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This Tremendous Lover

For the last several years, I have taught a moral theology class for juniors and seniors at St. Augustine Academy, where three of my children have attended school. I have always believed that young people, like all Catholics, need to see the Church’s moral teachings within the proper context of love. The Church’s moral laws safeguard and develop our love relationship with Jesus through the Holy Spirit’s work in us. A moral theology course ought to make that connection loud and clear.

To that end, and because I love Scripture, we begin the year discussing passages from Scripture that emphasize the covenant context of the Ten Commandments and their connection to the Beatitudes and Sermon on the Mount. And we end the year with M. Eugene Boylan’s work, This Tremendous Lover.

Dom Boylan, a Cistercian abbot with wonderful insights into the spiritual needs of the Catholic laity, has successfully inspired souls for decades by his rich yet clear explanations of the mystical relationship that we all have with the Holy Trinity. He anticipated Vatican Council II by connecting our spiritual life to our roles in the Mystical Body that is the Church. Yet he blended all this with an attention to the practical realities of the laity such that This Tremendous Lover has been called a modern day Introduction to the Devout Life (by St. Francis DeSales).

Living a Catholic life means more than receiving the sacraments and obeying the Church. Essentially, the Catholic life is a love relationship with the Lord, one that is nourished by spiritual reading and personal prayer. This Tremendous Lover, with its presentation of these truths, makes a wonderful culmination for a moral theology course.

http://www.amazon.com/This-Tremendous-Lover-Eugene-Boylan/dp/0870611380