Virtues and vices catholic church how to#

Perhaps you don't believe you can do the right thing, and even if you could, you wouldn't want to. On hearing that virtue is the both the capacity and the desire to act well, you may reflect that you sometimes have neither the capacity nor the desire to act well. That's what virtue is: it's the ability and the inclination to act beautifully, to make good choices. He had both the ability and the desire to make beautiful music. In choosing the notes for his compositions, his skills were so perfect and his taste so excellent that he would always choose good notes. Bach is a good example of a person with a virtue. It is both a skill and an inclination to use that skill properly. A virtue allows you to spontaneously and easily do the right thing. Another way to say it is that a virtuous person is disposed to act well.

Now, this capacity and desire to act well is a feature of a person's character, it is a quality in the person which perfects action. For our purposes, a virtue is the capacity and the desire to act well. It allows a person not only to perform good acts, but to give the best of himself.' 1 That's a very good definition, but let's see if we give one that's a little simpler. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (hereafter CCC) defines virtue as 'a habitual and firm disposition to do the good.

Virtues and vices catholic church how to#

Put simply, we need to learn how to do things the right way. Consequently, we must perfect our actions and properly order them towards true happiness. The desire for happiness is what originally motivates our actions, and our actions are what determine whether we obtain happiness or not. So there is a definite relation between action and happiness. We'll end up destroying certain goods instead of obtaining them. Further, we saw that if we pursue all these goods in the right way, it will lead to our happiness, whereas if we pursue them through bad means, it will lead to evil and suffering. In the last chapter we saw what every human person craves, and what motivates all human action, namely, certain goods such as friendship, love, accomplishment, health, etc.