Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

— Psalms 37:4

Either before you arrive or as you wait for class to begin, find this short passage from Sacred Scripture in your Bible or through an online search. Reading it will prepare you for this week’s material.

—Philippians 4:4–9

O God, our Father, you have made us and called us to eternal happiness with you. Look upon us in mercy, remove from our lives every evil influence, by your grace direct us to the eternal blessedness of heaven. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

As you watch the video lesson, refer to these key highlights. Feel free to use the space provided to take notes.

• While the Church Fathers were concerned with obedience to laws and rules, when it came to morality—or being good—they began first with the question of happiness.

• The goal of life is not to find our greatest happiness in the goods of this life but to cooperate with the graces that God gives us to elevate us to himself, to befriend Jesus Christ, and to follow Christ through the mystery of his passion and death to a participation in his resurrection.

• The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that the Christian moral life, which has the beatific vision as its end, is a life composed of virtue, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the Beatitudes.

• The theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—form the very basis of the Christian moral life. Infused with these virtues at baptism, the Christian moves toward God as his end through real acts of knowing (acts of faith) and real acts of loving (acts of hope and charity).

• If the theological virtues form the foundation of the Christian life, then the gifts of the Holy Spirit form its crown.

• The Beatitudes are markers of Jesus’s life, and the Spirit enables us, through the gifts, to act—to move toward the Father—as Jesus did.

Wisdom of the Saints

Since happiness is nothing else but the enjoyment of the Supreme Good, and the Supreme Good is above us, no one can be happy who does not rise above himself.

— St. Bonaventure

Take a moment to go through these questions with the group. For larger classes, divide them up into partners. Answers are provided to assist you in leading discussion.

1. Why is the moral life about more than just following rules and laws?

When morality is based solely on following rules, it forgets to take our freedom into account. The Church Fathers taught that morality was more a question of happiness because of their appreciation of God’s goodness and their confidence that God created man to share in his happiness.

Salvation is offered to us through the life and death of Jesus Christ. The moral life is therefore about union with Christ and allowing him to lift us into the divine life. But because we are free creatures, such a union must be voluntary, and in this voluntary act of uniting ourselves to Christ, we choose to live a sound moral life that leads to our ultimate happiness—the beatific vision.
2. What are the three theological virtues, and what role do they play in the Christian moral life?

The three theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity (or love). Each of them in their own way elevates our mind to enable us to know and love God and the things of God. Faith allows the Christian to believe what God has said is true and so participate in God’s own infallible knowledge of himself. By hope, we trust in God’s power to bring us to eternal life with him. Charity allows us to love God as a friend.

In summary, faith empowers us to know God as the source of all truth; hope makes us rely on God who is himself our promised reward; and charity allows us to love God as our first and best friend.

1. Why would charity be the only lasting theological virtue?

As we pass from this life to the next, faith will pass away since what we believe now about God will finally be seen, and hope will pass away since what we expect to enjoy in heaven will be actually enjoyed. But charity will remain since the friendship we begin with God on earth will continue everlastingly in the life of heaven.

1. What role do the gifts of the Holy Spirit play in the moral life?

The seven gifts (wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord) complement the theological and moral virtues, allowing us to exercise these virtues under the direct influence of the Spirit. The gifts render our minds and wills supple to the stirrings of the Spirit so that our movement toward God by faith, hope, and charity may be directed explicitly by God himself. By remaining docile to the Spirit, we imitate the Lord Jesus, who in his earthly life was constantly “led by the Spirit” (Mt 4:1).

Catechism Connection

The theological virtues are the foundation of Christian moral activity; they animate it and give it its special character. They inform and give life to all the moral virtues. They are infused by God into the souls of the faithful to make them capable of acting as his children and of meriting eternal life. They are the pledge of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in the faculties of the human being. There are three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity.

— CCC 1813

Discuss these questions with the group, pair them with a partner, or ask them to meditate on their own.

1. Have you ever thought morality was just about following rules? Do you find it helpful to know that morality is chiefly about happiness?

2. What kind of freedom and happiness is available to those who unite their lives to Christ and keep the commandments of God?

3. How does your love of God help you persevere through difficult times when your faith and hope might be wavering?

After concluding your group discussion, return to watch the second video where converts to the Catholic faith discuss their conversion and how they live today as Catholics.

Rome to Home

The dialogue of Jesus with the rich young man, related in the nineteenth chapter of Saint Matthew’s Gospel, can serve as a useful guide for listening once more in a lively and direct way to [Christ’s] moral teaching. . . . For the young man, the question is not so much about rules to be followed, but about the full meaning of life. This is in fact the aspiration at the heart of every human decision and action, the quiet searching and interior prompting which sets freedom in motion. This question is ultimately an appeal to the absolute Good which attracts us and beckons us; it is the echo of a call from God who is the origin and goal of man’s life.

— Pope St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, nos. 6, 7

Morality: Not merely obligations or duties, as many assume, nor a system of rules that we have to obey, but rather the area of thought (and of life) focused on how to get to our ultimate goal, which is true and lasting happiness. On this view of morality, commandments help teach us how to get to the goal, which is the main reason why they are important to obey in order to live a “moral” life; that is, a life that succeeds in reaching true happiness.

Christian Moral Life: The broad term used to describe the way of life Christ has called us to. Christ strengthens his followers through grace to live in accordance with his call.

Beatific Vision: Beholding God face-to-face in heaven, the end goal of the Christian life.

Intellectual virtues: The virtues we can acquire to help us understand the things of this world; they include wisdom, understanding, and knowledge.

Moral Virtues: Firm dispositions that allow us to do good and act in accordance with right reason; the four chief, or ‘cardinal,’ moral virtues include prudence, justice, courage, and temperance.

Theological Virtues: The supernatural virtues God gives us to elevate our capacity to know and to love, enabling us to know and love God and the things of God; they are faith, hope, and charity (or love). These virtues form the foundation of the Christian moral life.

God’s Word

So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

— 1 Corinthians 13:13

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now and will be for ever. Amen.

This serves as a review of the material that your students can read after each class, but it may be helpful for you to read as well. Consider reading it before each class to better prepare you for group discussion.

We live in an age when “being good” is often reduced to following rules. The good citizen is the one who obeys traffic laws, for example, and the good son is the one who returns home before curfew. The popular reduction of morality to obedience creates a problem, however. If being good is equated with doing what an authority commands us, then what is our freedom for? Must we renounce our freedom in order to be good? Or are we most free when we break the law? Many today are convinced that we are.

Christian teaching holds a different view of the moral life. For the Church Fathers, morality—or being good—was not fundamentally a question of obedience. For them, morality was a question of happiness. To be sure, the Church Fathers were not unconcerned with laws and rules. They wrote extensively on questions of law, and they studied the Ten Commandments with great care. Nevertheless, they understood that, in discussions on the Christian moral life, the question of obedience remains

…secondary to the question of happiness. The Fathers asserted this because of their appreciation of God’s goodness and their confidence that God created man to share in his happiness.

When St. Thomas Aquinas examines the Christian moral life in his Summa Theologiae, he jumps straight to the question of happiness. This is a deliberate move on his part, to begin with the end of the moral life—he identifies its purpose and aim—before describing how through moral action we arrive at the end. This is similar to finding Chicago on a map before figuring out how to get there.

For St. Thomas, seeing God face to face is the activity that will grant us complete and final happiness. St. Thomas explains that God made us to know and love him naturally, even if in some vague sense, but in Jesus Christ God has offered us the supernatural gift of sharing his life forever in a vision of his very essence, a vision that we would never have were it not offered to us. God’s offering of this gift changes everything. The goal of life is not to find our greatest happiness in the goods of this life but to cooperate with the graces that God gives us to elevate us to himself, to befriend Jesus Christ, and to follow Christ through the mystery of his passion and death to a participation in his resurrection. St. Thomas understood clearly what the Scriptures reveal about the moral life: we will not simply fall into heaven, nor will we get there by following a list of rules. To the contrary,we will arrive at our supernatural home by moving toward it in this life, by grace, following step by step the path that Jesus trod toward it.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church continues St. Thomas’s line of thinking when it explains that the Christian moral life, which has the beatific vision as its end, is a life composed of virtue, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the Beatitudes. Just as the intellectual virtues (wisdom, understanding, knowledge) allow us to comprehend the things of this world well, and as the moral virtues (prudence, justice, courage, temperance) allow us to love the things of this world well, the theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—elevate our intellects and wills and enable them to know and love things beyond this world; namely, God and the things of God. The theological virtues, therefore, form the very basis of the Christian moral life. Without them, we could not move toward God as he invites and draws us into his divine life. Infused with these virtues at baptism, the Christian moves toward God as his end through real acts of knowing (acts of faith) and real acts of loving (acts of hope and charity).

In the act of faith, the Christian believes that what God has said is true, and thus the Christian comes to participate in God’s own infallible knowledge of himself. In faith, therefore, the Christian knows what God knows because he clings intellectually to God as the First Truth, the one who graciously speaks the truth to us.

In the act of hope, the Christian loves God as a good that is difficult but possible to attain. God is a difficult good to attain because on our own we cannot cross the infinite chasm separating the created and the uncreated realms. Nevertheless, God remains attainable because he has made himself available to us by giving us every divine help necessary to reach him: revelation, the Church and the sacraments, Mary and the saints, daily graces and inspirations, and the like. Hope therefore loves God as our difficult but attainable final good, and also as the helper who draws us to himself.

In the act of charity, the Christian loves God as a friend. This is possible because, as St. John tells us in his first letter, “He first loved us” (4:19). In communicating his truth to us, God shows us his mercy and love, and in so doing he establishes the possibility of our being friends with him. Our response to revelation, therefore, includes not just obedience to God’scommands but also the sharing of God’s life in true friendship. Once we love God as a friend, then we can love our neighbor also in that same friendship of charity.

Faith then allows us in this life to know God as the source of all truth; hope allows us in this life to love God as our promised reward; and charity allows us in this life to love God as our first and best friend. As we pass from this life to the next, faith will pass away since what we believe now about God will finally be seen. Hope will pass away since what we expect to enjoy in heaven will be actually enjoyed. But charity will remain since the friendship we begin with God on earth will continue everlastingly in the life of heaven.

If the theological virtues form the foundation of the Christian life, then the gifts of the Holy Spirit form its crown. The seven gifts (wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord) complement the theological and moral virtues, allowing us to exercise these virtues under the direct influence of the Spirit. The gifts render our minds and wills supple to the stirrings of the Spirit so that our movement toward God by faith, hope, and charity may be directed explicitly by God himself. By remaining docile to the Spirit, we imitate the Lord Jesus, who in his earthly life was constantly “led . . . by the Spirit” (Mt 4:1).

Finally, the Beatitudes indicate the precise kinds of action that the gifts…of the Holy Spirit enable us to perform. The Beatitudes are not a checklist of things we have to accomplish; rather, they are markers of what life looks like when it is lived in the Spirit. The Beatitudes are the markers of Jesus’s life, and the Spirit enables us, through the gifts, to act—to move toward the Father—as Jesus did.

In summary, the Christian moral life is not about completing lists of commands but about moving gracefully toward our final happiness: union with God in the face-to-face vision of himself that he promises us in glory, …

Pinckaers, Servais. Morality: The Catholic View. St. Augustine Press, 2003.