Truth Bytes

The general trend today is to work as little as possible for the greatest possible rewards. But do we realise that this culture of sloth is undermining our integrity and shrinking our personalities... and maybe even worse?

Written and narrated by the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic, Australia.

Lust is a vice so prevalent that many people have come to see it as a kind of virtue. Is it? In a world that is obsessed with sex as pleasure, we may need to stop and reflect on God's plan for humanity and our true happiness.

Written and narrated by the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic.

The sin of envy is one of the ugliest sins. Envy makes us resent the success, gifts, good fortune of others just because we haven't got them ourselves. It is the ultimate kill-joy. It spoils life for others and doesn't improve our own.

Written and narrated by the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic.

We all battle against materialism - that degrading tendency to put more value on things than on people. The vice of avarice grows out of this and makes us slaves to our wants, never satisfied with what we have and much more keen on getting than on giving.

Written and narrated by the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic, Australia.

Anger - we all have it. We all need it to survive. But we need to keep the lid on it. This means controlling it by our reason and giving it direction by our will, so that it becomes a power for good in the world not the destructive force it so often is.

Written and narrated by the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic.

Personal pride - a healthy sense of our own self-worth – is a virtue. But thanks to all the defects of our fallen human nature, we often manage to turn pride into something very ugly, one of the capital sins in fact. It’s the ultimate sin of self-idolatry which leads us into all kinds of dangerous delusions and generally makes us impossible to live with.

Written and narrated by the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic.

None of us is going to argue with the fact that our human nature is not perfect. None of us, however, want to really degrade our human nature by sin, especially by those big ones that can turn us into monsters . What are these big sins we sometimes call capital sins? What do they look like in action? How do we deal with them?

Written and narrated by the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic, Australia.

Most of us appreciate being supported by firm, loyal friends and have an admiration (sometimes secret) for people with moral fortitude . The virtue of fortitude is a highly attractive one – nothing like the aggressive, dominating, showy strength we associate with the heavyweights of the world but more like the faithful, self-sacrificing and committed strength of the big-hearted.

Written and narrated by the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic.

The word "temperance" has often been associated with people joining a temperance league - making an oath never to drink alcohol. The virtue of temperance is a much more wide-ranging and attractive thing. It's all about managing our bodies and our emotions in healthy ways that make us more what we are made to be. Like the other moral virtues, then, temperance is a humanising habit that brings its own happiness both here and in the afterlife.

Written and narrated by the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic, Australia.

Justice is that 'fair go' we all want. It's doing to others what we want them to do to us. It's the social virtue that makes living with others possible, peaceful and productive. It's also something we owe to God. And something He measures out to us!

Written and narrated by the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic.