My dear sisters and brothers in the Lord,

Over the past few months we have been giving some special attention to giving thanks to the Lord here in our local church of Cincinnati.  We have been dealing with gratitude.

Last year I started to write a series of articles in The Catholic Telegraph entitled Grateful Believers.  In the beginning of that series I said that, as my life and ministry draw to a close, I have found myself ever more convinced of the importance of gratitude.  I said that one of the most fundamental responsibilities of the Church's ministers is to lead the faithful to gratitude, to teach people how and why to be grateful.  I said that I would consider my ministry as Archbishop of Cincinnati to have been successful if I could leave behind me a local church filled with grateful believers.

In the weeks that followed the beginning of those Grateful Believer articles, I tried to describe gratitude and deal with some of its implications.  Gratitude is an acknowledgment of a benefit received from another.  It is an expression of appreciation of something good that we have received.  Gratitude is important in the spiritual life of the Christian believer because being grateful, being thankful means acknowledging that we have been and are the recipients of the kindness and generosity of God.  The person who is never grateful, who never expresses thanksgiving, is the person who is not aware of having been gifted by the Lord.  If you are not thankful, you haven't been paying attention to the ways in which God has been generous to you in the past and continues to be generous to you in the present.

There are all sorts of things to be grateful for.  If we are at all aware of God's action in our ongoing human existence, we will be thankful for our lives, thankful for our health, thankful for our parents and our relatives and our friends.  We will be thankful for the talents that God has given us, for that complex of gifts and capabilities that make us the unique persons that we are and that enable us to participate in carrying out the providential plan of the Lord for his creation.

If we are reflective enough and humble enough we will also be able to see the action of God in those aspects of our lives that seem to be painful and difficult: tensions with other human beings, sickness, failure.  God is involved in all these things, not as one who sets out to test us, but as one who gives us gifts that are greater than we can understand.  Every action of God in our lives is gift.  Every action of God in our lives is good.  Every action of God in our lives calls for our gratitude.

God's invitation to gratitude is addressed to us over and over again in the Sacred Scriptures.  Much of the book of the psalms is an invitation to be grateful to God.  We frequently see Jesus giving thanks to His Father.  Over and over again St. Paul gives thanks to God for the gifts that have been given to the earliest Christians scattered around the early churches of Asia Minor.

In the liturgy, too, we express gratitude.  We say, "Thanks be to God" as our response to readings from Scripture. As we enter the central portion of the Mass in the preface, we proclaim that it is right to give God thanks and praise.  The priest then continues with "We do well always and everywhere to give You thanks."  Giving thanks is what the worship of God is all about.

As the series of Grateful Believers continued, I wrote about  how to express gratitude and what to express gratitude for. I described how gratitude can be a kind of thermometer to diagnose our spiritual temperature, and to what extent we are spiritually healthy. 

But I didn't want to make these reflections on gratitude to be a solo performance. As a result of consultation with some of my staff members, I invited men and women from throughout the Archdiocese to write one of the Grateful Believers articles for The Catholic Telegraph.  These were personal stories about life and death and joy and sorrow.  Many people around the archdiocese remarked to me how inspiring they found these stories and how these stories led them to more fervent thanksgiving for their own life experiences.

In addition to presenting the Catholic Telegraph articles, I  invited all the faithful of the Archdiocese, by means of a questionnaire, to sharpen their memories and their experiences of gratitude to the Lord.  The purpose of the questionnaire was to promote personal and private reflection, but well over a hundred people sent their questionnaires to me, sharing with me their reasons for being grateful to God.  What they had to say was almost without exception a source of edification for me.

During the confirmation season, my homily was about gratitude as a sign of Christian maturity.  Some ten or fifteen thousand people heard me encourage them to be thankful to God because such thankfulness is simply part of our life as grown up members of the Church.  I have tried to highlight the practice of gratitude in my other preaching, as well.

I also requested that every regular meeting of every group that meets under Catholic auspices (parish councils, faculty meetings, education commissions, and the like) should conclude with a formal, deliberate act of thanksgiving.  I suggested that the person who is responsible for the opening prayer and faith formation at the beginning of the meeting should also be responsible for preparing the prayer of thanksgiving at the end.  The purpose of such a prayer is to remind the participants that gratitude is supposed to be part of everything we do, and that, wherever there is Christian activity, there is always reason for thanksgiving.

Many people have spoken to me about their increased awareness of the place of gratitude in their Christian spirituality.  I like to think that, because of the cooperation of so many people in lifting up the importance of thanksgiving, we have more grateful believers in our local church than we had before.

But giving thanks, expressing our gratitude in thought and word is only an initial aspect of being a grateful believer.  We are called not only to say thanks to God, but to do thanks to God.  This expression of gratitude in action is what is called stewardship.  Stewardship is doing thanks.

When somebody gives us a gift or does us a favor, we spontaneously say, "Thank you."  That's the expected response between human beings.  If we don't offer some sign of gratitude, it's an indication either than we are not grateful at all for what has been given to us or we are not grateful enough to acknowledge it.  A thankless person, an ingrate, is somehow looked on as not being up to par in basic human skills.

But just saying thanks often isn't really enough.  Yes, we are expected to acknowledge in words the gift or benefit we have received, but we are expected to acknowledge it in action, too.  This acknowledgment in action is not supposed to be a "pay back" in which we calculate the value of what we have received and give exactly that much back to the giver.  Rather, it's intended to be a more intense expression of acknowledgment, a more emphatic way of saying that we are aware of having received and that we want to express that awareness by giving in return.

Doing gratitude in action is more demanding that just expressing thanks with words.  It's more elaborate.  It costs more. It's more complicated. But it is also more expressive.  And the more we have been given, the more we are expected to give in return.  Unless there is a willingness to give in return, the gratitude we express with words can easily become a mere formality.

Stewardship is the term used to express our giving in return to the Lord who has given everything to us.  Stewardship is not only the practice of persuading people to contribute more to the church in order to keep things going.  Stewardship is the practice of calling people to gratitude in action, to the practice of doing thanks.

There is a vast literature about stewardship.  Highly developed programs and spiritualities have arisen around the concept of giving back to God for what God has given to us.  I do not intend to go into detail about all the aspects of stewardship, but I want to say something about the basics.

Most explanations of stewardship speak in terms of "time, talent, and treasure."  That is to say, we use our time and our talents (abilities, skills, etc.) and our financial resources to perform acts of gratitude to the Lord, as means of expressing our thanksgiving.  (I prefer to speak of "financial resources" rather than "treasure," because "treasure" always sounds to me like something out of a pirate movie.)  These acts of gratitude are directed toward those that the Lord loves, toward the poor and the needy, toward our parishes and schools, as well as toward other agencies of philanthropy and benevolence.

The practice of stewardship is not a once in a while thing, any more than our gratitude to God is a once in a while thing.  Gratitude and the expression of it in word and action are supposed to be habitual in our lives.  They are part of what we are about in our day to day lives, every day.  They are constituent elements of our Christian spirituality.

The one thing about stewardship that we have to hang onto above all is that stewardship is about gratitude.  It's about giving thanks to the Lord for His multitudinous and continuous generosity and care for us.  Stewardship is only secondarily about helping the parish pay its bills.  It's only secondarily about providing food and shelter for the poor.  Stewardship is about gratitude.  It's about expressing in action our awareness of God's goodness to us.

The faithful of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati will be hearing more about stewardship in the months that lie ahead.  Part of my hope for fostering gratitude in our local church involves teaching people about stewardship.  I hope our people will be receptive.

Once more I stress that the important thing is gratitude.  The important thing is being thankful to God - in thoughts and words, in attentiveness to God's care for us, in confidence that even crosses are gifts, in daily responsiveness to God's action in our lives, and, of course, in stewardship, in doing thanks.

As the years have gone by I myself have tried to be more explicitly grateful to the Lord for everything in my own life.  Through the efforts that we have now undertaken, I am trying to lead our local church flock to an enhanced practice of thanksgiving.  I hope and pray that all of us will continue to develop into ever more intensely grateful believers.

With thanksgiving to God for each of you, I am,

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Most Rev. Daniel E. Pilarczyk

Archbishop of Cincinnati.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion by Individuals and Groups.

1. What role does gratitude play in my life?  In my relationship with God?

2. For what am I most grateful in my life?

3. How do I express gratitude?

4. Who do I consider to be a grateful person?

5. Why are grateful people happy people?

6. Has suffering ever elicited gratitude in my life?

7. How do I interact with ungrateful people?

8. How is gratitude part of my personal spirituality?

9. Where and when and how do I see the generosity of God?

10. How am I a steward of God's gifts?