Message from the Pastor

Dear Friends in Christ:

During these weeks I have been reflecting with you about freedom of worship and freedom of religion and the challenges before us. Please find an insert this week from Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, which was printed in the Wall Street Journal. The following piece about freedom is taken from a lesson given by Fr. Julian Carron:

“If the individual does not have substance, if his personality is emptied, then he remains at the mercy of the more uncontrolled forces of instinct and power: it is the loss of freedom.
Today we see around us an enormous desire for freedom, but at the same time we observe the inability to be truly free, that is, ourselves, in reality. It is as if, actually, we all bow under what is expected of us in each circumstance: in this way, you have one face at work, another with your friends, another at home… Where are we truly ourselves? Not to mention how many times we feel suffocated in the circumstances of daily life, without the least idea of how to get free, except that of waiting to change the circumstances themselves (this often seems the only road for liberation that we manage to conceive of). In the end, you find yourself blocked, dreaming of a freedom that will never arrive. In a historical moment in which freedom is spoken of so much, we see the paradox of its lack, its absence.
For this reason, the fact that today freedom is such a scarce good, so rare, is another documentation of the lack of a real experience of faith, according to the great motto of Saint Ambrose: “Ubi fides ibi libertas” – where there is faith, there is freedom.
This is why freedom is the most precious and powerful sign, and it is there where we can truly verify whether we are having an experience of faith able to resist in a world where everything – everything! – says the opposite. Do we realize what a challenge we have to face? In this reality, if we do not have a face and we do not have a substance, our faith cannot hold up in history; we will be swept away!
What is the condition of freedom? When does it make sense to talk about freedom, the irreducibility of the “I,” and substance? What condition is necessary? Only one: “In only one case is […] this single human being free from the entire world, free, so that the world together and even the total universe cannot force him into anything. In only one instance can this image of a free man be explained. This is when we assume that this point is not totally the fruit of the biology of the mother and father, not strictly derived from the biological tradition of mechanical antecedents, but rather when it possesses a direct relationship with the infinite, the origin of all of the flux of the world […]. Only this hypothesis allows me to proclaim that the world can do what it wants with me, but it cannot conquer, possess, grasp on to me, because I am greater that it is. I am free. […] So here is the paradox: freedom is dependence upon God. It is a paradox, but it is absolutely clear. The human being—the concrete human person, me, you—once we were not, now we are, and tomorrow will no longer be: thus we depend. And either we depend upon the flux of our material antecedents, and are consequently slaves of the powers that be, or we depend upon What lies at the origin of the movement of all things, beyond them, which is to say, God.”

Ubi fides ibi libertas,


Fr. Jerry Mahon
Pastor