Piety is both a moral virtue and a gift of the Holy Spirit. Piety allows one to recognize relationships and where one fits in those relationships. With regard to God, it enables the person to recognize that God is Creator and he is a creature or, to put it bluntly, that God is God and you are not. With regard to our fellow man, it enables the person to respect where one fits in relationships. “Filial piety,” of the kind caricatured in films depicting the Far East, recognizes that respect belongs to a parent because he is a parent.

One suspects that not a few moderns might wish God spared them piety.

In a Church that today often seems enthralled to “learn” from the modern world, piety rarely seems to be mentioned because it presents a worldview markedly out of synch with modernity. Modernity has little use for piety because of the value it puts on relationship. A Catholic understanding of the human person recognizes that people are relational and that relationality is essential to their humanity. A person disconnected from relationships is not “choosing” aloneness; he is deforming his humanity.

That vision is at odds with the individualism that marks so much of modern thought. From atomized social contract thinkers like Hobbes, Mill, Smith, and arguably Locke to cultural icons like the Marlboro Man or Horatio Alger and his bootstraps, moderns — and especially Americans — have been socialized to regard relationships as at best discretionary, at worst dangerous, where a “real man” proudly does it “my way!” That is also, paradoxically, the ethic of “choice” that so dominates the abortion debate.

(Note that no infant has yet announced, “Mom, get outta here! I’m doing my own diapers!” No child learned to talk by being put in front of a screen. A child recognizes his dependence. It’s only when we “grow up” that we grow stupid, which is probably why the Lord made “becoming like a child” prerequisite to entering heaven.)

Yet this individualist focus impairs our understanding of piety, as a virtue and as a gift. If we are all isolated monads, then recognizing one is in some ways subordinate to another offends modern sensibilities about equality. For moderns, “authority” comes not from relationship but from reason. Of course, since moderns are also ambivalent about reason, recognizing “authority” in fact usually means “I agree with you.” And, if that’s the case, then a parent or a God that says “thou shalt not” runs the risk of being refused authoritative acknowledgement.

Every year on Holy Family Sunday, the Church reads from the Book of Sirach, where reverence for father and mother is extolled. The Fourth Commandment does not say “Listen to your father and mother.” It says “Honor” them. Honor is more than a grudging listening or an acquiescence in what you hear if you find it reasonable, rational, and/or likeable. It means acknowledging that respect and honor for a parent because he or she is a parent is a value in itself, and not just when it is convenient. Extrapolate that human experience to one’s relationship to God, “from whom all good things come,” and we begin to get an insight into the value of piety and, by extension, religion and justice as well.