🕊️ Virtue Description
Today on VirTrue, we’re talking about the virtue of Concord (Concordia).
Concord is the fruit of charity that fosters unity, harmony, and peaceful cooperation among individuals and groups. It is not about avoiding conflict but actively cultivating unity through humility, patience, and mutual respect.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, II–II, Q32) teaches that concord is a form of charity that reconciles differences and seeks the common good through ordered love.
A person living in concord doesn’t suppress opinions but harmonizes differences through love of God and neighbor. This virtue integrates with patience and prudence, allowing for constructive disagreement without fracturing relationships or institutions.
Concord is foundational to families, communities, and the Church, sustaining cooperation, trust, and shared mission without requiring sameness.
⚖️ Vice of Deficiency: Discord
Definition:A disposition that resists unity and intentionally or carelessly fosters division, resentment, or hostility.
Why it fits:Discord is the absence of concord. It elevates self-will over communion and often masks pride, bitterness, or emotionalism as honesty or strength.
Description:The discordant person is quick to divide and slow to reconcile. Discord turns difference into rivalry and wounds the Body of Christ by prioritizing personal agendas over the peace of truth. It frequently arises in marriages, workplaces, and parish life when people resist humility or mutual submission.
💧 Vice of Excess: Complicity
Definition:Willing cooperation or silent consent in wrongdoing for the sake of preserving peace or institutional agreement.
Why it fits:Complicity mimics the appearance of concord but is empty of moral substance. It preserves peace at the cost of truth. When unity is pursued without fidelity to justice or doctrine, it becomes a counterfeit virtue.
Example:During the Arian crisis, many bishops knew the heresy was false but still signed off under political pressure. Their failure wasn’t doctrinal — it was moral. They chose a shallow institutional unity over fidelity to the truth of Christ.
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🪞 My Life
Concord is a virtue I’ve actively pursued, though not always successfully.
In marriage, I’ve seen discord show up as being strong-willed or slow to listen.In work, it’s easy to argue over process instead of uniting around shared goals.In politics, I’ve wrestled with how to find common ground on the good — not just getting my way, but seeking the good we can agree on, test, and pursue with reason.
At times, I’ve fallen into complicity — staying quiet or softening the truth in order to keep the peace.
I’ve also questioned whether certain Church leaders, especially bishops, are complicit when they promote partisan policy positions or downplay serious moral issues for the sake of political or institutional harmony. This includes:
* The shedding of innocent blood
* The sins of the sodomites
* The oppression of the poor and the foreigner
* Injustice toward workers
Concord must not come at the cost of reason or justice.
🌍 The Secular Perspective
The modern world confuses opinion with will.
Our culture elevates emotion over reason and treats disagreement as threat. But concord isn’t compromise, and unity isn’t uniformity. We must overcome emotional reactions with reason and act from the will, not from instinct.
True concord requires effort, humility, and a shared pursuit of the good. Not silence. Not appeasement.
🌟 Example Saint: St. Catherine of Siena
* Lived in a time of division and corruption: schism, political chaos, clergy scandal.
* Worked tirelessly to restore unity between popes and princes, clergy and laity — not through compromise, but through truth anchored in divine charity.
* In The Dialogue, God teaches her that the soul must be converted in the will, abandoning self-interest to align with divine order.
* She wrote:
“The variety of gifts in the Church … I have distributed them all in such a way that no one has all of them. … Thus have I given you reason — necessity, in fact — to practice mutual charity.”
Her life teaches that unity in the Church is not sameness, but shared surrender to God’s will.
“Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.” — St. Catherine of Siena
💬 Tell Me What You Think
Share your thoughts in the comments and continue the conversation.Your insights may be featured in future episodes when we invite guests to explore this virtue further.
✝️ Act of Concord
O my God, I surrender my opinions, my passions, my talents, and my gifts in the service of your divine will.I will work toward the common good of my fellow man rather than asserting my own will.Strengthened by your grace, help me to act in unity with the body of Christ throughout the world in patience, humility, and mutual respect.Let your will be done, Lord, not mine.Amen.
🛡️ Closing Prayer
Lord, bless us with faith, hope, love, prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice that we may live as you intended man to live, in all virtue and righteousness.Help us to flee from sin, and avoid all temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.Protect us with a spiritual hedge in front of us, behind us, above us, below us, to our right, and to our left, within us and all around us, and seal it with the blood of your precious Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.Help us to keep you in everything that we think, say, and do.Amen.
🕊️ Go out and fill the world with virtue. Deus vult!
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