Piety

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her, therefore, to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things. One thing is needful. Mary has chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her’” (Luke 10:38-42).

In the modern world, “piety” has come to be associated with being religious. And while it does have a religious application, its original meaning was far wider and richer.

The English word “piety” comes from the Latin pietas, which spoke of family love, and by extension, respect for one's ancestors, for one's country, and for God.

Cicero defined pietas as the virtue “which admonishes us to do our duty to our country, or our parents, or our blood relations.”

For the ancient Romans, piety was one of the highest virtues since it was the virtue that knit families, and ultimately all of society, together in love, loyalty, and a shared, reciprocal duty.

Piety also roots us in our past and helps us to give proper respect to those who have gone before us.

You could say that piety is the glue that holds us together. Without its effects, we can fall apart into factions, our families can dissolve, and the “weave” of our culture can give way to tear and to dry rot.

It's the just recognition that we owe to those who have gone before us. It's the sober realization that we owe our existence and our substance to powers beyond ourselves.

We are social, communal beings. We're not islands; we're part of the mainland.

Piety is a gift of the Holy Spirit that comes through the sacraments.

It is “not identified with having compassion for someone or having pity for our neighbor; but it indicates our belonging to God and our profound bond with Him, a bond that gives meaning to the whole of our life, which keeps us firm in communion with Him, even during the most difficult and trying moments” (Pope Francis, General Audience, June 4, 2014).

The virtue of piety and the gift of piety are very important things. We're called to practice the virtue of piety frequently, to take care of our piety, to form children in piety.

“It is our friendship with God, given us by Our Lord, a friendship that changes our life and fills us with enthusiasm and joy” (Ibid.).

The gift of piety poured into our souls by the Holy Spirit arouses in us, first of all, gratitude and praise, leads us to thank God and to praise Him.

It teaches us the meaning of our divine filiation, that we are children of God. It’s a joyful supernatural awareness that we have: children of God and brothers and sisters of all mankind.

It also moves us to maintain an attitude of childlike intimacy with God. “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).

The Founder of Opus Dei used to say we have to try and have “the piety of children and the doctrine of theologians” (Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 10). Doctrinal piety is necessary.

The gift of piety means we're truly capable of rejoicing with those in joy, and to weep with those who weep, and to welcome and help those who are in need.

“When the Holy Spirit makes us perceive the presence of the Lord and all his love for us, it warms our hearts, and moves us almost naturally to prayer and celebration. Piety, therefore, is synonymous with authentic religious spirit, with filial confidence and trust in God, with that capacity to pray to him with the love and simplicity which is proper to persons who are humble of heart. … May the Holy Spirit give all of us this gift of piety” (Pope Francis, General Audience, June 4, 2014).

It's something we need to foster in our families. Often, I think that the prayers that a child knows at the time of their First Communion will be the prayers they say on their deathbed. The early years of life are often the best years for formation and piety. We shouldn't waste those years.

John Paul II liked to say that we go to the great spiritual messages through physical signs and symbols. Very often little children take in those physical signs and symbols.

They see them, they hear them: beautiful singing in church, different liturgical celebrations, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, ashes—all the other material things that are part of our piety: holy water, crucifixes, Rosary, Way of the Cross. It's very good to expose children to all these things at a young age.

St. Josemaría in The Forge says. “You must be constant and demanding with yourself in your regular practices of piety, even when you feel tired and arid. Persevere! Those moments are like the tall red-painted poles which serve as markers along the mountain roads when there are heavy snowfalls. They are always there to show where it is safe to go” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 81).

He also says, “Interior life is strengthened by a daily struggle in your practices of piety, which you should fulfill—or rather which you should live!—lovingly, because the path we travel as children of God is a path of love” (Ibid., Point 83).

Adoration and prayer are the principal acts of the virtue of religion. They're also natural obligations.

Through the virtue of piety, we learn almost instinctively that we cannot get through life without prayer any more than we can survive without food.

St. Thomas Aquinas says, “Prayer is proper to the rational creature, because only a creature with an intellect can realize that he's dependent on God” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II. II. Question 83). Animals don't pray.

Pope John Paul said, “Prayer is…the acknowledgment of our limits and dependence: we come from God, we exist in God, and to God we return” (John Paul II, Address to Young People, March 14, 1979).

"Hence, we cannot but abandon ourselves to him, our Creator and Lord, with full and complete confidence. … Prayer is above all an act of the intellect, a sense of humility and gratitude, an attitude of trust and abandonment in him who has given his life for love of us” (Ibid).

“Silence and contemplation have a purpose: they serve, in the distractions of daily life, to preserve permanent union with God” (Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, October 6, 2006).

No matter what we're doing or where we are, we can express our life of piety through the presence of God, through acts of faith, acts of hope, acts of thanksgiving, acts of atonement, living in God's presence, and communicating with Him all the time.

Piety leads us to want to be formed and to take advantage of all the means of formation that God has made available to us, which, when you think about it, are treasures. Great gifts.

Superficiality is not Christian. We need to stir up our interest to know God through reading, through classes, through prayer, through getting to know His life, through coming to understand the workings of His Heart, so that we don't get carried away by sentimentalism or superficiality. We should have great desires to grow in this area.

Knowing more about God but not loving Him more is not so useful. The goal of our interior life is not just to know God, not just to know theology, but to love Him in practical ways.

That's why all the saints say that somebody who may know very little theology but is full of piety—they may know an awful lot about God, far more about God than many theologians.

St. Josemaría says in The Forge, “With your life of piety you will learn how to practice the virtues befitting your condition as a child of God, as a Christian. —And together with those virtues, you will acquire a whole range of spiritual values which seem small but are really very great.

“They're like shining precious stones, and we must gather them along the way and then take them up to the foot of God's Throne in the service of our fellow men: simplicity, cheerfulness, loyalty, peace, small renunciations, little services which pass unnoticed, the faithful fulfillment of duty, kindness…” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 86).

While we try to grow in piety, at the same time we try to avoid what you would call pietism, a sort of excessive piety that is without doctrine, so that we get things a bit mixed up.

We feel we have to have many medals instead of just one. Or thinking that to get my house blessed is more important than going to Mass on Sundays.

I heard someone say once that our doctrinal formation prevents us from becoming what somebody called once “pious nuts.” Sometimes pious nuts can give a bad impression of religion.

We need a balanced piety, or why we know the reason for our actions. This leads us to avoid anything unusual or odd. Our doctrine keeps us very balanced, very normal.

But at the same time, if we're to love God, we need to try and know Him as much as possible. If we try to get most out of the means of formation, a very good disposition for that is piety.

We're told in The Forge, “You need interior life and doctrinal formation. Be demanding on yourself! As a Christian man or woman, you have to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, for you are obliged to give good example with your holy shamelessness.

“The charity of Christ should compel you. Feeling and knowing yourself to be another Christ from the moment you told him that you would follow him, you must not separate yourself from your equals—your relatives, friends and colleagues—any more than you would separate salt from the food it is seasoning.

“Your interior life and your formation include the piety and the principles a child of God must have in order to give flavor to everything by his active presence there. Ask the Lord that you may always be that good seasoning in the lives of others” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 450).

St. Paul in the Acts of the Apostles tells us a lot about his life, his human qualities. He wasn't timid. He was cultured. He was a good speaker. He had the capacity to persuade. He knew the Roman laws. He was well-formed in Scripture and Jewish customs. He studied at the school of Gamaliel.

Before his conversion, all these good qualities helped him to persecute Christians, assisting at the martyrdom of Stephen, the imprisonment of Christians who rightly feared him.

But then at his conversion, there's a dialogue with Our Lord. He opens to grace. The scales fall from his eyes, which prevented him from seeing the truth.

All the intellectual, professional, doctrinal formation is useless unless there are personal dealings with Our Lord through piety—a sincere piety that's not just external actions. We don't just go through the Rosary or the Way of the Cross, which are all very good, without penetrating to their deepest meaning.

“Nevertheless,” said Pope John Paul II, “the temptation towards the opposite is currently very prevalent—the kind of arrogance that leads man to fail to recognize that he is a creature and therefore inherently dependent on another.

“Contemporary man, especially, has fallen prey to this illusion. Child of the modern pretensions to autonomy, and dazzled by his own splendor, by his wondrous fashioning, he forgets that he's a creature.

“As the Bible teaches us, he suffers the temptation to set himself up against God, following the serpent’s insidious suggestion in the Garden of Eden: ‘You will be like God’ (Gen. 3:5).

“The consequences,” he continues, “of this pretense to autonomy are disastrous for man, since, when he fails to acknowledge his dependence on God, he inevitably ends up going astray. His heart claims to be the sole measure of reality. His will no longer recognizes the law inscribed in his heart by his Creator.

“And he ceases to pursue the good. Seeing himself as the final arbiter of both truth and error, he imagines these to be equally elusive and thus deceives himself. In this way, the spiritual dimension of reality fades from his experience. And as a result, his ability to discern what is mystery as well.”

We can ask the Holy Spirit for a greater gift of this piety, a piety that is manifested also in the liturgy.

We can love the liturgy and have certain manifestations of liturgical piety, a sincere interior attitude that gets expressed in acts of faith and of love, respecting the liturgical norms.

“Love Our Lord very much,” we're told in The Forge. “Maintain and foster in your soul a sense of urgency to love him better. Love God precisely now when perhaps a good many of those who hold him in their hands do not love him, but rather ill-treat him and neglect him. Be sure to take good care of the Lord for me, in the Holy Mass and throughout the whole day” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 438).

We can make our genuflection with piety, with a certain pause and attention, so that if someone sees us making a genuflection, they're able to see, ‘here is a person of faith.’

St. Edith Stein talks about how before her conversion as a Jewess, a philosopher in Nazi Germany, her only prayer was the search for truth. One day she went into a Catholic church—she'd never been inside a Catholic church before—just to see what it was like.

While she was there, a lady came along with her shopping basket, coming from the market. The lady knelt down and said a prayer before Our Lord and Blessed Sacrament.

This very simple, normal, common act of piety that many Catholics practice had a profound effect on Edith Stein, who went on to be St. Teresa Benedict of the Cross, martyred at Auschwitz, because she said no Jewess in her right mind would pass by the synagogue to kneel down and say a prayer.

It was the simple piety of this mother of a family, going about her ordinary duties, expressing her faith in such a simple way, that had a powerful effect on this future saint and model for all Christians.

We don't know how God is using our piety to inculcate piety in others. With your family, try to use occasions to pray with them, to say the Morning Offering perhaps at the breakfast table or in the car, or to pray the Prayer to the Guardian Angel, or to say a decade of the Rosary, or to link up a little visit to the Blessed Sacrament when you go shopping or go to town for certain things—so that people see that our faith is very much part of our life.

If you have any situation in your parish or in other stations upcountry where you have a chance to improve the material care of the liturgical items, try and do so, so that the items that are used in the Mass are good, the Missals, the linens, the sacred vessels—that they're clean, that they're dignified, in good condition.

Let the splendor of the divine realities shine, of tasteful liturgical objects, because in one of those parishes or outstations or remote places where the Mass is said, even if it's on the back of a truck or back of a pickup some place, there may be some future vocation.

Those liturgical items may be the objects that God used when to enter the mind, heart, and ears of that child, to form them in liturgical piety.

It's very good that we have a certain finesse in piety. There's a thing called liturgical good manners. We don't talk in church. We take care of moments of silence. We create that atmosphere of prayer. We try to foster love of God in small details, little sacrifices.

It's good that we try to be refined in the fulfillment of our practices of piety: our Morning Offering, our Grace Before Meals, our visits to the Blessed Sacrament, our glances at the images of Our Lady.

We're told in the Furrow, “You need a heart which is in love, not an easy life, to achieve happiness” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 795). A heart that is in love with God, and that love finds expression in concrete details every day.

The virtue of piety, which is indispensable to justice, will also lead a person to give due honor and reverence to the legitimately constituted authority—first of all, to our parents, as part of the Fourth Commandment.

But that includes all lawful authority. St. Paul says, “Let everyone be subject to the higher authorities, for there exists no authority except from God, and those who exist have been appointed by God. Therefore, he who resists the authority resists what God has appointed” (Rom. 13:1-2).

That's another interesting little area in which to educate our children.

Also, man's social makeup brings him to have closer ties to a wider community than just the family. It's from that wider community that we receive language, culture, traditions.

Patriotism also forms part of the virtue of piety. Love for one's village, or love for one's town, or one's city, or one's region, or one's country.

Patriotism is distinct from nationalism. Patriotism is a healthy love for all those things we've just mentioned. This leads us to love other countries also, because God has made them; and other towns and cities and regions, because they all come from God.

In The Way, St. Josemaría says, “So many glories of France are glories of mine!” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 525). He was from Spain, from a different country.

Patriotism leads us to love our own country, but also to love other countries as well, and to recognize the great achievements of other peoples or other places, so that we're not just super attached to our little town with the blinkers on.

Nationalism is a type of love of my own place, my own country, to the detriment of other people or other countries. That type of nationalism has led to many wars.

Every time we receive grace in the sacraments, we receive all the gifts of the Holy Spirit. That's a treasure that we receive every time. We are spiritual millionaires.

Every time we go to the sacraments, we can ask the Holy Spirit for all of His gifts: wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, piety, fortitude, and fear of the Lord.

Pope St. John Paul liked to say that the family is a school of piety, a school of love, a school of virtue, a school for the soul (Familiaris Consortio); a school of deeper humanity (quoting Gaudium et Spes); a sanctuary of life (Evangeliium Vitae).

He said, “The future of humanity passes through the family” (John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, November 22, 1981).

Children shouldn't just learn prayers at school. The home is the first educator. Often all the great moral lessons that a child has to learn are learned before they're seven years of age.

I often think if you hear of people who in some countries have embezzled large amounts of money from some bank, some major senior professional person, that person did not learn “Thou shalt not steal” before they were seven years of age.

This is another reason to pay great attention to the preparation of children for their First Holy Communion, so that they know their prayers, they know the moral lessons, they know the Ten Commandments—and with that, an awareness that the great spiritual messages often come through material things—dressed in white for our First Communion.

Possibly the child doesn't grasp the deep spiritual and theological significance of the Real Presence of Our Lord. But through the clothing that they wear—dressed in white—they get some sense that something very important is happening here.

We encounter the spiritual realities through those physical signs and symbols (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Point 1146).

Make every opportunity that Christmas and Easter provide for teaching spiritual truths: the Way of the Cross during Lent, or the crib at Christmas. Or other such things, maybe a May altar in May, or the rosary in October, or a visit to a certain shrine of Our Lady in the month of May.

Another good thing can be to bring your family occasionally to different churches in different parts of the city, so that somehow, they come to appreciate the universality of the Church. They get to know a little bit how other parishes and other chapels and churches function.

It's good if children can hear various prayers that they might not hear under other circumstances, like the Memorare. Or to wear a medal from when they’re young, as a protection of Our Lady.

And of course, giving importance to Sunday Mass. It comes before everything, before any journey, especially when we're out of town. If we're traveling internationally, we'll try and find out the times of the Masses in the places we're staying, before we leave.

Or if possible, to celebrate feast days of Our Lady or other big feasts of the Church with some little family treat, so that children learn to Christianize these things. They remember the feast days.

Give importance to Pentecost, not just to Christmas and Easter. Often children know a lot about Christmas and Easter, but very little about Pentecost.

Try and do a visit to the poor as a family regularly, a few times a year.

Make visits to the Blessed Sacrament and your local church compatible with visits to the bank or the supermarket. Make sure that children know the national shrines to Our Lady or other small local shrines.

Teach them about indulgences. Visit a cemetery, a place where your parents or grandparents are buried, so they learn to pray for the dead.

Promote a Catholic culture, so they have a certain knowledge of mission territories. Pray at home for the Pope and his intentions, so that little children learn who the Pope is.

There's a whole pile of little ways that we can inculcate piety in children.

Children believe what they see and hear. If you go to Confession regularly, occasionally go with your children. Let them see you going to Confession. They see this as not something that they do.

Help them to pray their night prayers and their morning prayers.

Above all, help them to realize that Our Lady is always in our midst.

If you have little images of Our Lady in your home or your bedroom, the children can learn to say their prayers before that image, or to turn to Our Lady to say something nice before they go to bed at night, or when they wake up in the morning.

We could ask Our Lady that we might grow in this virtue of piety, and in this year of St. Joseph in particular, to pass our piety through St. Joseph. He must have had a great love for Our Lady and the Child Jesus.

Mary, may you nudge St. Joseph and ask him to teach us to grow in this virtue in a special way during this coming year.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

JOSH