To be a Catholic (it is widely supposed) is to be shackled with heavy irons: rules, obligations, prohibitions, guilt. The great thing is to get out from under all this and to declare one’s autonomy. “I don’t want anyone telling me what I may or may not do.” So might run the response if we were to ask someone why he had left the Catholic Church.

For many people, the issue is understood to be a matter of freedom. I must be free to shape my own destiny, and certainly free to make my own choices as I go along through life. After all, what is it to be human? Is it not to stand tall, take on the yoke of responsibility for one’s own choices, and to be ready to bear the consequences? It is meddlesome, really, this way the Catholic Church has of laying down so many laws.

What might be the answer ventured by the Catholic Church to such a charge in this connection?

The whole question turns on the notion of freedom. Such would be the response put forward by the Catholic Church. And in so doing, ironically, she would not be appealing to anything we all do not already know and count upon. And she would cite a paradox here.

As we all know, any freedom is double-edged: the one edge is the freedom from something, and the other is the freedom, thus gained, to do something. A man in jail wants to be free from his bars and free to go home. The exile wants to be free from his solitude and estrangement and free also to return to his own native land. The paraplegic would give almost anything to be granted freedom from his wheelchair and braces in order to have the freedom, which everyone else takes so blithely for granted, to walk and leap and praise God, like the man in the Gospel.

From the Christian point of view, this matter of freedom lies very close to the center of the whole drama of our redemption. Christus Victor! we cry. The Savior by his life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension has freed us all from the bondage of sin and death, which we brought on ourselves in Eden, and has set us free to enter into that race which, in St. Paul’s metaphor, constitutes our progress toward the goal, when we will have won the capacity to bear the titanic ecstasy of the City of God, an ecstasy that would, in our present state, terrify us.

Our transition from bondage to freedom is marked initially at our baptism. But the freedom into which we now step is not carte blanche for a higgledy-piggledy manner of life, in which we celebrate our “freedom” by embarking like Nero or Caligula on the pursuit of every whim and appetite. All of us would no doubt agree that what we see in those emperors, not to mention hosts of others who have similarly pursued surfeit, is no human life at all. The man is making himself swinish, we might feel (not without reason), although charity ought to draw us beyond such a remark to the more authentic frame of mind that, in genuine solicitude for the man’s well-being, wishes him well (“well”, that is, in the sense of his abandoning destruction and seeking the true freedom with which our humanity is crowned).

Destruction. True freedom. Crowned. Where are we with this collection of terms?

We are at the point, mentioned a few paragraphs back, at which the Catholic Church would appeal to a paradox with which we are all long since familiar. It is the paradox in which obedience to rules, renunciation of various pleasures, and discipline turn out to be the very tactics by which freedom is gained. And further, it is the paradox in which this hard-won freedom turns out to be synonymous with joy and magnificence and perfection and beauty.

We may see these paradoxes at work at a thousand points. The ballet, for example: How has that ballerina achieved this supple and glorious mastery? Oh, would that my body looked like that and that I had the freedom to execute those breathtaking movements. How do they do it?

By obedience and renunciation and discipline. There is no other way. Thousands of hours, year after year, giving up this pleasure and that food, exercising in utter obscurity, placing oneself wholly under the rigorous direction of the master.

And the fruit of all that? Mastery. Control. Beauty. Perfection. And not only for the dancers themselves. The rest of us are the beneficiaries. Their prowess brings us joy. It hails us with truth in one of its modes, namely, the truth that attaches to man as body. In some sense, the form exhibited by Adam, new-made from clay, is a true form. We feel that the bodies of dancers are reminiscent of that form. The rest of us, full of potato chips and sour cream dips and nachos grande, must make shift to hobble about, wheezing and grunting, hauling our tremulous torsos and abdomens in and out of cars and up and down the stairs. Ah, would that I could move like that dancer, we mourn.

The same paradox is visible, of course, in gymnastics. Those godlike young men and these pixies from Hungary and China: How have they won through to this state of affairs in which discipline and mastery and control seem synonymous with beauty and freedom and perfection? It is a state of affairs altogether beyond the reach of all who do not feel it worth their while to abandon everything for the pursuit of this crown.

Or music. The tenor. The pianist. The oboist. They seem positively to exult in the challenge put to them by the score and to mount up with wings like eagles, transforming the impossible task into soaring and leaping joy. How did they win their way through to these precincts of freedom, while the rest of us croak and fumble with the keys in a melancholy way?

The paradox, of course, could be chased all through the fabric of human life. The freedom to do something is not easily won. The greater the perfection sought, the greater must be the remorselessness of our own self-abandon to the discipline that constitutes the steps up to the summit where freedom reigns in great bliss.

To be Catholic is to see the force of all this and to see all of it as testifying to that which is true of our humanity itself. Concupiscence has undone us. We can scarcely crawl, laden as we are with all sorts of venality and cravenness and pusillanimity and meagerness of spirit and sloth. But there, in the precincts where our humanity dances in all the glory with which it was invested when it was created and crowned with the imago Dei: Oh, that we were there! as the old carol puts it.

But how shall we get there? How be set free? How win through to the sheer muscularity and agility of spirit required by the choreography of that dance—or rather, that Dance. For it is, of course, the Dance, namely, Charity.

Charity? How did we get here?

To be Catholic is to see the goal toward which we struggle as that realm (it is called the Kingdom of Heaven) where that which was Law down here during our schooling on earth (“thou shalt not . . . thou shalt not”) has been revealed for the blissful thing it is, namely, “Love does not . . . Love does not.” Love does not kill, steal, lie, commit adultery. Love does unto its brother what it would wish for itself. Love lays down its life for its neighbor.

Oh. But I have many reservations about all of that. I have a difficult time, for example, in allowing this bodkin-tongued colleague of mine to get away with his remarks: I am rather deft at the withering reply. Or again, they didn’t take me into consideration in their discussion: I enjoy registering my hurt by a slight frostiness. And again, that person who has roused my jealousy has run into bad luck: Am I not to enjoy, even in the teensiest way, a whiff of pleasure? And yet once more, I don’t mind it being known that I know such-and-such a celebrity on fairly informal terms. This gives me a faint lead over the rest of you.

Alack. How am I, tumid with vanity and sloth, ever to gain that realm where sheer, joyous generosity of spirit seems to be the very choreography to which they all dance with never the smallest gasp or stumble? The name of the Dance is Charity: would that I had attended to my lessons with more assiduity over the years.

That state of affairs is, a Catholic would urge, exactly analogous to the agility and singleness of purpose and mastery we glimpse in a great dancer, gymnast, or artist. Somehow, in such precincts, discipline and practice and obedience to the rules have borne fruit, not in bondage and discouragement and meanness, but rather in suppleness and beauty and freedom. Whereas it is in the artists and athletes and others in whom we now may glimpse the paradox, it is in the saints that we may see the analogous thing in the region of final destiny. It is not the mastery of the oboe that is at work in our obedience down here (although heaven grant that there may indeed be great heavenly oboes): it is the mastery of our souls and the transformation of them into the image of Christ.

The image of Christ. That is a very taxing assignment. Yes; but it is our assignment nevertheless. We will not have stepped up to the freedom for which we were made until we have reached “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”, as St. Paul puts it. Or we might say that the freedom in store for us may be glimpsed in the Beatitudes: When we have won the “blessed” crown that is given to those who have learned those difficult lessons, we will be free. Or in still another picture, when we can pass the litmus test of 1 Corinthians 13, that daunting hymn to Charity, we will be free.

It is in terms such as these that a Catholic understands the matter of freedom. We might say that freedom is a mere byproduct of Charity’s having wholly possessed one’s being. No raw spots of irritability; no prickles of vanity; no pockets of self-pity. All is to be greatness of spirit, merriment, purity, serenity.

But of course it takes endless lessons in self-mastery if one hopes to achieve any such guerdon. The schooling in these lessons constitutes the whole ascetical life, on the Catholic view. Asceticism is not masochism. Rather, it is exactly analogous to the privations, disciplines, and exercises that a dancer, a gymnast, a violinist, or a tenor subjects himself to in order to master the thing he loves. Certainly one may have chocolate ice cream: What could be more innocent? But one may not have chocolate ice cream (or not much of it anyway) if one wants to dance. A flat stomach is called for. And certainly one may while away one’s afternoons gossiping with one’s friends: What could be more innocent? But one may not thus while away one’s afternoons (or not many of them anyway) if one wants to play the violin like Itzhak Perlman. And so it goes.

Catholics fast, not because meat or eclairs are sinful or because the Church wishes to pinch off such small pleasures; rather, Catholics believe, as the ancient Church has always believed, that such small denials constitute excellent schooling. Fasting assists me to recall that the belly is not all. Actually, on its own level it reminds me of an immense principle, namely, that our appetites must be governed by Reason—by our power, that is, of judging and sorting out values and of making immediate choices in the light of the long view (which has freedom at its end). We all turn away in sadness from the spectacle of some old debauche who has been governed by appetite alone. Having gorged himself on food, drink, or sexual license, say, he must dribble away his last days weepy and full of regret, or worse, still leering and hiccoughing. On the other hand, we may come upon some old soul with merry eyes who is full of curiosity about how we are and what we have been doing and whose whole being radiates tranquillity and joy. How did she arrive there? The freedom that presides over her innermost being is a prize most sedulously to be desired. What has she denied herself? Probably more than chocolates. Who knows of the thousand times when she, stung by venomous remarks from some old person in her care, simply smiled and let the remark pass, with no doubt an inner aspiration, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Or who can tell what nights of vigil she has kept, offering up to the crucified Savior her own unfulfilled yearnings? Who will tally up her total of hours at the wheel, bogged down on the freeway, when what ascended from her was not a torrent of imprecations and fumings about how hopeless this all was but, rather, “ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis” Especially nunc.

There is no question about it. Strait is the gate. The aperture is as small as a needle’s eye. We must through much tribulation enter into joy.

Tribulation? Surely this is to confuse things. Voluntary abstaining from some pleasure or other for the good of one’s soul is one thing; but tribulation—say, being caught in bombed Warsaw, or in famine-ravaged Somalia, or in the path of Ghengis Khan’s Mongols—that is something quite distinct.

Yes. But the thread that might connect my forgoing a piece of chocolate and our woman in the traffic jam and the Somali would be an attitude, surely? An attitude that is prepared to see all choices, and also all circumstances, even those that are beyond one’s own choosing, as occasions put to one by the Divine Love, which may be transformed for one’s own benefit. In such precincts, evil itself may be touched by the divine alchemy and turned to gold. You meant it (my kidnapping) for evil, says Joseph to his brothers, but God had good for all of us in mind. Or again, from his very ashheap, Job, victim of every conceivable undeserved ill, testifies to his stubborn conviction that God is good and not sadistic. Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. Polycarp goes with immense serenity to the stake. Thomas More goes to the Tower with vast dignity and solicitude for his wife.

Such attitudes are not won with the toss of a ball, like a gew-gaw at the traveling circus. (There are some reaches of Christendom where, to hear the teaching, one might conclude that indeed we may, just for the asking, achieve greatness of soul—“the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”, that is. Just ask! it is urged. Or, “Pray through! The Lord will give you the victory!”)

The Roman Catholic Church, which has been shepherding us mortals for two millennia now, does not have quite so breathless a notion of things. Nothing is won cheaply. Oh, to be sure, Jesus Christ won for us all what we could do nothing at all to win, namely, forgiveness and eternal life. But then begins our schooling in Charity.

For that is what it is, really. In the foregoing pages, the two words freedom and charity have been used almost interchangeably. On one level this is to use words carelessly. After all, the two words are not synonymous. On the other hand, as it turns out, the “law” in the City of God is indeed Charity, and that turns out to be a state of affairs so gloriously free that our wildest dreams of freedom here on earth are niggardly by comparison.

For that “law” (or “choreography”, as we have called it, in a metaphor) may be said to indicate the clarity, precision, and enduring perfection of the City of God. That is, what we hear now as “Thou shalt not lie” hints at that City where sheer truth reigns and suffuses all. The lie is hell and was cast out of this City with Lucifer and his cohorts. The lie is sadness and wrath and strife, for it flings itself, forever impotently, against the everlasting solidity of the truth. It will not have the truth. It loathes the truth. And insofar as my being depends on the lie, even in the smallest degree, I am to that extent unfit and unready for the City of God. Its clarity, precision, and enduring perfection would crush me, enfeebled and deliquescent as I have made myself by living the lie or by depending on the lie.

What lie? The great lie, at bottom, that says with Lucifer, Non serviam. I will not serve. I will follow my own choreography. I will not obey the Choreographer. I will not submit to his law. I have my own morality.

To be Catholic is to hear in such words the voice of hell: very plausible, very appealing, very bracing; but hell nonetheless.

One form in which such words often come to us all nowadays in the public realm touches on the matter of sexual behavior. This topic is, oddly, almost always suggestive of where a given civilization is at the moment. The public, colorful, and strident celebration of nakedness and of all the activities that suddenly boil up when people all take off their clothes may be trusted as an index of the state of the fabric of that civilization. There seem to be no exceptions in history. To be sure, the civilization does not always collapse outright: Victorian England, stuffy as it was, pulled itself together after the saturnalia of the Regency. We may tut-tut when Victoria’s name comes up, but she at least wished to keep intact in her England the notion of the hiddenness that ought to guard the precincts where the man and the woman enact that “knowing” which seems to bring them both to the very center of the mystery by which, in their masculinity and femininity, they constitute that “one” which itself bears the image of God as no other creature in the universe does.

We have come quickly into deep waters here. The center of the mystery? Well, yes, a Catholic would urge (or, at least, a Catholic who has pondered the teaching of his Church on the matter). For it is in our sexuality that we may see that “language of the body”, and that “spousal meaning of the body”, taught by John Paul II. It is not difficult matter. The smallest children explore their bodies and find differences. And (time reveals) the one calls to the other. An invitation is implicit and insistent. The two forms do not exist side by side, inert and self-sufficient. There is an awakening and, soon enough, an almost irresistible bidding. I become more “alive”, as it were, by following this awakening to its fruition in the other. The form of the body itself speaks its language to me: this is clearly made for that. He is made for her. She is made for him.

But because the union of the two forms is itself a case in point of the mystery of Man and Woman as Image of God, and because this union brings them both into that state of affairs where (literally, physically) the giving of oneself to the other who is not myself turns out to be joy—because such high and eternal stakes are at work here, stakes that first appeared at the creation, and that reach all the way to the Eschaton—because of all this, it is very meet and right, says the Church, that the ceremony be shrouded. There must be a veil protecting the holy place.

When that veil is ripped open, and the ogling public troop in, snickering and leering, then tragedy has come upon us.

But of course the Roman Catholic Church is not unique in her insistence on such a veil. All tribes, all cultures, and all civilizations have always known that the sexual phenomenon must be hidden. Tribes that go entirely naked about their daily tasks retire to some sequestered purlieu for the sexual act. Polygamous cultures (and even the sultan with his seraglio) acknowledge that these are my wives and not yours. There is no random traffic in this realm of the sexual.

But how did we get this far afield from our topic of freedom? We are not “afield” at all, of course. We are speaking of the rules, as it were, as paradoxically assisting us toward our freedom, the way the choreography does the dancer.

Thou shalt not commit adultery. Negative. Life-denying. Grim. So would run the verdict on such a prohibition in our own time. But a Catholic sees in this prohibition the same sort of warning as is constituted by “Danger: high tension”, or “Keep back from the edge.” No one complains that those warnings are negative. The negation is the smallest part of what they mean. They open out onto the awareness that your life is infinitely important to you and that you don’t wish to be electrocuted just now. The negation celebrates that, and it joins you in your assessment of your own worth.

The negation in the rule against adultery is of this sort. Turn it around: to commit adultery is to destroy yourself, just as to jump onto the third rail is to do so.

Ha-ha! laugh many of our own time, winking and prodding each other with jocose knowledgeability. Hasn’t Freud told us all about this sort of thing? And, having advanced many decades beyond old Sigmund, don’t we now speak of “sexual preference” and of “life-styles”, thereby drawing the sting from all of those otiose Victorian negations?

It may be worth remembering that Queen Victoria did not make up the prohibitions. Nor did the Puritans. Nor did the Roman Catholic Church. Nor did Christianity. Go to the bottom of the world, and you will find this profound awareness of the sacred character of the sexual phenomenon. What our epoch leaps insouciantly into is shrouded and hedged and hemmed in with the highest and thorniest hedges possible, in all tribes.

The man comes to the woman. They become one. Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and the two of them shall be one flesh. It is called marriage. It is called the holy sacrament of matrimony. It is not merchandise for the flea market or the frat house or the dormitory bedroom or the hugger-mugger assignation in the motel.

Why not?

Because (says the Church—says the rule—says, actually, Nature herself) insofar as you enter this shrine, and that one, and the other one (or the other dozens), you to that extent become a plunderer, for one thing, taking away the treasure of another personhood. And you incur the guilt of sacrilege: you have violated the shrine of the personhood (for that is what the body is). And you blind yourself to the glory of personhood, seeing in it solely soft and delectable surfaces and folds of flesh. And, lastly, you stultify your own personhood, snuffling and rooting into every shrine like a pig after truffles—like Odysseus’ men under Circe’s spell—and therefore wholly unfitted for the bliss of which this physical pleasure is the sketchiest and most diluted foretaste. That bliss will derive from the extent to which you have perceived in the body of the other the form of the personhood and have thereby honored that personhood. You will be as unfitted for that bliss as is a pig for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

So. Freedom and the rules. The negations are the very guardians of our true and ultimate freedom, and they act as our tutors now. Which of us knows all that is at stake, for example, in the mystery of the man’s body and the woman’s? Very few; very few. Well, then, we have the simple rule, embarrassing and almost insulting in its elementary flatness. Thou shalt not. The obedience brought to such a rule by the man or woman who looks, like Abraham, for a city whose builder and maker is God is like the obedience brought to the rule by a dancer or a musician. Here is how to do that. Do not stray from the rule.

It is thus with the whole moral law, says your Catholic. The rules point to joy, really—the joy that presides in that realm (it is the City of God) where we see finally what was guessed at in all of the aspects of our mortality (the ballet, gymnastics, art, and any sort of mastery), where obedience, discipline, renunciation, and effort yield the fruit of prowess, mastery, beauty, perfection, and freedom.

Such a picture of things calls into question the most shrilly insisted-upon maxims of our own epoch. Not so! is shouted from all sides. There is no such rule. Customs and taboos change from tribe to tribe and from century to century. And our own time has brought human freedom to the point where each man may pick the style that suits him most comfortably. A truly free society is the one that allows all such styles their full exercise.

Not altogether, replies our Catholic. We may consult once again the sexual realm in this connection. (It is not without interest that sexual taboos seem to be virtually the only taboos called into question by societies demanding “freedom”: we seldom hear the freedom to lie, murder, steal, or cheat being touted.) From the Catholic point of view—and, it may be remarked, from the traditional Protestant and Jewish points of view—there is one context and one only for sexual activity, namely, that of heterosexual fidelity. The reason for this has been touched on above: in this act we find Man under his two aspects, male and female, enacting that knowledge of the other which opens him wholly to this other and which instructs him in the great mystery of self-donation. Since personhood is at stake here, the rite must be guarded. Marriage is the name of the bond that guards and hallows the man and the woman who have pledged themselves to this obedience. (To speak thus is to call down howls of incredulity and derision from the realm of “public discourse” in our own time. No one still talks that way! we hear. Well, again, yes, some do. The Roman Catholic Church does.)

But what, then, of all the alternative “styles” that appear to have stepped onto the public stage in the sexual realm now?

To be Catholic is to urge that each alternative must be tested by the tuning fork, so to speak, of heterosexual fidelity. Adultery, for example: the breakdown here is of the exclusive vow by which I bound myself to my spouse, knowing that it takes the whole of a man’s life, in faithful attendance on the shrine of the spouse’s personhood, to learn what it is all about. To steal away to a neighboring shrine is to pollute both with infidelity, one of the tawdriest of sins.

Well, fornication, then. Just two independent people, consenting ones at that. College students, shall we say.

Again, what is as costly as the crown jewels, namely, the personhood of the other, is treated like merchandise in the side show. A game. A divertissement. You can’t do that, says the Catholic—or, you cannot do that and not stultify both you and your partner.

Sexual congress between two members of the same sex, then? The breakdown here is that there is the attempt at union with the other who is a mirror image of myself and not authentically “other”. Catholicism celebrates the creation, when male and female created he them. The dance is not choreographed for two of the one kind. What you have there is futility and sterility. No fruit can issue from this congress. In reply to the shouts of protest arising at this point, a Catholic can only appeal to the sacramentalism of Catholic vision, which sees the physical as the icon of the spiritual. The body is not a random casing for my spirit, which is genderless. I am a man, or a woman, in some fundamental sense. It is the Manichaeans who will have it that the physical is merely an unfortunate ballast to our otherwise free-floating spirits. Sacramentalism takes seriously the iconography of the body. Hence the sexual act between two members of the same sex is futile, sterile, and disorderly.

There have not been put forward, as of this writing, the claims of bestiality as also a worthy alternative style, but if such a claim were advanced, a Catholic would see the matter as grotesque, of course, but, more than that, as the attempt at ghastly union with an other that is too utterly other than I. There is no possible union between a man and a sheep, say. The barrier is so high that ordinary human sensibility has always justly recoiled even from speaking of the attempt to surmount it.

What of autoeroticism? Here, of course, we all justly hesitate to speak too pompously. Who will inaugurate the vendetta here? But even here, the vision of our personhood as both cloaked and revealed in our body would discover a certain sadness. For has not that joy which is rightly perceived to gild the self-donation of myself to the other, my spouse—has not that joy been stolen off into a squalid corner here and detached from its true source? Again, few will wish to wax inquisitorial. But it is worth keeping alive the integrity of the sacramental and creational vision of personhood, of the language of the body, and of the spousal meaning of that body, even in such domestic and ubiquitous matters as this.

But this paradox of our freedom, and of the conditions that lead to it and guard it, is not exhausted by the rules, in the sense of the prohibitions and demands of the moral law. We find it also at work in the Church’s adjurations to prayer, fasting, and alms.

None of these three activities would appear, on the surface, to tend toward freedom. Each one is a burden, in its own way. And each one asks something of me. Each one interrupts what otherwise might be a pleasantly self-serving modus vivendi that I had worked out for myself.

Prayer. We have already spoken of Catholics at prayer in another chapter. But we may at least recall in this context that prayer by its very nature draws me out of my self-absorption. In prayer I address the Most High, and I find myself addressed by him. In prayer I am introduced to the most profound mystery of being, namely that my “I” is addressed by, and is created to address, the “thou” who is God himself. Ego-centrism, which looks appealingly like freedom to most of us most of the time, is really another name for hell, since the center is not, in fact, ego (I).

The psalms furnish us with the most eloquent testimony to this state of the soul that has found its true freedom by discovering truth—the truth, principally, that it is God for whom I am made, and not for myself. “How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts.” “One thing have I desired of the Lord. . . that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.” It is this, say the psalms, it is this, say the prophets, it is this, say the Law and the gospel and the Church and all the martyrs and saints, that our restless soul seeks. Any “freedom” sought elsewhere is worse than an illusion: it is a travesty and, finally, a ghastly cheat.

Prayer opens into this region where the human soul encounters the Most High for whom it was made. If my days do not have written over them as a superscript: Our Father . . . hallowed be thy name . . . thy will be done, then those days will turn out at last to have been Macbeth’s dismal tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

The Church beckons us toward our true freedom by enjoining the discipline of prayer on us. And it beckons to us in its injunction to fast and abstinence.

Once again, on the surface of things it would appear that fasting and abstinence are just the sort of negations that gaunt religion is pleased to lay upon us mortals. Religion, and most especially the Roman Catholic Church, begrudges us all sorts of small diversions and indulgences that might otherwise spice up our lives, which are already difficult enough, heaven knows: so runs the plaint from our petulant souls in this connection. But it is a matter of our freedom—our true and whole freedom—that is at stake, the Church would remind us. Who is the free man? Or, to phrase it differently but to mean the same thing, what is the saint? Is he not the one who, like the ballet dancer and the gymnast and the violinist, has done his lessons, with all the discipline and self-denial that those lessons entail, so that he will attain to such and such an achievement, in this case the glorious freedom of the sons of God, as St. Paul phrases it. Since fasting and abstinence touch us at the very sensitive point of appetite, the exercise assists us toward that agility and prowess and grace which will enable us to execute magnificently and freely the steps demanded by the choreography of Love.

If we ask what, exactly, this might mean detached from this highly figurative language of the Dance, the Church would tell us that in order for us mortals to exhibit the great dignity with which we are crowned as Man, we must have brought our faculties into a just ordering, with Reason (or Will) presiding over affections and appetites. Affections and appetites open to us some of the richest delights of our existence: but in themselves they are somewhat random. Mere appetite (for food; for sexual pleasure; for any pleasure) cannot tell me whether the pleasure to which it inclines me at the moment is fitting. This may be the wrong time; or I may have had enough; or my station in life (married, say) excludes my satisfying this inclination to enjoy the body of some terribly appealing person who is not my spouse. The man who has been governed by appetite becomes swinish: even the pagan Greeks knew this. It did not take the Roman Catholic Church to tell us this. But in her holding out to us the discipline of fasting and abstinence, she is wise. We are reminded in these disciplines of what we are (man, not beast) and of our destiny (fitness for that City where Charity presides), and also, as it happens, of our need to reflect soberly on our myriad and habitual self-indulgences. This part of the matter is called penitence; and fasting and abstinence turn out to be excellent assistants in my efforts at penitence.

And alms. This intrudes on my right to my own money (most of the time it is money that is at stake, but time might also constitute a species of alms).

Yes. It does thus intrude. That is the whole point. For inasmuch as I am pleased to suppose that I have such and such a right, I am still, alas, an unhappy alien to the City of God. The word rights does not exist there. All is debt—exulted in with an exultation that can only be called worship. “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain and hath redeemed us to God by his blood”, sings that City. “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi”, we all sing at Mass down here. We are debtors. God is our Savior. He has done all. Everything we have is owed to him. There is no one here who is not altogether a debtor—even the highest and best of us: My soul doth magnify the Lord . . . for he hath done great things for me . . . he hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath regarded. He hath done great things. He hath shown strength. He hath put down. He hath exalted. He hath filled.

Debt. Utter debt. But not, as it turns out in these precincts of joy, debt experienced as leaden and dolorous. No. Rather, this debt is transformed, by the divine alchemy, into the very substance of exultation. Read the psalms. Read the hymns of the redeemed in St. John’s Apocalypse. Blessing, honor, glory, and power, be unto him . . . for he hath redeemed us.

It is a song to stick in the throat of the man who has spent his life squinting and tallying and calculating, making sure that his rights are never, ever called into question. What’s mine’s mine. It is hell’s formula.

But, What’s mine’s thine: there is heaven’s formula. All that I have is owed to thee, O my God; to thee, Paschal Lamb; to thee, Holy Ghost, Comforter. And hence, all this that is “mine” because of the divine largesse is thine, my brother, my sister. Especially my indigent brother and sister. Especially the beggar, the Lazarus at my gate (and is not my gate the whole world, now in this epoch of the global village?).

Alms. A discipline and a small renunciation enjoined upon me, not because Catholicism is niggardly, but rather because this ancient Church’s whole ministry to me is to bring me to, and fit me for, joy. Freedom.

To be Catholic is to see the whole question of our freedom in terms such as these.