Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Lent lasts 40 days, and worry, for many Catholics, lasts considerably longer. Ave Maria Press designed this book as a day-by-day Lenten companion for readers who recognize habitual worry as something more than a temperament — a spiritual problem that seasonal discipline can address. Each day offers a brief reflection, a concrete practice, and a prayer, building toward Easter with the cumulative logic of a 40-day retreat. The audience is any Catholic who finds that anxiety about work, health, relationships, or the future crowds out trust in God — which is to say, most practicing Catholics at some point in their lives. The book's argument is simple and old: worry is a disordered grip on outcomes that belong to Providence, and Lent is exactly the right season to loosen that grip. It asks nothing more of the reader than 10 minutes a day and a willingness to treat anxiety as a spiritual matter worth bringing to prayer. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book operates from the assumption that the human person is ordered toward trust and peace — that serenity is not an achievement but a recovery of something native to us. This reflects the CCMMP's Created premise: original human dignity includes an orientation toward God that worry obscures rather than destroys. - **Fallen**: Worry, in the book's framing, is a form of concupiscence applied to contingent goods — a disordered desire for control over outcomes that belong to God. This is precisely what Aquinas means when he identifies anxiety about temporal goods as a failure of the virtue of religion, which requires referring all things to God as their first cause. - **Redeemed**: The 40-day structure is itself an act of faith in the Redeemed state: it presupposes that habit, grace, and repeated practice can reshape the soul. The daily rhythm of reflection, practice, and prayer is ordered toward what the tradition calls purgation — the slow loosening of attachments that distort perception and generate chronic anxiety. - **Prudence (foresight)**: One of the book's implicit pastoral gifts is training readers to distinguish between prudent planning (which looks ahead in order to act well) and anxious rumination (which loops through possible futures without resolution). That distinction is a form of practical wisdom, and the Lenten frame gives it a concrete daily exercise. - **Justice (prayer and adoration)**: By routing worry through prayer rather than through strategy, the book situates the problem correctly within the virtue of religion. Worry is not first a cognitive distortion; it is a misdirection of the reverence and dependence that belong to God alone. SECTION THREE Teresa of Avila[^1], in the *Way of Perfection*, makes the same argument the book appears to make — that poverty of spirit and freedom from worry are inseparable, and that the soul who has genuinely entrusted outcomes to God finds, paradoxically, that she worries least when she has least to cling to. Bonhoeffer[^2], in *The Cost of Discipleship*, anchors the same Matthean logic: seeking first the kingdom is not a technique for reducing anxiety but the only act that addresses its root, because worry is finally a question of which master one serves. Rodriguez[^3] adds the ascetical precision the book will need if it is to avoid sentimentality, noting that interior peace is not a feeling to be pursued but a consequence of living as one ought — cheerfulness follows virtue, not the other way around. ## References 1. Teresa of Avila (n.d.). *Way of Perfection*. — "It is when I possess least that I have the fewest worries" 2. Bonhoeffer, D. (1937). *The Cost of Discipleship*. — "Be not therefore anxious for the morrow: for the morrow will be anxious for itself" 3. Rodriguez, A. (n.d.). *The Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues, Vol. 2*. — "a virtuous man is always cheerful, and a wicked man is always sad and tormented in conscience"
✓ Strengths
- ✓Situates worry within the Lenten arc of conversion, treating it not as a personality trait to manage but as a disordered attachment that Lenten discipline can loosen — a spiritually serious premise.
- ✓The Lenten format provides a concrete, graduated structure for habit formation: daily practices over 40 days map naturally onto Aquinas's account of virtue as built through repeated acts.
- ✓Frames worry as a failure of trust in Providence, aligning with the classical spiritual tradition's insistence that anxiety about created goods betrays disordered love rather than prudent concern.
- ✓Grounds freedom from worry in prayer, adoration, and gratitude — the sub-virtues of religion in Aquinas's taxonomy — rather than reducing anxiety management to technique alone.
- ✓Designed for parish use during Lent, making it accessible to a broad Catholic readership who may not engage formal spiritual direction but benefit from structured seasonal guidance.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The Lenten devotional format risks treating worry as purely a spiritual failing, potentially bypassing the body-soul unity the CCMMP insists upon — worry has neurological and somatic dimensions that a purely ascetical framework may underaddress.