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Gift of Knowledge 

Helps to Sanctify the World Around Us

BY MARK SHEA

As we discussed previously, the gift of knowledge is there to make us “complete thinkers,” to connect one thing with another and to connect what is of earth to what is of heaven. This is often surprising both to secularists and to Christians of a certain stripe who imagine that the only thing a spiritual gift should concern is “spiritual” (by which they mean “disembodied”) things.
So it can be disorienting to hear that, say, Nicolaus Copernicus, who was a priest, was being a good Catholic in working through his calculations to show that the earth went around the sun, or Father George Lemaitre was being a good Catholic in formulating the Big Bang Theory, or St. Albert the Great was being a good Catholic in trying to do natural history, or Louis Pasteur was being a good Catholic by studying anthrax, or Gregor Mendel was being a good Catholic by inventing the science of genetics.
But since, as St. Thomas made clear, all truth is God’s truth, Catholics exercising the gift of knowledge do this because they know that earth and heaven are bound together by two unbreakable cords: the fact that the universe was created by God and the fact that God has joined himself to earth in the incarnation of the Son of God.

That’s why the gift of knowledge is a sanctifying gift. To sanctify is to make holy, to set apart, to give to God. The main thing made holy by the sanctifying gift of knowledge is, of course, the saint. But the saint’s task is then to sanctify the world around him. So when we are infused with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we respond to the promptings of the Holy Spirit by a sort of instinct that refuses to cut earth off from heaven, but instead insists on glorifying God the Creator who is also Christ the Redeemer....................
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