than our material existence—this is why Jesus says in the Gospel today: let the dead bury the dead What we call the spirit and the immortal soul, is by definition the ability to transcend and be free of the material, making material things a means to an end, stepping stones on the path to the eternal

As Aristotle notes we are not just animals, but Rational Animals Homosapien—creatures who know, and who know that we know It’s this self-knowledge and awareness, that is the basis of freedom human and divine. Man doesn’t just know stuff, he knows that he knows things and in this knowledge he is forced to confront the question: WHY?

An animal may choose to kill or not to kill, but we are able to ask ourselves, and to struggle with,

the question—Not just to kill or not to kill, but, if I kill, why do I do it, [and vice versa].

This “why question”, which adults often get tired of quickly when it is first discovered by a 2 year old, is truly the most human of questions, even if a 2 yr old lacks the capacity to answer or even understand the question

The “why question,” when we are intellectually honest, AND not distracted by the many tasks of life in the material world, ALWAYS and ultimately leads to two questions: Why do I exist rather than not? And assuming we come to the rational conclusion, that we exist for no reason other than that God created us. We must ask ourselves, or actually ask our God, Why was I created? It’s only in this context, in the context of rationality And in the light of truth, that we can be truly free.

Freedom is not just the ability to choose A or B, eandomly or based on some whim or statistical variable, as people often mean today. Rats in a maze can make these sorts of choices!

Freedom, in the biblical perspective--a perspective,we should note, that was shared by most all of the founders--is the ability to choose to be more than what we physically are, to be, as the Psalmist sings, little less than gods. Freedom is the ability to choose to be like God: to give and expect no return to love even when offended to forgive even when forgiveness is not sought and to see the goodness in all created things, even when they are corrupted by evil.

Freedom is meaningless without purpose, it necessarily degrades into anarchy and chaos or totalitarianism and dehumanization. As the famous atheist philosopher John Paul Satre, once honestly noted, without God, other people become our hell.

To be free we need not just the ability to choose, which in fact people always have whether in a democracy, the best of monarchies, or the worst dictatorship. To be free we need to have the ability to choose, and the knowledge to know what to choose, or at least where to look to find such knowledge. A free society therefore is not a society without any laws, but a society whose laws and culture promote the search for truth so that people might make truly free, informed, choices.

It is for freedom he has set us free because only free can one truly love. God created us free and sets us free once more by the example of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who shows us how to transcened our material needs and live for God.

Rudolph Hoess and Raymond Kolbe, those two men who were so alike, and died such similar deaths will ever be remembered in very different ways. Hoess, the commandant of Aushwitz, will forever be held in infamy for his part in the murder of millions Kolbe, whose religious name is St. Maximillian, will forever be held in honor for giving up his life to save another. The difference between these men, their use of freedom. As Hoess notes in a final letter to his family:

During my long isolated sojourn in prison, I have had ample time and peace to reflect on my whole life…I see today very clearly what for me is very hard and bitter, that the whole ideology, and the whole world in which I believed so firmly, was resting on completely false foundation and certainly had to fall into ruins some day… Likewise did my fall from faith in God depend wholly on my false foundations? This was very difficult to overcome. Nevertheless, I have recovered my faith in God.”

True freedom is the ability to reflect on what we are and why we are what we are and having discovered a firm foundation for our actions to act in accord with our nature, to be who we were created to be: sons and daughters created in God’s image and likeness

St. Maximillian’s faith was always engaging reason allowing him to found the firm foundations need to use his freedom well.

In contrast Hoess bought into the Nazi ideology with blind faith and these false foundations led to his ruin. And let’s not fool ourselves—Hoess and so many like him didn’t choose evil overtly, he fell into evils trap, this lie, this slavery, because he used his freedom irresponsibly.

It’s in freedom and love that we are made in God’s image and likeness, pray today that each of us might take seriously the responsibility that comes with our freedom and putting it to good use.

Freedom--Pt 2

Homily for the 14th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Given at St. Patrick's Church

By: Rev. Fr. Ronnie P. Floyd, STL

Most of us go through life making choices thinking that these choices are FREEDOM: Pepsi or Coke, Nike or Adidas, Comcast or Verizon...

We make thousands of decisions like this each day and so when we hear the word freedom, we are so sure we have it, that we equate it with these choices.

We equate freedom to the ability to do what we want when we want to, to seek pleasure and avoid pain as we see fit, and for the most part, that’s ok.

It’s ok to make a thousand inconsequential choices based on whim, because whether we drink Pepsi or Coke, doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. However, some things do matter, and it’s these things that require real freedom. These are the fundamentals of being human that our forefather’s fought for two centuries ago.

It is almost laughable to think of Patrick Henry saying: give me liberty or give me death, over some of the silly things we equate with freedom.

On this day in 1776 our founders risked everything to cast off a tyrant and gain the freedom every man needs to pursue happiness—a God given right the Declaration notes. And while many people would like us to think that our revolutionary war was nothing more than a tax revolt I would like to purpose that our founding fathers saw in America the potential for good, inherent in free men acting freely; something that may have been lost in much of Europe, and they refused to let America to become another Europe. I think it was this potential that the founders saw in the fledgling society of the 13 colonies, that made them think that maybe it was worth the risk to break from Britian and Europe.

Alexis DeTocqueville, the famous French political commentator who travelled the US just two decades after our Country was born searching for the secret of the Success of Democracy in America, noted this cultural difference from European society.

American’s helped one another, and used their freedom not as a vehicle for selfishness but as an opportunity for self-sacrifice and charity. DeTocqueville credited this difference with a deep religiosity,

Which he noted had created a culture of civil religion. Contrary to what many would have us believe today religion, or rather faith, is essential to true freedom, because its only by being able to answer the BIG QUESTION--that WHY QUESTION, which, if you have been paying attention to my homilies over the past year, I keep coming back to--that we can be truly free.

If we go through life making all our choices based on our animal instinct to pursue pleasure and avoid pain even if we never ask the WHY question we are effectively living as if there is no God, there is no purpose to life; our life is a mistake, a fluke of chance, and we need to make the best of it.

This is the theological and philosophical point of view that people try to sneak in the doors of our schools along with the scientific theories of Charles Darwin. They say—no religion in school, but then use Darwin and Evolution to make a religious point.

Science shows that creatures evolve, and that often the best designs win out in this evolutionary processes—Darwin called this, “survival of the fittest,” a perfectly reasonable scientific theory, which does not conflict with the Christian faith.

The problem is Darwin and his disciples said therefore things evolve by random chance, as if evolution was a proof that God isn’t needed and therefore doesn’t exist.

At a car factory many different car designs are purposed, the best are manufactured, and the best sellers are retained for years to come. This is essential the same as “survival of the fittest.” Is there any logical reason to believe that “random chance” is in control of car companies?

Survival of the fittest may explain change in species over time, and it may even explain the genesis of life, but if it does, it only does so because this is the way natures laws work! And the question remains: WHY?

Whether nature works the way it does by random chance, or because it is guided by the hand of God, is a theological question.

In FACT, it’s the WHY QUESTION, the most important human question, that cannot be answered by science because it’s answer rests on an immaterial reality, the existence of God.

Darwinism, not the science, but the philosophy, an atheistic pseudo-religion, undermines the possibility of freedom, because while it’s all well and good to make thousands of inconsequential choices, acting as if God didn’t exists in times of peace and prosperity, what about when “it” hits the fan?

How does one live freely when there is no way to avoid pain? And moreover, how does one choose to make the sacrifices necessary for the common good, and for the very existence of freedom without any purpose for your existence?

Freedom without God is slavery to the monotony of a pointless existence ever

overshadowed by a morbid death watch!

CS Lewis the famous author, who suffered greatly in life, used to say that suffering is God’s megaphone by which He forces us to confront the WHY Question and reminds us the truth that we are made for more than just a pleasant existence in this world and then death. Suffering, in truth, sets us free to truly love, to choose the good of another even when our reward is guaranteed to be pain or discomfort!

This is the freedom that our founding fathers sought and chose when they signed the Declaration of Independence. By declaring independence they effectively signed their own death warrant, they guaranteed personal financial losses far greater than any tax, they embraced years of hardship and pain, all for the chance to create a more perfect union, a place where people could be free to pursue happiness, which can only come from knowing, loving, and serving God.

Finally, turning for a moment to today’s Gospel: The Truth sets us free to respond to God’s call to serve him in the vineyard of the world. Its only when we realize that we were made of eternal life that we can transform our daily work into cooperation with God’s plan of creation, into a vocation. Only by realizing that we are made for heaven are we set free to choose the “work” of parenthood, or the work of celibate religious life, or even the work of Jesus Christ, the priesthood. Vocations are the ultimate pursuit of happiness and the ultimate freedom.

Today as we pray for our country, we pray that the Master of the Harvest might set many of our country men free to respond to their vocation and thus seek and find happiness.