Try “Little Virtues”

12 August 2026  1 John 4:7-21

Memorial of St. Jane de Chantal, Religious

“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another.”  (1 John 4:11)  

According to a 2025 study by the Walton Family Foundation and the Gallup organization, entitled Voices of Gen Z, 35% of Gen Z dislikes reading, and 43% of Gen Z rarely or never reads. According to publishing and consumer tracking data analyzed by the National Endowment for the Arts, 40% of American adults read no books in 2025, and half of all the reading done was done by just 4% of American adults.

Back in 1985 Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) observed that people who get their information from books get sustained, logical arguments. If they are using an electronic medium, however, the “medium becomes the message;” people are distracted, and manipulated, by image and spectacle.

In 2026, when almost all information is obtained through electronic media, especially by young people, it is no surprise to find that adults and teens are easily and routinely manipulated by commercial and political interests, with short-form videos that make people progressively immune to arguments based on facts and reasoned argument.

In 2026, when almost all information is obtained through electronic media, especially by young people, it is no surprise to find that adults and teens are easily and routinely manipulated by commercial and political interests, with short-form videos that make people progressively immune to arguments based on facts and reasoned argument.

Alarming as this is, it isn’t entirely new.

In 1610 St. Jane Francis de Chantal founded the Order of the Visitation. She sought as members not spiritual athletes, but women who, due to delicate health, advanced age, or lack of physical strength, could not bear the rigors of the more traditional orders of nuns. She didn’t emphasize demanding fasts and penances, but instead focused on the “little virtues” of everyday life – humility and gentleness most of all, also even-tempered charity, joyful optimism, simplicity, patience, kindness and acceptance. In short, she was looking for ordinary people to embody the ordinary virtues, to help other ordinary people draw a little closer to God. St. Jane meant no criticism of the other orders, and the Visitandines today mean no disrespect to those who make powerful reasoned arguments for the sufficiency of the Gospel in the modern world. The Order of the Visitation simply recognizes that more people need to be instructed in the plain virtues that will make them better parents, better neighbors, better husbands and wives, and better citizens before they need to get their minds around the cosmological argument for the existence of God. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another” (1 John 4:11) is a good place to start. St. Jane compressed that into a two-word motto: “Live Jesus.”

This in no way is meant to diminish the extraordinary evangelical power of apologetics, and how it also is crucial for the witness of the Church in our time. Part of the manipulation carried out by political and commerical interests in social media has been to persuade many that Christians are intellectually underdeveloped, but the last generation has seen the emergence of extraordinary apologetic resources and skilled apologists. They have changed the conversation about religion, philosophy and science, and their work is beginning to bear powerful fruit. But they are still over the heads of the 40% of Americans who read zero books last year, the 43% of young adults who hate reading, and the 66% of high school seniors who are at- or below-basic in reading (cf. NAEP, U.S. Dept. of Education).

So maybe the Order of the Visitation is on to something, has been on to something for a while now: train people, especially the young, in the “little virtues” – humility and gentleness most of all, also even-tempered charity, joyful optimism, simplicity, patience, kindness and acceptance. It may not be a reasoned argument that gets young people out from behind their screens, but the attractiveness of simple virtue.

St. Jane de Chantal, pray for us.