The Christian life is sustained by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These are the permanent dispositions that change the docile man to follow the impulses of the same Spirit. The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of God

“All those that are driven by the Spirit of God are sons of God… Sons and, therefore, heirs, heirs of God and co-heir of Christ” (Rm 8:14-17)

The fruits of the Holy Spirit are perfections that the Holy Spirit forms in us as  the first fruits of eternal glory. The Church designates twelve: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness,modesty, continence and chastity (Gal. 5:22-23).

Human Freedom

God created man endowed with reason and gave him the dignity of a person gracedwith the initiative and mastery of his actions. “God made ​​man in the hands of his own counsel” (Sir 15:14), that he might find himself and his creator, adhering to Him freely, arriving to the fullness  and happinessof perfection.

Then not having fixed definitively on his ultimate good, which is God, the freedom entails the possibility of choosing between the good and the bad, therefore, of growing in perfection or languishing in sin. It is charactized in the acts properly human. Becoming the font of praise or reprehension, of merits or demerits.

The freedom is not in the man, it is a force of growth and maturity in truth and kindness. The freedom reaches the perfection when it is ordained to God our joy.

The more the person practices the good, the more the person becomes free. He does not have freedom who is not being in service of good and of justice. The choice of disobedience and of evil is an abuse of liberty and drives one to the slavery of sin.

Freedom becomes the man responsible for his own acts, in the measure in which they are willed. The progress in virtue, the knowledge of good and asceticism increase the dominance of the will over his actions.

The exercise of freedom is an inseparable demand of the dignity of the human person, over all in moral and religious matter. This right should be recognized civilly and protected in the limits of the common and of the public order.

Fr. Wagner Baia

translated from Portuguese