I finished last week on a sort of "low" note, with a rant followed by a critique of the poor job the outgoing generation ("Baby Boomers") did in passing on the Faith to subsequent generations (particularly, my own). As a more positive beginning to this week, and as a sort of extension of my last post, I'd like to express a bit of gratitude. I cannot, alas, include everything for which I am thankful, or even everybody to whom I am grateful, as such a list would require more time simply to compile than I have to write. I will here limit myself only to those to whom I am grateful for reasons pertaining to my own faith and formation--and even then, this is not an exhaustive list.

I'm thankful for and grateful to both to the living and to the dead, who have fought, struggled, and persevered to keep the Faith alive. I'm grateful to God the Father for His creation, and to the Son for coming to redeem said creation and to the Holy Spirit for coming to renew said creation. I'm grateful for the Lord's promise that against His Church, "even the gates of hell shall not prevail" (see Matthew 16:18). I'm grateful for the gift of His Incarnation, but also for the sending of the Spirit to guide, to protect, and to nourish the Church, even when many members of the Church have turned astray.

I'm grateful to Our Lady's fiat, her decision to cooperate with God's will so that Our Lord might be incarnated as "true God and true man." I am grateful to all of those saints who followed in her footsteps, whose fiat is joined to hers, and through whom God was able to work to guide and renew His Church, to preserve and pass on the Faith. Each one has an impact on our Faith which can scarcely be measured, for it may be obvious or obscure, tangible or intangible. In this life at least, we are never given to know even our own effects on the world to its fullest, let alone the effect of another. I am also thankful for their prayers of intercession on my behalf, and on behalf of the Church as a whole.

I am grateful to the Doctors of the Church. Their writing have helped to pass on Church teaching from gerenation to generation, and have helped to explain those teachings to a people who would ahve remained otherwise ignorant. They have been the teachers of my teachers, for though I have not read all or even many of their works, I see that those whose works I have learned from learned from these men and women. I am especially grateful to Sts Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, for their teachings echo through the ages, and to Sts John of the Cross and Therese de Lisiux, from whom I have learned much and will learn more to come.

I am grateful to our popes, and in particular to the current pope and his immediate predecessor. They have not been perfect--and some have been downright horrible as human beings--but they have faithfully cooperated with God in keeping the Church intact, and in preserving her teachings. Our last two popes in particular have been the voices of orthodoxy, thinkers and teachers who have worked tirelessly to renew the Church, and to teach the faithful. Their witness to the Church and the world has been often ignored, often sneered at, often undermined--even from within the Church--but they stayed the course, giving us the teachings of the Church which they lead. From these two great men, we have a wealth of catechesis, from John Paul the Great's Theology of the Body to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

I am grateful to many of our bishops and cardinals, especially some of the recent ones, who have worked with the pope to strengthen the faith and teaching of the Church locally, nationally, and beyond. I am here thinking of such people as Their Excellencies Charles Chaput, Raymond Burke, Timothy Dolan, Thomas Olmsted, Aiden Nichols, Frederick Henry, (the late) Avery Dulles, and George Cardinal Pell. I am grateful to those priests who take seriously their tasks as their collaborators.

I am grateful to my family and especially to my parents, who did the best they could to discharge their duties to raise my brothers and I in the Faith. This was often a thankless struggle, even or perhaps especially in my own case: growing up I had little interest in communion classes or confirmation classes, nor for reading anything about the Faith--at least some (most?) of the time. Nor were they aided in this struggle by many within the local Church community, including our pastor who often worked to undermine parental authority. I am therefore also grateful to the pastor at our other parish, who is kindly and sincere, and who did not work to undermine my parents' attempts to catechize us.

I am thankful for the influx of converts over the years, and am grateful to those who brought with them a zeal to renew the Church. They brought a desire to reform those practices which were adverse to the life of the Church, while at the same time (usually) respecting the doctrines which she cannot change, and indeed admiring those practices which make the Church vibrant. Their are, of course, many such converts in every age, but I will restrict myself to the last century or so: G.K. Chesterton, Peter Kreeft, J Budziszewsi and Rob Koons, Scott Hahn, and many, many more. I am equally grateful to those cradle Catholics who have shown a similar zeal, such as Hillaire Belloc, Fulton Sheen, and J.R.R. Tolkien, to name only three.

I am grateful to those intellectual giants among men--some of whom have already been named--who yet remained faithful to the teachings of the Church, even joyfully so. To the already long list of names, I should add a few more, mostly deceased: John Henry Cardinal Newman, Pierre Duhem, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand, and Stanli L Jaki. I am thankful that these men and women placed humility over pride, choosing to follow the Truth rather than their own self-interests.

I am thankful for the now-burgeoning apologetics movement within the Church. Indeed, to a lesser extend I am grateful to the apologetics movement within Christianity, which is where I got my own start and because of which I discovered Catholic apologetics. This, in turn, (re?)kindled my interest in theology, and so set me to learning more about the Faith. I am grateful especially to Mark Shea, Karl Keating, and Patrick Madrid, in addition to many others already named.

I am grateful to those friends of mine who have helped me to grow in the Faith, both directly and indirectly. I will not name names here, but you know who you are; I will say that this list is predominantly but not exclusively Catholic.

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Originally published on my Equus Nom Veritas blog.

Tags: Gratitude Reflection

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