Happiness and religion, that is our topic for today.

Pope Francis, then Cardinal Jorge Maria Bargoglio, in his notes addressed to his fellow cardinals,

during the congregations of cardinals preceding the 2013 conclave, named what he regards to be the most pressing margins of human

existence to which the Catholic Church is called to evangelize. The margins of the mystery of sin, of pain,

of injustice, of ignorance, and of doing without religion.

Arguably doing without religion is an increasingly widespread mode of living in the

secular societies of the Western Hemisphere. For very good reasons, Pope Francis identifies this

pervasive mode of living as one of the margins of human existence, for it is neither neutral

nor benign. Rather doing without religion constitutes a significant impediment to attaining

the surpassing final end to which humanity is ordained in the extant order of providence,

to perfect and everlasting happiness in union with God.

The Cateism of the Catholic Church renders this surpassing final end in its programmatic opening

statement thus. God infinitely perfect and blessed

in himself in a plan of sheer goodness freely created the human being to make him share in his own

blessed life.

Thomas Aquinas advances an account of the virtue of religion that is theologically profound, philosophically robust,

and is especially relevant for a context in which doing without religion

has become a widespread phenomenon.

Aquinas takes the virtue of religion to be indispensable for attaining the surpassing final end,

to which divine providence has ordained humanity, indeed genuine and everlasting beatitude

in communion with God. To put Aquinas' central insight in a nutshell,

the gratuitous ultimate end of perfect and everlasting participation

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