Tuesday GIFTS of Advent

December 16, 2025

“Counsel and Fortitude”

Last week we explored how the Gift of Wisdom is a desire to contemplate God through creation. We also saw how the Gift of Understanding is an ability to see the reasonability of what we teach and contemplate.

Today the prophet Zephaniah says God will step in to “change and purify the lips of the peoples.” God helps us “do the right” through the Holy Spirit’s Gifts of Counsel and Fortitude.

Counsel, the third Gift of the Holy Spirit, is the perfection of the cardinal virtue of prudence. Prudence (the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason) can be practiced by anyone, but the gift of Counsel is supernatural.

Through this Gift of the Holy Spirit, we are given insight into how best to act almost by intuition. Beyond mere human reasoning, the gift of Counsel provides us intuitional insight into what we ought to do; to do what God would have us do. It is because of the gift of Counsel, for instance, that Christians need not fear to stand up for the truths of the Faith, because the Holy Spirit will guide us in defending those truths with divine insight.

Fortitude is ranked as the fourth Gift of the Holy Spirit because it gives us the strength to follow through on the actions suggested by the gift of Counsel.

While the gift of Fortitude is sometimes called courage, it goes beyond what we normally think of as courage. Whereas the gift of Counsel blesses us with insight, the gift of Fortitude blesses us with ability… the ability to do what we come to see as right. Fortitude, for example, is the virtue of the martyrs that allows them to suffer death rather than renounce the Faith.

Thus, the Holy Spirit’s Gifts of Counsel and Fortitude bless us with insight into how God would have us act and the ability to follow through on those actions. In this way the Holy Spirit empowers us to “observe what is right, and do what is just.”