Tuesday GIFTS of Advent

December 30, 2025

“Piety”

Today John tells us, “Do not love the world, rather love God’s Will.” God is love and through the Holy Spirit this Divine Love abides in our hearts quietly influencing our vision and actions to cooperate with God’s Will and so make us holy. This is what we mean when we say our discipleship task is to take on the image of Christ. The final two Gifts of the Holy Spirit involve this Divine Love’s role in our becoming holy, in other words, our sanctification. The Holy Family is itself an embodiment of this Divine Love’s action through the Holy Spirit’s Gift of Piety.

Piety, the sixth Gift of the Holy Spirit, is the perfection of the virtue of religion. Now there is great debate today about the role of religion in our society. Given how any ideology may be passed off as a “religion” it is easy to see how people get burned out on the concept altogether.

Yet, more than just a collection of mere external elements of our faith, religion really means the willingness to worship and to serve God. Our Catholicism is Jesus’ divinely created and sustained SURE path to worshipping and serving God, should we be willing to do so.

The Holy Spirit’s Gift of Piety amplifies this willingness beyond a sense of duty so that we desire to worship God and to serve Him out of love, the way that we desire to honor our parents and do what they wish.

There can exist many motivations for worshipping and serving God (fear, duty, routine, remorse, etc.), but Piety is the Gift of the Holy Spirit that roots our willingness to worship and serve God in the motivation of love. In the Holy Family we see in play this “love-motivated willingness”, or as St. Paul puts it, “a bond of perfection”. The Holy Spirit’s Gift of Piety taps into the very love that Mary and Joseph have for Jesus and blesses our willingness to love Jesus with it.

Piety is the Gift of the Holy Spirit that blesses us with Love itself as our motivation to worship God.