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”. It “characterizes properly human acts” and is “the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach”. As long as it has not bound itself definitively to God there is “the possibility of choosing between good and evil”. Yet “the more one does what is good, the freer one becomes”, and the choice to do evil is “an abuse of freedom” that leads to “the slavery of sin”. The grace of Christ “is not in the slightest way a rival of our freedom when this freedom accords with the sense of the true and the good that God has put in the human heart”.
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