Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast,

where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture, and passed down

through the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a Year is brought to you by

Ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church discovering our identity and God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is Day 241. We are reading paragraphs 1803 to 1811. As always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes a foundations of faith approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own catechism in a year reading plan by visiting

ascensionpress.com slash CIY, and you can click follow or subscribe to your podcast app for daily

updates and daily notifications today. As you know, his day 241 reading paragraphs 1803 to 1811.

What that is is the virtues.

In fact, Article 7, remember we're walking through all of these articles that kind of set the stage for what it is to live a life in Christ, what it is to live a moral life, and not just to be good, but to be like Jesus. This is the whole goal. Again, I think a lot of times as Christians, we think, oh, yeah, I'm supposed to be good. Well, at the heart of it, we're called to be his, to belong to him, and we're called to be like him. We're called to have the heart of Jesus and to look at the world through the lens that Jesus looks at the world through, and also to live and to love in this world the way Jesus lived and loved in the world. And so we're to talk about the virtues. And we're talking about the human virtues. So cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Those are the cardinal virtues. And cardinal does not mean the bird, although it does mean a bird, but not in this case. In this case, it means like the hinge virtues. And so we're looking at the hinge virtues of justice, prudence,

temperance, and fortitude. We're also going to look at the last two paragraphs, our paragraph 1810 and 1811, talk about virtues and grace. And so, you know, tomorrow we'll continue talking about

the theological virtues, faith, hope, and love. But today we recognize not only are we called to,

like the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, people,

human beings around the world have acknowledged that, yeah, these four cardinal virtues,

these four just essentially human virtues of justice and prudence, temperance, and fortitude

are healthy and essential for a healthy and free life. Remember, the moral life is a life of freedom.

To embrace responsibility and to choose to live according to the commandments, to choose to live

according to God's call upon our lives is to ultimately live a life of freedom and of joy.

And so the virtues, like we said the other day, are not straight jackets.

They're meant to be the habitual disposition to do the good, a firm attitude, a stable disposition,

habitual perfections of intellect and will that govern our actions, order our passions, and guide our

conduct according to reason and faith. They make possible ease, self-mastery, and joy

in leading a good moral life. That's what we're going to talk about today. So let's buckle in.

Let's call upon our Lord for his help because we definitely need virtue and need grace in order to

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