Friends, welcome to Word on Fire, Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an

apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and

new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with

Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring

the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite

you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us. Peace be with you. Friends, I

begin today with my philosophers had on and tell you that a basic tenet of

existentialism, which is a very influential philosophy in the 20th century, a

basic tenet of it is that we invent ourselves. So Jean Paul Sart, the famous

philosopher who invented the existentialist philosophy, said that existence

precedes essence. It's his fancy way of saying that our freedom comes first and

then what we are or who we are follows as a consequence. In other words, we

decide. We decide who we will be, what we will be. Well, I would say that what

was once a kind of rarefied philosophy for prison intellectuals in the mid-20th

century has now become a common view among most young people in the Western

countries. Who are you to tell me what to do? That's the watchword of most people in

the West today. I decide who I will be. You don't tell me. Who church your

government or other person? I decide what I will do, what I will be. Many of the

debates around gay mirrors today, transsexualism, etc., etc. center around this

understanding of life and what you hear from most people is that liberty seems

to trump everything. Now, Sart was right that the chief obstacle to this view was

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