In an age in which emancipation is regarded as the true heart of redemption, and freedom appears as the right to do everything I myself want to, and only that, the concept of obedience is, so to speak, anathematized. It has been excised, not merely from our vocabulary, but from our thinking. Yet this conception of freedom is the very thing that has made people incapable of living with one another, incapable of loving. It enslaves people. That is why obedience, correctly understood, has to be rehabilitated and be made effective in the heart of Christian and priestly spirituality.
--Pope Benedict XVI, “The Ministry and Life of Priests”, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith
