Oh, for a Great Soul!
February 8, 2023
Fr. John Riccardo
By God’s grace, The Rescue Project (www.rescueproject.us) is currently being run in every state in the USA, save Utah, and in 19 other countries around the world. In an effort to make it more accessible for people of other languages, we recently finished and released a Spanish dubbed version (www.rescate.us), and we’re planning on additional translations in the time ahead.
The Rescue Project is composed of 9 episodes, or “chapters,” each breaking open a part of how the Lord has led us in ACTS XXIX to proclaim the kerygma. As they watch each chapter, participants are encouraged to ask the Lord for a very specific grace. For example, for the second chapter, the grace to ask for is wonder and awe, as we ponder the grandeur of all that God has created, culminating in the human person, made in His image and likeness, to be loved and to love.
Aside from the introduction, every chapter has a corresponding grace, except the final one, which is about getting clarity on the mission of the disciple. We noticed this omission recently and are amending our companion resources to rectify that. As we contemplate what our mission in the world is, as we pray and think about what exactly Jesus is sending us out to do, the grace to ask for is magnanimity.
Not exactly a household word.
Magnanimity literally means to have a great soul. Aquinas describes it as a stretching forth of the mind to great things and considers it as belonging to the virtue of fortitude or courage. The Angelic Doctor adds that this virtue makes a man deem himself worthy of great things in consideration of the gifts he holds from God.
Now, some might think this virtue is, well, not a virtue. How do we reconcile this with the virtue of humility? People who are magnanimous aren’t proud, since they consider everything they have and are as a gift from God. And since God is so good, His gifts are likewise good. The magnanimous person desires to use those gifts as best he can, not so that he is praised, but that God is praised through him.
This virtue is what roused St. Ignatius as he read the lives of the saints while convalescing in his father’s house. As he read the life of Francis and others, he was moved by the thought that he too could do such things. But here’s the key: before reading the lives of the saints, Ignatius aspired to amass honor and fame for himself. Now, as he read what these Christian saints had done, the Holy Spirit moved him to see that true honor and greatness wasn’t about amassing honors for himself but for God, hence the Jesuit motto for the greater glory of God.
The final chapter of The Rescue Project puts forth a number of examples and heroes who understood that they were destined by God to live in their particular time. Each of them lived and acted in such a way that they sought to continue the mission Jesus began on Easter Sunday. Each of them is a model of magnanimity. So, too, is our patroness, Joan of Arc. In fact, it would be hard to find a single saint that didn’t demonstrate this virtue.
Perhaps it would be profitable for us all this Lent to pick up a biography or two on the saints, and ask the Lord to do in us what He did in Ignatius, namely, to rouse us more and more to see everything as gift and to aspire to do great things for the greater glory of God.