I won t ask for a show of hands, but I m sure that all of you have heard about supposed product of the code, which is Catholic guilt, which ranks just below Jewish guilt in comedian one-liners. At this point, I want to emphasize that in the view of the Church, there is not a plurality of moral codes. Rather, there is one code. It is universal. It applies to all of us, to you and to me.
Many people say that they are against the moral code.
Instead of rules, they say that they want freedom, an answer that always interests me. Recently, I was talking with a good friend who is also a client. He mentioned freedom for some reason, and when I asked what he meant by freedom, he said that for him, freedom was doing what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it and in the way that he wanted to do it. It was to live without restraints. His answer struck me, not because I agreed with it, but because it mimicked so closely the definition of freedom that I hear from the popular culture, especially from advertisements.