President O’Reilly’s 2023 Thanksgiving Address

By Paul J. O’Reilly, Ph.D.
President, Thomas Aquinas College
Thanksgiving Dinner
November 20, 2023
California Campus

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“Develop the Habit of Gratitude”

From Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation:

“Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor … rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks … in general for all the great and various favors which He hath been pleased to confer on us.”

Lincoln, decades later, proclaimed the need to acknowledge our blessings: 

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us” (Proclamation of a National Day of Humiliation).

Both these great presidents have seen the connection between gratitude and humility, on the one hand, and pride as the source of ingratitude on the other hand. As we prepare ourselves for Thanksgiving, it is good to see that Washington and Lincoln have echoed an even greater wisdom.

“Our Lord inspires us in the Beatitudes, and in how we are to pray, so that we should choose to be poor in spirit. One of the best ways to achieve this is to develop the habit of gratitude.”

Jesus taught His disciples about happiness in the Sermon on the Mount. As St. Augustine put it, the whole perfection of our life is found in that sermon. Jesus begins: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of God” (Matthew, 5:3). St. Jerome says about this beatitude: “Do not imagine that [this] poverty is bred by necessity. For He added ‘in spirit’ so you would understand blessedness to be humility and not poverty.” Our Lord is teaching us, then, that the Kingdom of Heaven is the home of those who are humble. And St. Augustine goes further: 

“And the poor in spirit are rightly understood here as meaning the humble and God-fearing, i.e., those who have not the spirit which puffs up. Nor ought blessedness to begin at any other point whatever, if indeed it is to attain unto the highest wisdom.”

This first beatitude teaches us that humility is the start of the path to wisdom and leads to happiness in this world and the next.

St. Thomas explains:

“For a life of pleasure consists of two things. First, in the affluence of external goods, whether riches or honors; from which man is withdrawn — by a virtue so that he uses them in moderation — and by a gift, in a more excellent way, so that he despises them altogether. Hence the first beatitude is: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ which may refer either to the contempt of riches, or to the contempt of honors, which results from humility” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa I-II 69).

Not only did Jesus teach us the path to happiness when He preached the Beatitudes, but He also taught us how to pray. He taught us to address God as “Our Father” and to make petitions to Him. One of these petitions is: “Give us today our daily bread.” St. Thomas points out that God is teaching us in this petition the sins that arise from a desire of temporal goods. He says that there are six sins to be avoided, the fifth of which is ingratitude. The ungrateful man prides himself on what he has, and believes he is the principal agent in achieving what he has. Jesus shows us that when we pray, “Give us today our daily bread,” we are to acknowledge that all that we have, even manifest things that are produced by our hands, come from God.

Our Lord inspires us in the Beatitudes, and in how we are to pray, so that we should choose to be poor in spirit. One of the best ways to achieve this is to develop the habit of gratitude. We do that by acknowledging that all the good things we have come ultimately from God. We should resist the temptation, quoting Lincoln, to “imagine, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own,” because then we “become too self-sufficient … too proud.”

What should we be grateful for? What are we the members of the TAC family grateful for?

• Our founders: for their courage and daring to establish TAC against all odds.
• Our Board of Governors, for their selfless and generous support of Catholic liberal education.
• Our benefactors: only because of their generosity and encouragement can this College exist.
• Our chaplains: who provide for our spiritual life.
• Our tutors: who sacrifice to live in Southern California, but do so in order to guide us to the truth.
• Our administration and staff: who provide for the day-to-day operations of TAC.
• Our fellow students: who devote themselves to improve this community in class and beyond.

So, in all, we are grateful for what TAC offers, and ultimately we must thank God for guiding our efforts.

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