The answer to this question is provided by the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
1731 Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude. 1732 As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning. This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach. 1733 The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to “the slavery of sin.”28 1734 Freedom makes man responsible for his acts to the extent that they are voluntary.Progress in virtue, knowledge of the good, and ascesis enhance the mastery of the will over its acts.
After Our Lord Jesus Christ, Our Lady is the example par excellence of how to make good use of our God-given gift: our freedom. To be authentically free, one must know and be capable of choosing the good. Though choosing what one arbitrarily wants is a manifestation of freedom, more often than not, that use of freedom, or abuse of freedom, as in the case of choosing evil, leads to slavery instead of being interiorly free.
Christian freedom aims at the liberation from every form of slavery: the slavery of sin, of moral misery, of evil, and of the disordered use of earthly goods, and of disordered passions. All this is possible because Our Lord Jesus Christ freed us from sin and from the devil through his Passion and Death on the Cross, and thus obtaining for us the freedom of the children of God.
Let us ask Our Lady to imitate her example in choosing what is morally good, in choosing what God wants from us and what makes Him happy., and at the same time, what make us truly happy.
ORIGINAL PHOTO SOURCE AND CREDIT: Josemaria Leal, sculptor,Inmaculada (Mairena) in http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lPhgZmbz39E/UrDMu0PV6UI/AAAAAAAAAYs/D18AHF5c3Hc/s1600/inmaculadamairena2.jpg
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