Hi, I'm Edwards III, and welcome to all things Catholic, where real faith meets real life.

Today I want to talk about virtue, but I want to focus on one particular danger I see out there in the way we as Catholic sometimes talk about virtue and think about

virtue, whether it's in our parishes and our Catholic schools with our children or even in our own

homes and our families, the way we present virtue and call our children to grow in virtue,

and maybe even our own selves with what we read and videos we watch. It's not a full, authentically

Catholic vision of virtue that I often see out there. It's not a full, authentically Catholic vision of virtue that I often see

out there. It's an approach that holds up virtue in such a high way, meant with the best

intentions to inspire us, but can leave us with a pressure to be perfect. Can leave us with a kind of

perfectionism. And in the end, it sets us up and sets our

children up for failure, for discouragement, for shame, feeling it's just too hard. I keep falling.

I can't do this. I'll never be able to live the virtuous life. What is this danger that we want to avoid so we make sure we present a full Catholic vision of virtue? And how do we avoid it? How do we build that authentic Catholic vision of virtue? That's what we're going to take a look at in this week's podcast. So welcome to all things Catholic. I'm your host, Edward Sriari, and here's the background on this. I was just

recently invited to speak at my wonderful Catholic school, where we send our kids as a great parish

and as a great classical Catholic school, wonderful community of families. And they had an event

called Sipping with a Scholar. So they had a bunch of drinks, mixed drinks and wine, and then wonderful hors d'oeuvres,

and then they invite a scholar to come and share some ideas and you have a big dialogue. And

they asked me to speak on virtue. And I thought about it and I have a number of talks I've given

for the last 20 years, all about virtue that could easily just pull out of my hat and do.

But I decided to do something different. I wanted to share with them something I've been pondering recently in the last three six months something I'm noticing out there in a lot of

Catholic presentations on virtue that I'm hearing I wanted to address it and I share with them

and say hey these are just some initial thoughts.

I'm still pondering this.

You know, maybe a year from now, I have a slightly more refined view.

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