Let us begin our talk with a Hail Mary.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed our time

and women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

This class is a class on the importance of doctrinal formation.

Specifically, my goal is to persuade you at the end of the talk, to embrace a lifestyle where there is room for reading and meditation on sacred scripture or other spiritual reading like the lives of saints and classics, other spiritual classics, that can help us grow in our interior life,

and even cultural reading, because as St. Justin Martyr, the great apologist, would say,

there are great works of literature that contain seeds of the word that can help us see where our Lord,

God has actually given us something true, good, beautiful, noble in creation, in nature,

and in culture.

St. Jose Maria stated, and he was a firm believer in this,

that spiritual reading has made many saints.

And it is true.

Many times there are saints that have made a very deep turnaround in their lives, a conversion,

because they read something that set them off in a different course in their life.

And because of what they read, we can think of St. Ignatius of Loyola or St. Edith Stein, how she read St. Teresa Lavala,

or St. Augustine himself, how he read the books of the Platonists, as he says, or Cicero, the Hortensius, when he mentions in his confessions,

that we think of all these people who have made amazing strides in their spiritual lives

because of something they have read.

Well, in order to do this,

we need to create a culture of silence and interiority.

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