Italian Stigmatists

Magnanimity (n.) - greatness of soul. "Magnanimity is chiefly about the hope of something difficult."

Today classes focused on character development. One thing that was stressed was that gifts without character to  help them along is useless. In fact the prime example of gifts without character is Satan. Wow. Needless to say, FOCUS wants to make sure none of us fall into that category. So each day we will learn a different virtue that should be incorporated into our lives. Today's was magnanimity. It means recognizing the capacity for greatness within yourself and working diligently to achieve it. The virtue of humility goes hand in hand. Humility guards magnanimity from becoming pride and helps us see things rightly, therefore guarding against judging others. The two vices on the extremes of the virtue of magnanimity are pride and pusillanimity. (I know, I know, tons of big words...but look at how much I'm learning!) Basically pusillanimity is realizing the greatness you can achieve with God's help and chickening out. A sister vice to pusillanimity is sloth. The most interesting thing I learned today was that "sloth only comes into play when the reluctance to act involves sorrow concerning the commandments of God. More characteristic of sloth than inactivity is hyperactivity, the restlessness of mind that often results in workaholism, frenetic activity, and constant distraction". How beautiful that we have a chapel so close and easy to access to pray over everything we learn in our classes.

The best part of the day, though, came this evening. As I mentioned, we are divided into colleges and each college has a brother or sister college. One of the great things FOCUS teaches is healthy interaction between the sexes. So at the beginning of training, the brother college has to come up with a creative way to ask the sister college to be their sister college. Then over the rest of training, the colleges do service work and other projects together. Our brother college, St. Padre Pio, wrote, memorized, and recited a poem to ask us and then treated us to frozen yogurt at a place right down the street. It was so nice and a great way to get to know more of the amazing men on staff.