Welcome to our daily rosary meditation. Let's begin in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen. Let's call to mind all those we promised to pray for.

You know, Teresa, there are seven vices at the root of all bad actions. Vanity, envy, sloth, anger, greed, gluttony, and lust.

Every bad action flows from one of those.

But there are also seven virtues

at the root of all good actions.

Prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and love. Now the first of all the virtues is prudence.

This is the virtue that must ground all the others because it's a virtue of the mind of knowledge.

The fundamental fact that our society seems to have largely forgotten

is that you cannot pursue the good unless you know what the good is in the first place. It's the mind,

it's understanding that enables you to do the right thing in the first place

because it tells you what the right thing is.

So the entire moral life is based not on your instincts,

not on your gut, not on your gut, not on your good intentions,

and certainly not on feelings

or your likes or dislikes,

the entire moral life is based on the discipline of reflecting on the truth,

being willing to seek the truth relentlessly, to consider it rigorously, and to carry it out with painstaking conscientiousness.

The truth really will set you free.

Which means if you've never considered yourself a reflective person, if you just prefer to follow

your heart, to shoot from the hip, if you're not the sort who worries about thinking things through carefully, well, that has to change.

Because the first and fundamental virtue is prudence, and you have to care about the truth and about getting the truth

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