It is a temptation for people of faith of every age to be influenced by and even seek to blend in with the society that surrounds them. It was true for the Israelites of the Old Testament who struggled to keep their faith in God who led them out of Egypt (2 Kings 17:7-17).

In our own day, we are challenged, for example, not to absorb the values of the sexual revolution or the addiction to material things that Pope Francis so often speaks about.

That temptation to blend in often leads to a total loss of faith. Jesus Himself faced a moment when some of His followers walked away from Him completely because His teaching was hard (Jn 6:66).

But a further temptation is to compromise with the faith itself. In that case, there is an effort to “keep a foot in both camps,” often by holding to an abstract or emotional love for God but living according to the values embraced by wider society. Sometimes this is done with the thought of “avoiding conflict” perhaps even within our families.

But Jesus has warned His followers that merely invoking His name will not be sufficient for the task He has given us (Mt 7: 21-23).

As we reflected last week, to resist these constant pressures, we need to live with virtue; that is, those habits, dispositions and attitudes that strengthen our minds and our actions to lead a morally good life (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1804).

Said another way, the virtues are those moral and spiritual pillars of life that give us a strength of character to live rightly before God and before our fellow men and women.

The overarching virtue that, one might say, guides all others, is prudence. When speaking of the virtue of prudence, we do not mean that sort of common practical wisdom that we assume to be prudence in everyday life. For example, we would say it is prudent to lock our door at night.

But prudence as a virtue is the habit of seeking to recognize and distinguish what is right from what is wrong, what is true from what is false. And once the truth is recognized, then we live prudence by making the truth the basis of all our thoughts, our judgments and our actions.

This understanding of prudence can immediately be seen to clash with but also to be an antidote for one of the great weaknesses of modern society. We constantly hear that there is no truth that can be identified that binds us all. Instead, you have your truth and I have mine.

As a result, our society demonstrates weakness and doubt about affirming that anything is right or wrong.

Prudence, however, recognizes by human reason that certain actions are to be done and others avoided. It does not need the Ten Commandments to recognize that thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery and that we should honor our father and mother. Anything less would make us to be less than fully human.

The search for truth, however, is not limited to reason. God’s revelation in the Scriptures, the coming of Jesus among us and His guidance of the Catholic faith through the ages gives us further understanding of what is true and real.

We can recognize that there is a God, that the world and the human race were created by His wisdom and that we are not mere biological accidents. And we can know that our purpose is to prepare to meet Christ and to seek eternal life with Him.

The prudent man or woman will make this understanding of truth to be the guide for practical and moral decisions. In faith, we ask God to strengthen our prudence. We seek the guidance of the Church, not only in our day but in its treasury of experience and teaching. The prudent person will constantly test his or her judgments, asking the advice and counsel of others who demonstrate prudence.

We can expect that to live prudence, actively seeking what is true, will cause us to stand out instead of blending in with our society and our modern culture. Prudence calls for us to make a basic decision and to take a stand. But to stand with the truth is to take a stand with Christ. That is the essence of prudence.