Introduction by Fr. Jonathan Wilson
Good evening. This is one of my favorite times of the year here at Saint Paul. Our annual parish mission. And I’m so grateful and honored to welcome Father Joseph Tuscan as our mission priest. As I’m sure you heard him at Mass today, a Capuchin priest—a Capuchin Franciscan priest—from the Province of Saint Augustine, which is based in Pittsburgh.
As I think you heard as well, the Capuchin fathers from that province founded our parish in 1930. And as Father said, willingly gave it up in 1950. And so this Father is coming back to the tree that his order planted just about 100 years ago. Pretty special. And it seems like the hand of Providence.
Father Joseph is a friend of our great friend, Father Olvera. And I’m so grateful that Father has recommended Father Joseph to us. This is night one of three nights, starting each night at 7 p.m. with the talk, and earlier for those who choose confessions and rosary. Tonight will conclude with veneration of relics, including a major relic associated with Saint Padre Pio and Blessed Solanus Casey.
Blessed Solanus Casey is not as well known as Saint Padre Pio, but I’m excited that Father will be introducing us to him. When I was in college at Franciscan University, one of the priests introduced us in a homily to then-Father Solanus Casey, whose cause was being promoted. And he said, “And his great-nephew is among us”—Tim Casey, my classmate, the great-nephew of Blessed Solanus Casey. I was like, “Wow, you have a saint in your family.”
So very special for us. I just encourage you to have an open heart. Thank you for making the journey with us. And as these days continue, if the Lord puts on your heart to invite someone to the mission, please consider that as well.
[The assembly stood and sang “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name.”]
Gospel Reading: Matthew 20:1–16
The Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew.
“The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went.
And when he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing idle all day?’ And they said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’
When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. And when the first came, they thought they would receive more. But each of them also received the usual daily wage.
And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
So the last will be the first, and the first will be the last.”
The Gospel of the Lord.
Talk: Acedia — The Sin of Our Time
Announcements
Just a couple of announcements before I begin. Over the three nights of our retreat, I’m going to recommend a few books for further reading. I can’t cover all the material in short sermons. But in the narthex, on the mission table, you’ll find a plastic placard with a list of the books I’m going to refer to. I set it up so that you can just snap a picture of it with your phone if you’d like to order any of them. And I know the bookstore has a few of those on sale.
Also, the bookstore has our beautiful women’s devotional book, Mother Love. This is the definitive women’s devotional. In fact, we’ve published it since 1880. This is our latest edition—the best version we’ve ever done. I had 10,000 of these printed a year ago and we’re sold out. It’s a very popular book. And even if you haven’t yet considered enrolling with the Consecrated Christian Mothers, it’s a great women’s devotional book either way.
There is a sign-up list in the narthex for any women or moms-to-be to be enrolled in the Christian Mothers. Father’s sister belongs to the Christian Mothers. We have a long history in the dioceses, and from the time when our friars were here at Saint Paul’s, you have an old charter with us. So we’re reactivating that by the gracious invitation of Father Wilson. They just reactivated their charter at Saint Michael’s in Worthington with Father Daley—they have over 100 women in that new group. And we get about six new groups a year starting. A wonderful movement, a beautiful tradition of medicine for healing the culture through the family.
And as I mentioned, the mother of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux—now canonized herself—Zélie Martin, was an early member of the Confraternity of Christian Mothers when it began in France. And speaking of that, I’m leading a pilgrimage to France for our 175th anniversary in September, and there’s still a bit of open registration if you’re interested. We’re going to Mass at Notre-Dame and Lourdes for a Marian pilgrimage. We’re going to have Mass on the Feast of the Sorrowful Mother—who is the patroness of the Confraternity of Christian Mothers—on September 15, in Lille, where it began in 1850. So all of that information is in the narthex, along with some other materials you might want to take home.
The Seven Deadly Sins and the Primary Fault
I’m going to recommend one book in particular about this talk. Drawn from the text of Sacred Scripture, the list of the Seven Deadly Sins—which is in your mission packet—was formalized in the late sixth century, around the year 590, by Pope Gregory the First, building on the work of Evagrius Ponticus and later transmitted through the famous Conferences of John Cassian.
Pope Gregory presented his teaching in his work Moralia in Job, giving us the familiar list: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. This formula became the standard moral teaching of the Western Church and was later developed by theologians such as Saint Thomas Aquinas. These deadly sins—or cardinal sins, as they’re called—are contrasted by their healing virtues: humility, generosity, chastity, kindness, temperance, patience, and diligence.
Every one of us has a predominant—or what we call a primary—fault. Father James McElhone, who was a Holy Cross priest at Notre Dame in Indiana (he died in 1963), was a brilliant, insightful writer on the interior life. He published a beautiful book with perennial wisdom about discerning what our primary fault is. It’s called Rooting Out Hidden Faults: How the Particular Examen Conquers Sin. I’m going to draw from his book tonight about what I consider the primary fault within our cultural situation today.
Just as each individual is often marked by a predominant fault, so too can a culture—being a community of persons—come to reflect a characteristic weakness. When a significant number of individuals within a society share the same disorder, that pattern ceases to be merely personal and begins to take on a cultural form. In this way, the collective habits of many hearts gradually shape the moral tone of an entire people.
A Spiritual Crisis
I gave you at the homily at Mass this morning some of our statistics about church attendance. Let me make it clearer: in the United States today, only 7% of our population attend any Christian congregation on a regular, weekly, faithful basis. Seven percent of our country. Now, if you expand that to people who attend occasionally, the number goes up. But in terms of Christians who faithfully attend worship every Sunday—and for us as Catholics, holy days—that is about 7% of our country today. I would suggest to you that those statistics are just a reflection of a deeper problem, and I’d like to get at that this evening.
It is certainly a spiritual crisis. I mentioned that my first years as a priest, I was on the South Pacific island of New Guinea. In fact, I’ll be back in New Guinea in May to give retreats for our Capuchin friars, for the diocesan clergy, and for the nuns in our dioceses there. I haven’t been there in 25 years, but they invited me to give their retreat this year.
When I was a bush missionary in New Guinea, we were two priests. We took care of a parish that had 80 villages. Half of those chapels were two days’ walking up through the mountains to get there for Mass. But when I’d have a Christmas Mass, I would have 5,000 people. The feast day of our parish was Saint Anthony of Padua—5,000 or 6,000 people, easily, for Mass on the feast of Saint Anthony. Even the non-Catholics and Protestants would come because we were the biggest show in town.
I go to Africa almost every summer to give retreats for our Capuchin friars in various countries. I’ll be in Nigeria in July, where we have, by the way, the Christian Mothers—we have over 10,000 members of the Christian Mothers in Nigeria. And the churches are packed in Africa. They have other issues; that’s not their problem. I’m talking about our cultural context today.
I would suggest to you that of that list of the Seven Deadly Sins, the predominant one in our culture today—clearly, just by simple statistics—is that one we often call in English “sloth.” The Greeks called it acedia. And what is it? It is an inordinate attachment to rest or personal comfort, which manifests in one of two extremes: laziness on the one hand, or workaholism on the other. And in the end, it leads to what Saint Thomas Aquinas described as apathy toward God.
Acedia: Inordinate Attachment to Comfort
Father McElhone uses the story I read for you from Scripture—the laborers in the vineyard—to illustrate this particular sin. There is a tendency to think that if I’m a workaholic, sloth cannot possibly be my primary fault. In the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, the sin of acedia is revealed not in laziness, but in the interior attitude of the first laborers who, despite working diligently all day, lose their joy when they compare themselves to others and resent the landowner’s generosity.
This is why these seven deadly sins are called cardinal sins, because the word cardo in Latin means “hinge”—like on a door. And what Saint Thomas rightly observed was that when we morally consent to any of the seven deadly sins, it opens the door to all the rest of them. I’d say that the primary one that opens the door to all the others is this really fundamental issue. Clearly in the West, this is a primary issue.
Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches that acedia is a “sorrow at good.” And this is precisely what unfolds in the parable. The workers who once accepted their wage with peace become bitter. They become envious—another deadly sin—and dissatisfied, not because they were treated unjustly, but because they can’t rejoice in someone else’s blessing. Their labor, once meaningful, becomes burdensome in retrospect, showing how acedia drains the soul of gratitude and turns faithful service into resentment.
In contrast, the late workers received everything as gift, free of comparison—highlighting that the true danger is not in the body, but in a heart that no longer delights in the goodness and generosity of God.
Acedia can manifest in two seemingly opposite ways: laziness or workaholism. Yet beneath both lies the same spiritual disorder—an inordinate attachment to rest and my own comfort. In one case, I withhold my time, my energy, my effort. In the other, I give myself excessively, but only in a way that turns inward, becoming obsessive, self-referential, and ultimately narcissistic. Whether I give too little or too much, the root is identical: a subtle but real self-centeredness. And in both forms, God is no longer at the center.
Laziness and Workaholism: Two Sides of the Same Sin
I knew a great priest from the Archdiocese of the Bahamas. There was a great monsignor there who used to say that “ego” stands for “Ease God Out.” In both forms, God is no longer at the center. Neither laziness nor compulsive work is ordered toward the love of God or the love of neighbor. Instead, both become expressions of a life curved in on itself.
When I entered the Capuchin Order at the age of 20 and took my first vows at 21, one of our old venerable Capuchins who would give us classes from time to time—Father Michael Schmidt—taught us the phrase in Latin: In medio stat virtus. Virtue stands in the middle. This does not mean to be lukewarm or wishy-washy. It means to avoid extremes and impulses that often look a lot like my own opinion—resisting anything objective or challenging.
In the fourth century, Saint Augustine said, “Conquer yourself and the world is at your feet.” Padre Pio used to say that in life, our greatest struggle is with ourselves. In our culture today, one of the biggest common struggles is impulse control. People are destroying themselves with self-destructive behaviors because of giving in to extreme positions. And that also translates into political and social life—there’s a tendency toward extremes where the other side doesn’t just have another opinion; they’re the enemy. And that inevitably leads to violence.
Saint Thomas said that this sin is usually caused by three things: discouragement, distraction, and disappointment. Discouragement says, “I cannot.” Distraction says, “I will not be still.” And disappointment says, “God will not.”
Three Causes of Acedia
Let’s take these in a row. Discouragement is the slow surrender of hope. It’s not open rebellion against God; it is the quiet conclusion that holiness is unrealistic. A father, perhaps working two jobs, kneels at night, exhausted. His prayer lasts two minutes before sleep overtakes him. After weeks of this, he concludes that he’s not the “prayer type.” He doesn’t stop believing in God; he simply lowers his hope of grace.
Discouragement
A young woman striving to live chastely in a culture that mocks her purity grows weary of being misunderstood. After repeated loneliness and failed relationships, she begins to think that perhaps the Church’s teaching is not realistic. The ideal remains true, but she feels it is unattainable for her.
I’ve been a confessor as a priest for 30 years, and I couldn’t tell you how many times people will come into the confessional and say something to the effect of, “Father, I think I don’t know how to go to confession, because every time I go, I keep confessing the same sins over and over.” My instinctive response to that is: “What do you want to do—confess something new?”
The Seven Deadly Sins are not a check-off list. You don’t have to hit them all before you die. In the spiritual life, we have what is called the primary fault or the predominant fault. And that is not always what I call people’s “favorite sins.” Sometimes people’s favorite ways of destroying themselves are related, because sometimes they’re coping mechanisms. Perhaps the primary fault of anger triggers them. They can’t deal with it, and so they use whatever—alcohol, drugs, pornography, promiscuity, whatever kind of illicit, self-destructive behavior—to cope with this deep anger they can’t handle. And if they dealt with that root, the familiar sins would go away.
Sometimes people obsess over even their past sins, which the devil uses against them. The devil is called the Accuser. He tempts us into sin, and then once we commit it, he’s forever throwing it back at us. When we die and face our Lord for what is called our particular judgment—when we stand before him and are assigned to heaven or hell—at that judgment will also be the devil. He’ll have his little clipboard, and he will cross every “t” and dot every “i.” He is literally the lawyer from hell.
But here’s the thing: if you’ve gone into that confessional box—which is often called the “Miracle Box”—and accused yourself, he has nothing on you. That’s the miracle that our Lord gave us in the beauty of being reconciled. Saint Teresa of Ávila said, “When the devil reminds you of your past, you remind him of his future.” Padre Pio used to say, “My past, O Lord, to your mercy. My future, to your providence. That I might live in the present with gratitude for your love.”
A young man fighting pornography goes to confession for the same sin for the tenth time. He begins to interpret repetition as hypocrisy. “God must be tired of this,” he thinks. He confuses his weakness with insincerity. Yet each return to confession is already evidence of grace at work.
Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta—I give retreats to her nuns all over the world—when she died and her memoirs were published, she said that for 40 years she experienced no consolation in prayer. Saint Mother Teresa—one of the most profoundly effective modern saints of our day—said that when she went to prayer, she experienced no emotional consolation. But she was faithful. It was an expression of love.
Let me give you another example. A woman with a little baby who has to change that diaper multiple times a day. Is that a pleasant experience? No. You do it not because it’s pleasant, but because of love. Love is beyond a feeling. It’s not a feeling. Today, that word in our culture—“love”—is the most overused, abused, and misused word in the English language. And when the culture uses the phrase “love is love” or “love wins,” they’re not talking about this.
Acta non verba—actions speak louder than words. Don’t tell me you love me; just give me the flowers. We don’t feel ourselves into a new way of acting. We act ourselves into a new way of feeling. We don’t wait for a warm, fuzzy feeling to pray or to do what is right. You do what is right and moral, and then good consolations come as a result of good actions.
Discouragement doesn’t shout. It sighs. If it persists, it convinces the soul that striving is pointless. And the tragedy is that perseverance in weakness is often more pleasing to God than visible success.
Distraction. The noonday devil today has gone digital. We live in an era of constant distraction. Screens scatter our attention. Silence vanishes. Studies show that excess screen time, especially among children and adolescents, is linked to anxiety, depression, disturbed sleep, shorter attention spans, and reduced capacity for empathy and reflection. Children raised in constant digital stimulation struggle to sit still, to be silent, to reflect. In other words, they struggle to pray.
Now, I was giving this talk in Bremerton, Washington, a few weeks ago, and a gentleman came up to me afterward and said, “Father, this is really good stuff, but you realize you’re giving us this talk on an electronic tablet.” Let me make this observation: How many of us make our living having to use some form of electronics? Today it’s unavoidable. It’s a tool. Let’s analogize it with, for instance, owning weapons, which is legal in this country. The issue is not the tool; it’s in the heart of the person who owns the tool. You can go out and hunt a deer and feed your family. You can also kill somebody with it. The issue isn’t the gun; the issue is the person in possession of the tool.
Distraction
A few years ago, I was giving one of these parish missions out in Silicon Valley. Now, this is where all the big tech companies are housed. And there’s a charter school out there that their children attend, where children are not allowed to use electronic platforms—no cell phones, no tablets. They do math longhand. They diagram sentences. They learn geography. They learn cursive writing. These are the children of the wealthiest tech company owners in our country, and they want their kids running those companies, not sweeping the floors.
And famously, Mark Zuckerberg, who built Facebook, would never let his own children have accounts on Facebook. They know. If it’s good enough for their kids, why is it not good enough for yours? It’s a marketing ploy. The problem is not that the tool doesn’t exist or that it can’t be used. The challenge of our generation is to learn appropriate use of the tool.
I’m going to recommend a couple of books in particular. Jonathan Haidt published an excellent assessment of this material in a book called The Anxious Generation a few years ago. He reveals what is behind the tech companies’ assault on especially children through marketing. You’ll be surprised—maybe a little shocked—about the intentionality of that effort. More recently, he published a book with Katherine Price called The Amazing Generation, about how young people all over our country are reclaiming creative play away from screens and feeling liberated, renewed, and like real people again.
I was listening to an interview with a young high school student who said that when he entered high school as a freshman, they were allowed to use smartphones. But by his second year, the school required students to put those phones in pouches at the beginning of the day. He said that when they were allowed to use cell phones during school, every time the bell rang, everyone went into the hall and got on Instagram and Snapchat—they weren’t even talking to each other. Now, when the bell rings, they actually have relationships with each other. And he said, “I would never go back.” He felt imprisoned by it.
I’ll be in Australia doing a parish mission in Sydney the first week of May, and I don’t know if you know this, but the country of Australia has made the use of social media by minor children illegal. And some of our states and many of our schools are slowly learning this lesson, because teachers can’t get the attention spans of kids for more than two seconds—they’re used to screens. It’s rewiring the brains of children, and it’s a huge issue. So I would recommend The Anxious Generation, The Amazing Generation, and then there’s a great book by Claire Morrell called The Tech Exit.
Dom Prosper Guéranger, the great Benedictine liturgist of the 19th century, diagnosed the spiritual disease of modern times with prophetic clarity. He said: the evil of our times is the refusal to adore—not hatred of God, but refusal; not noisy rebellion, but a quiet turning away. Acedia slouches before glowing screens instead of kneeling before the glowing tabernacle. It’s not merely an individual temptation; it has certainly become a cultural source of decay.
A professional cannot endure ten minutes without stimulation. Every waiting room, every red light, every moment alone becomes an opportunity to check email or refresh a feed. If you’ve been through airports, you know—everybody in that airport is staring at a screen. Nobody’s talking to anybody.
A retiree, after decades of work, facing quiet evenings—instead of allowing loneliness to become a doorway to deeper prayer, perhaps beautiful spiritual reading—numbs it with endless television. An ache that could have led to communion with God is anesthetized. I’m not saying it’s immoral to know what’s going on in the world. What I will tell you is that it’s unhealthy to follow the news like a sitcom. It doesn’t resolve in 30 minutes. And these companies, whichever one you attach yourself to—that’s a commercial endeavor. They’re in business to keep you attached to their product. Something happens in the morning, and they beat it to death all day long in an entertaining way, because that’s where they make their money. I beg you not to do that.
Distraction today is not merely occasional—it’s ambient. It trains the soul to prefer stimulation to contemplation. And when the heart grows accustomed to noise, the gentle presence of God feels less attractive than the next notification. Acedia thrives where silence is feared.
And finally, disappointment—the wound that hardens hope. If discouragement weakens and distraction scatters, disappointment wounds. It’s the temptation proposed by the devil in the Garden of Eden to the first parents: that God is not good, or that he doesn’t care. It often begins in the family. A child who experiences inconsistency or harshness or abandonment may grow into an adult who struggles to trust authority. When earthly fatherhood is distorted, divine fatherhood can feel distant or abstract. I’m going to go into this more tomorrow night.
Disappointment
A faithful Catholic who trusted a spiritual mentor discovers a moral failure. The shock is not merely intellectual; it becomes personal. The wound can become a wall. “If this person failed, who can I trust?” Cynicism becomes a shield. In civic life, corruption and self-interest where service was expected foster fatigue. People stop expecting integrity. They stop expecting sacrifice. Eventually, they stop expecting anything at all.
And then there’s perhaps the most intimate disappointment: prayer that seems unanswered. A young couple prays for a child and receives silence. A young man discerns for years and feels no clarity about his vocation. A widow begs for relief from grief and feels only absence. A missionary labors faithfully with little visible fruit. In such moments, disappointment whispers subtle accusations: God is distant. God is slow. He is inattentive. He doesn’t care. He’s not good.
The temptation is not atheism. It starts as suspicion. Left unchecked, disappointment does not simply sadden the soul—it corrodes theological hope. It suggests that God’s promises are theoretically true but practically unreliable.
I would offer you a simple axiom about terrible relationships: high expectations and low hope. Hope is a theological virtue because its proper object is God—as with the others, faith and love. They’re theological virtues because their proper object is God. Expectations are a human thing. It’s not that some of our expectations aren’t just, but the problem is we’re all human beings. We’re all sinners. We are sometimes unintentionally selfish, absent-minded, or even hurtful because of our own hurts. There are only sinners walking this planet.
To have the unreasonable expectation that the people closest to me will never hurt me or wound me is not realistic. That’s not living in reality. And that unrealistic expectation leads to disappointment. The formula for good relationships is high hopes—the proper object: that when I die, and when my spouse and children die, we will be in heaven with God. That is a proper object of hope. And keep our expectations low. If you want to be shown mercy, show mercy. As Scripture says, we will be judged the way we judge others.
Let me share a brief personal story. I mentioned my grandfather briefly at Mass this morning. My grandfather was an immigrant to this country from Italy. He settled in Crestline, Ohio, near Mansfield. My grandmother was also an immigrant from Sicily as a little girl, and they had an arranged marriage. It didn’t work out so well, but they had eight children—my father and seven girls.
The Healing Power of Catholic Faith
My grandfather was an alcoholic. He was rough on her, emotionally difficult to deal with. And my grandmother ran away. She just couldn’t take it. It was too much for her, and she left him with all the children. My aunt was just one year old when she left. And my grandfather put these kids into a state orphanage. Two of my aunts were twins; they were ten years old when they went to the orphanage. It was a bad place, and one of them died there.
Father Slattery, the parish priest at Saint Joseph’s in Crestline back in the 1940s, went to my grandfather and said, “I want you to take those kids out of that orphanage and put them with the nuns up at Saint Anthony’s in Toledo.” My dad went there when he was two years old. He was raised by beautiful French Franciscan nuns from Montreal, Canada. This is what we would call today a safe environment.
Blessed Solanus Casey
My father—my dad will be 92 this year; he’s a healthy 92, I tell people he’s 92 going on 45—he would tell you that when he was growing up at the orphanage, the sisters said to the children, “If you don’t have a mother and father of your own, adopt the Holy Family: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” He didn’t have any men in his life, and they would tell him about Saint Joseph—what the characteristics of being a man were, of being a father. A man who is just, who does the right thing not because of his feelings but because he knows it’s right.
And my father modeled that. He was just a little kid. Our Lord in the Gospels says you can only inherit the kingdom of heaven if you become like a child—not childish, but like a child. My father had the advantage of being an actual child. He really took that in, and it shaped who he became. He said, “If I hadn’t had those nuns, I would certainly be in prison today.”
That’s the beauty of our Catholic faith. How many of us have some broken pieces of our family histories? Here’s the beauty: our faith is like a medicine, a spiritual healing program. Because not only do we have these great witnesses who give us good example—they intercede for us. They help us concretely.
Let me tell you a true story about Father Solanus Casey. As Father Wilson said, not too many people know about him, but he is responsible for over 6,000 physical miracles while he was alive. He wasn’t even a full priest—he never had faculties to preach sermons or hear confessions. But sometimes there were two or three miracles a day at Saint Bonaventure on Mount Elliott Street in Detroit when he was there in the 1940s and ’50s.
I met the woman who was the miracle for his beatification at the Mass at Ford Field in November of 2017. She suffered from a terrible skin disease called ichthyosis, an idiopathic disease that has no cure, where the skin looks like fish scales. Her name is Paula Zaráte. She’s from Panama. She had this terrible disease her whole life, and she was miraculously cured of it at his grave. She is a medical phenomenon—the only known case of a person recovering from this disease.
Seven years ago, I was preaching at a mission at Saint Joseph Parish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A wonderful family there—graduates of Franciscan University—had six children, and their middle daughter, Margaret, was diagnosed with fatal stage-four leukemia. I was telling some of Father Solanus’s miracle stories during the mission, and I got a phone call from this couple who asked me to go see their daughter at Hershey Medical Center.
Examination of Conscience: Acedia
So I brought this relic—the one that will be out for veneration here in just a moment—to the hospital. When I got to her room, the doctor said to me, “Father, this girl is dying. Please do not upset the parents with false hope.” I went into the room, gave the little girl the sacraments, and I looked at her mother and said, “Father Solanus helps little girls. Pray a novena to Father Solanus.” There’s a great novena, by the way, on a website called Pray More Novenas. I highly recommend it.
- Do I neglect prayer because I feel too busy, tired, or distracted?
- Do I rush through my prayers without attention or love for God?
- Do I pray only out of habit without really speaking to the Lord?
- Do I allow distractions to dominate my prayer instead of gently returning to God?
- Have I become lukewarm in my faith?
- Do I attend Mass with reverence and attention—and faithfully?
- Do I arrive late or leave early without a serious reason?
- Do I treat the church as a sacred place where God is present?
- Do I receive the sacraments with preparation and gratitude?
- Am I satisfied with being average in my spiritual life?
- Do I make real efforts to grow in virtue and overcome my sins?
- Do I avoid sacrifices that would help me grow closer to God?
- Do I make good resolutions but fail to try seriously to keep them?
- Do I avoid responsibilities at home, work, or school out of laziness?
- Do I waste time that could be used for something good?
- Do I work carelessly without giving my best effort?
- Do I overwork, ignoring my greater responsibilities to my family?
- Do I complain about the effort required to do what is right?
- Do I spend excessive time on entertainment, social media, or distractions while neglecting prayer, family, or responsibilities?
- Do I delay doing good things because I don’t feel like it?
- Do I fill my life with noise and activities so I never have time for God?
- Has my heart grown indifferent toward God?
- Am I slow to show kindness, patience, or charity to others?
- Do I avoid doing good because it requires effort or sacrifice?
- Do I desire holiness—or have I become comfortable with mediocrity?
The Heart of Cultural Collapse
A year later, I’m in Mexico at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, leading a pilgrimage group, and my phone rings. It’s her mother, and she says, “Father, we wanted to call you because today is Margaret’s one-year anniversary of being cancer-free. We prayed that novena to Father Solanus, and they tested her—they found no cancer in her body, as though she never had it.” They took the chemotherapy line out of her neck. She went home, took a shower, went home with her parents. She just graduated from high school a year ago. She’s now about 20 years old, and she’s never had any recurrence of the cancer.
Countless stories of the intercession of saints. Does God care about us? Does God love us? Does he show it in concrete ways? Let us open our hearts. Let us open our minds to the healing power of God and the mentorship, the healing balm of these beautiful saintly figures from our tradition. That’s the beauty of being Catholic: we have this spiritual program of healing—not just psychological and emotional, but even physical. It is just an expression of a generous, loving, merciful God.
I’d like to lead you through a brief examination of conscience related to this sin.
Saint Thomas said that this sin, at its extreme, is what he calls a “sorrow” or apathy toward the divine good. It’s not merely fatigue. One begins to think, perhaps not out loud but in the recesses of the heart: “Yes. He lived. He was holy. He was the Son of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Yes, he was unjustly accused, falsely charged. They beat him up. They nailed him to a cross. It was a long time ago. It doesn’t affect me. I don’t care. And I don’t care that I don’t care.” That’s what acedia becomes in its most extreme form.
The Remedy: Diligence
The heart of cultural collapse is a lack of love for God. Saint Francis, in the 13th century, gazing upon an image of our Blessed Lord on the cross, said, “That is love—and love is not loved.”
This is the chilling fruit of acedia—not rebellion but indifference; not hatred but a refusal to be moved. There’s often a lot said about our “culture of hate.” But hatred is not the true opposite of love. Indifference is. Because where love still burns, even if distorted, it acknowledges the other. But apathy withdraws the heart entirely, refusing even to see. In that cold absence of concern, love is not wounded—it is extinguished.
For this reason, Aquinas insists that acedia is fundamentally a sin against charity. It is not simply a failure of discipline or diligence. It is a failure to love. It is a resistance to the very love that calls us out of ourselves, which heals us and draws us into communion with God and others.
And here we must be clear. In our culture, the word “love” is the most overused, abused, and distorted word in the English language. Love is not merely a feeling or a validation of the self. Love is self-gift—as we say in Greek, kenosis: self-emptying. It is the willing of the good for the other, even at the cost of one’s self. Love is our Lord crucified. Acedia is not simply laziness or overwork; it’s the quiet refusal of that love. It is the turning away from the cross, and therefore from the only love that can truly satisfy the human heart.
So finally, how do we overcome this sin? Saint Augustine said, “God made you without you, but he will not save you without you.” This requires a bit of our cooperation—or what we say in Latin, collaborare. The corresponding virtue to the sin of acedia is the virtue of diligence. It is a steadfast readiness of the heart that resists spiritual sloth and embraces good with perseverance, zeal, and quiet fidelity out of love for God—without anxiety.
The remedy for sloth is simple, though not always easy: the love of God. That we love God enough to give him our best. First, we must ask ourselves: why do I do what I do? If our motive is to please God, everything else changes. Even the smallest task becomes an act of love—changing the diapers, whatever. We work promptly, cheerfully, carefully, because we know we’re working for the Lord.
Second, let’s cultivate zeal—zeal in our work, our studies, our spiritual life. This doesn’t come all at once. There’s an old saying that maturity necessarily involves immaturity. We grow in our understanding through practice and discipline—giving ourselves a specific time and structure for prayer. I’ll be more practical about that tomorrow night.
The world today does not need lukewarm Christians. It needs men and women who are serious about God, who form their minds and strengthen their character, and who allow their faith to guide their lives.
Third, we must aim at holiness. Holiness doesn’t mean to be “good.” Often in our culture today, we hear: “Well, he doesn’t go to church, doesn’t do much for the spiritual or corporal works of mercy, but he’s a good person.” I hope so—but here’s the thing: you don’t get to heaven by being good. Why? Because you can be good for reasons that aren’t good. If you have a boss or a bishop or a superior or a spouse, and you know how to behave yourself, what do they give you? Advancement, money, prestige, position, power. You can be good for reasons that are completely self-serving. We don’t get to heaven doing that. That is called narcissism.
You get to heaven by being holy. What does that mean? It means “not like the world”—different from the world. Sanctus, in the Mass: that’s what it means. Different from the world. Are my motivations, my reasons, different from the world? Are they not self-serving? That is the heart of holiness. Little by little, we learn to overcome faults, avoid deliberate venial sins, and practice virtues: humility, obedience, charity, self-discipline.
Fourth, we must be faithful in prayer. When I was growing up, my dear father—even to this day—gets up early and is right in the front room with his prayer book and his rosary, and goes to Mass every single day. In fact, my dad has been serving Mass at the Clare Monastery in Canton for 54 years. Last week, the secretary of the monastery called me because my father didn’t show up for a couple of days, and they were worried about him. I talked to dad and said, “They were worried about you over at the monastery; they didn’t see you for a couple days.” And he said, “I had a dentist appointment.”
Being faithful to prayer. It doesn’t just give a good example; it shapes and liberates us. When distractions come, gently return to God. When fervor fades, keep praying anyway. When discouragement appears, don’t give up. Perseverance is the cure for acedia.
And finally, remember: we don’t fight alone. We have the great Communion of Saints that assist us and God himself, who died for us. If we pray, if we struggle, if we keep beginning again, our Blessed Lord himself will give us the necessary grace, the necessary strength.
So the remedy for sloth is very simple: pray faithfully. Work diligently. Strive for holiness. Never stop beginning again.
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank you for calling us into your vineyard, even when we’ve grown tired, distracted, or discouraged. Forgive us for our sloth and for the times we have chosen comfort over love, noise over prayer, and ourselves over you.
Stir our hearts again, Lord. Set us on fire with your love. Give us the grace to begin again—to pray faithfully, work diligently, and seek holiness with courage. When we are weak, strengthen us. When we fall, raise us up. When we grow cold, draw us back to your heart.
Lord Jesus, save us from indifference and make us faithful laborers in your vineyard. Holy Spirit, give us zeal. Saint Paul the Apostle, pray for us. Mary, Mother of Hope, Saint Padre Pio, Blessed Solanus Casey—we ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Transcript prepared from audio recording. Lightly edited for clarity and readability.