Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today as a nation, we celebrate Independence Day when we obtain freedom and liberty from French sovereignty, from English sovereignty, and English rule.
A famous icon of our nation's liberty is the 150-foot copper statue hovering there over New York Harbor.
Not surprisingly, a gift from the French, who historically hate the English, right?
The Statue of Liberty is meant to be a symbol of the light and hope that we are to offer to the world and to those who, over the past couple hundred years or so, have come to this land seeking a better life, seeking a better future.
Freedom and liberty are often concepts that are used synonymously, used together.
In reality, internally, we're all created free.
We have the ability to choose, we have the ability to love, the ability to hate.
It's part of the gift of the free will that God has given us.
Every gift by God is given to us in the hopes that we'll use that gift wisely.
In the West and in our country, we've come to understand freedom to mean essentially the ability to do whatever you want to do, to be whatever you want to be, to define life however you want to define life, as the Supreme Court of this country ominously stated not too many years ago.
And parenthetically, when the Supreme Law in your country makes claims like that, the collapse of the country is all but inevitable, at least certainly on a natural level.
Radical autonomy is what that mentality is called.
Radical autonomy says I'm not bound by any laws or rules except man-made laws and socially constructed rules, and so the ultimate goal is to have power so that I can not only be free to live as I want to live, but even more importantly, so I can enforce my vision of life and my vision of right and wrong on others.
Radical autonomy, that's the perspective.
That's what every law does, right?
Every law imposes a moral standard on others.
The only question is, is a law or is a norm rooted in truth?
Is it rooted in God's law?
Is it rooted in the reality of man's dignity and his true good?
Or is a law or a norm rooted in a lie instead?
Atheistic communism has imposed lies on those who've lived and died under its dark shadow over the past hundred years or so.
It's imposed a meaningless and purposeless, and hopeless vision of life on millions of people.
Actually, the greatest gift, thinking about it, that an atheistic worldview gives someone, the greatest gift is of the spirit of radical autonomy.
What is it?
It's that it makes people miserable.
It's actually a gift.
They're free in a certain sense, yes, but they're as free as an astronaut who's floating off into space away from his space shuttle, floating out into outer space with nothing to hold on to and nothing to hold him back, really.
They understand freedom and liberty to mean that there's no natural law, there's no really such thing as human nature, there's no supreme being, so no real savior.
No one and nothing to give their life meaning, purpose, and hope.
They're spiritual orphans.
They know it, and they feel it as well, too.
Being miserable in that way is a gift from God because it's a sign that something's not right.
It's God's way of saying, you know, you're not going to be happy without me, no matter how hard you try.
Who's the person who's truly free?
It's the one who's found their savior, who's found the love of their life, who's found purpose in life, who's found the Lord of love, who's found the Lord of life.
The one who's created you, the one who created you with such love that he made you a reflection of himself, and the one who's been searching for you long before you ever thought to search for him.
Speaking of France and the Statue of Liberty, the world-famous French actress, Ève Lavallière, was about to begin her renowned career on the stage at the time the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor toward the end of the 19th century.
Ève, whose real name was Eugénie Fenoglio, Ève was one of the most admired stars of her time.
She survived a very dysfunctional home, which included seeing her father shoot her mother, and then, just a second later, shoot himself, actually commit suicide right in front of her.
Before becoming an actress, she witnessed that, she experienced a lot of trauma.
She still decided that was the path for her to actually enter into acting.
She became an actress, essentially following in her father's steps of working with the theater, though he wasn't an actor himself.
Ève became very rich, lived a worldly life, a very sinful life, also a very unhappy life, too.
In June of 1917, so this is when Our Lady is appearing to the children of Fatima, same year, same time, Yves rented a palace in France and was preparing for a trip to the US, where she was scheduled to perform, scheduled to act.
I'm sure she would have passed by Lady Liberty as she sailed into New York Harbor, but it's a trip that she never ended up making, actually.
At the Palace of Chanceux, which apparently means fortunate in French, at that palace, Ève was given a book on the life of Saint Mary Magdalene by a priest who was a trustee of the palace that she was renting.
Ève, when she was a teenager and first thinking about being an actress, had written a play while her parents were still alive, a play which her father read and was very impressed with actually.
It was a play about Mary Magdalene.
The friend who had accompanied her to Chancel, Leona, said this.
She said, after lunch, Ève settled down near a kitchen and opening the doors so that the servants might hear, began to read the book on Saint Mary Magdalene in a loud voice.
Enthusiasm seized her.
Never have I heard her read with such conviction.
Sitting at her feet, I began to cry.
The servants were likewise moved.
Ève continued reading, her voice broken by sobs.
In that reading of the book, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene, Ève Lavallière had a huge conversion.
Can't do justice to her story here in just a couple of minutes.
What I can tell you is that she found the freedom and the happiness and the love that she had never found in all the previous years of her life.
To put it in Marian terms, she really became a New Eve.
Later on, she would say, from now on, only Jesus has a right to my life, for he alone gave me happiness and peace.
And in the year that she died, 1929, a large Parisian newspaper published an interview of the former celebrity.
They asked Ève, do you suffer a lot?
Yes, horribly, she responded, because she had asked actually God to allow her to suffer as a way of making atonement for her past.
Have you any hope of being cured?
None, but I'm so happy.
You cannot imagine how great my happiness is, she said, even with so much suffering, the journalist asked.
Yes, and because of it, I'm in God's hands.
Tell my friends of days gone by that you met the happiest person on the earth, she said.
And in her last letter, she wrote, all my being and all my will are turned toward this last end, to love God, who loves me so much, in spite of my past and present miseries.
So true freedom is found when you live in dependence on God, not independent of God or independent from God.
Life, love, liberty, meaning, morality, purpose, destiny, these are all found in a filial relationship with the Heavenly Father through His Son, Jesus Christ.
Apart from Him, you'll find none of these things.
Apart from Christ, you'll actually become so blind and confused that you'll get to the point that you'll literally not be able to tell the difference between male and female anymore.
Right?
If you would have said that when I was growing up as a little child, people would have laughed at you.
No one's laughing at that kind of statement nowadays.
Each one of us must choose between being children of God, children of the light, or children of darkness, children of liberty or children of slavery.
Those who choose to be children of liberty must fight the good fight and not lay down their arms.
And our greatest weapon is charity, charity united to prayer, to defending the truth, to sharing the gospel, to suffering with Christ.
If we accept that calling as Ève Lavallière did when she became a New Eve, if we accept that calling, then we too will be the happiest and freest people on the face of the earth.
So let's ask Our Lady, the true Lady Liberty, for the grace to find liberty and freedom and true love in Her arms and in the arms of Her Son and in the arms of our loving Heavenly Father.



Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.

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Ave Maria.