August 2026 

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, 

Today I want to sing the praises of those of you who are excited to return for another year of school. You are my “tribe!”!

There is good reason for your excitement to get back to the books, your community, and to daily Masses and prayers. It can be a great benefit to your vocation to holiness. Though the summer break brings greater liberty for many, the Doctors of the Catholic Church are unanimous in teaching that it is formation, discipline (gasp), and holiness of life that really sets a person free.

For St. Augustine, people find freedom in loving the highest good. God created the human heart to love God and neighbor, so the more we love God, the freer we become. Choosing and loving the source of all goodness is the royal path to joy and happiness.

Education in every virtue and the development of good habits, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, promotes our ability to choose the highest good. A piano player, he would argue, becomes more free, not less free, through many years of diligent training and practice. The person who has not spent this effort is completely unfree (even unable) to play a Rachmaninov concerto. The player who has developed virtuosity through labor, however, can play with expression and originality. She has a freedom that a non-musician does not even understand.

The same is true of athletes, artists, and those who would be saints. This is something called “freedom for excellence” not just meager absence of restraint.
This kind of “freedom for” — freedom with divine purpose — is the fruit of friendship with Christ, says St. Catherine of Sienna. The more we belong to God, the greater our truest liberty, she says. St. Theresa of Avila agrees. It is selfishness and willfulness that enslave us, she teaches.

Freedom begins from an interior life with God, and springs from growth in holiness and the beginning of a life in service to God. Growth in faithful understanding and prayer (like the formation we receive in Catholic Schools and Parish Schools of Religion) lead us to deeper relationship with God — the source of true freedom. As we allow ourselves to become increasingly reliant on God more than ourselves, St. Therese of Lisieux writes, we will come to trust God more. This trust in God’s mercy, she says, is what finally leads the Christian person to freedom and to lightness of heart. Dependence on self leads to anxiety; trust in God’s mercy, to freedom and relief.

The kind of liberty we have on summer break, then — the freedom to choose a later bedtime or to spend more time at the pool — is not real freedom at all. It is merely less restraint. Freedom is more than the power to choose for oneself. It is the power, formed by truth and grace, to choose the good — to choose God’s will.

And freedom is not the gift of governments or constitutions. Even the Declaration of Independence of the 13 colonies that became the United States of America affirms “that they [human beings] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (emphasis mine). Freedom is God’s gift, and through growth in virtue and faith in Christ, we embrace that gift and become increasingly free.
That connection between Freedom, Formation, and Faith is deeply Catholic: faith reveals the truth, formation shapes the person toward the truth, and freedom is the fruit of a life ordered toward God.

Welcome back to another school year. Our Catholic schools and parish faith formation programs are ways that we respond to God’s ongoing command to “Set my people free!” The freedom you are looking for is coming to find you in the person of Jesus Christ. It is all about Jesus! Enjoy!

Sincerely yours in Christ,
Most Reverend John C. Iffert
Bishop of Covington