Made for Joy

HAPPINESS: What it really means and how to find it. Social media relentlessly bombards us with messaging like this about finding true happiness. We mostly scroll on. However, a recent conference in Ireland caught my eye. Titled Happiness Conference 2026, speakers considered what is preventing our happiness, and what is the road to true happiness and joy from a Christian perspective.

An initiative of the Dominicans, the main speaker was Fr. Gregory Pine, OP, an American moral theologian and author of several books including Prudence: Choose Confidently, Live Boldly and Your Eucharistic Identity: A Sacramental Guide to the Fullness of Life. He is a regular contributor to the well-known Catholic podcast Godsplaining, which promotes itself to listeners with the call: “Tune in, as we converse to convert.”

Reading the conference brochure, I was reminded of Pope St. John Paul II’s comment to young people gathered in Rome in 2000 for World Youth Day, “It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness.” St. Augustine put it another way, “Restless is our heart until it comes to rest in you.” The Happiness conference brochure published another pertinent quote from John Paul II, “We who are Christians have a further cause for joy: like Jesus, we know that we are loved by God our Father. This love transforms our lives and fills us with joy. It makes us see that Jesus did not come to lay burdens upon us. He came to teach us what it means to be fully happy and fully human. Therefore, we discover joy when we discover truth – the truth about God our Father, the truth about Jesus our Savior, the truth about the Holy Spirit who lives in our hearts.”

The other two speakers at the Happiness conference were Fr. Toby Lees, OP, director of Radio Maria England and assistant priest at Our Lady of the Rosary and St Dominic’s, London. After studying law at Cambridge University, Fr. Toby became a solicitor but then felt called to the priesthood. He specialised in moral theology in Rome, writing his thesis on the passion of sorrow and the vice of acedia (sloth) in St. Thomas Aquinas, and what that great theologian’s thought might contribute to a contemporary understanding of depression.

Fr. Conor McDonough

The third speaker was Irish Dominican Fr. Conor McDonough, OP. He is well known in Ireland for his YouTube series Treasure Island, which provides history and religious context for some of Ireland’s ancient ecclesiastical heritage sites. He is currently researching a PhD on biblical commentary in early medieval Ireland on the Letters of St. Paul. Ordained in 2016, he is one of 17 Dominican friars in the Irish province under the age of 40 who have given themselves to religious life in recent years, bucking the downward vocations trend in the Irish Church.

I spoke to Fr. Conor about happiness and St Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of what it is and how we achieve it. He explained that happiness is a prominent theme in the Dominican tradition, and especially in Aquinas’ theology. “Some Catholics are surprised when they hear us Dominicans speaking about happiness so much in our sermons, talks and writings.” He cited The New Wine of Dominican Spirituality: A Drink Called Happiness by theologian Paul Murray, OP, which explores the theme of happiness in the lives and writings of Dominican saints such as St. Dominic, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Catherine of Siena as well as their profound, joyful experience of God’s Word and their love of learning, defence of truth and spirit of freedom within the order. This theme of happiness, Fr. Conor underlined, “doesn’t exclude other things like sorrow and penance.”

Starting point

“For St. Thomas Aquinas, happiness is his starting point in moral theology. He asks: what is it that all men desire? They all desire happiness. Moral theology is about how to get to the point of happiness. For him, it is not just a fleeting thing; it is a stable condition of flourishing in all the dimensions of mind, body and soul according to God’s wise plan. It involves all the virtues.”

This area was covered during the conference by Fr. Pine, who spoke about the connection between happiness and virtue. “If you don’t have that connection, you have a slightly watery sense of happiness as something that just comes and goes,” Fr. Conor explained. “The Dominican understanding associates happiness or flourishing with the daily practice of virtue. Fr. Toby discussed acedia or sloth as that which can prevent us from engaging in spiritual practices that lead us to happiness. What are the obstacles in contemporary culture to moving towards the happiness for which God made us?”

Fr. Conor himself addressed the conference on God’s own happiness and sharing God’s happiness as His creatures. “This is really important for St. Thomas Aquinas, but it is something we rarely preach about; the fact that God Himself is supremely happy, and that His happiness is seen in creation, and we can participate in it by engaging with the created world.”

Sometimes people use the words happiness and joy interchangeably. According to Fr. Conor, “Different spiritual traditions use those words in different ways. We must ask what people mean by them. In the writings of St. Thomas, they are used differently. Joy, gaudium, is something that is a passion. When we gain something we are looking for, we experience the passion of joy. But it comes and goes. Whereas happiness for him – beatitudo, or the Greek term eudaimonia – means a stable, lasting possession based on the practice of virtues.”

Social media

Asked if he is concerned by how social media and contemporary culture portray happiness, the young Dominican scholar who is doing his research at the University of Galway commented, “I see students in the university all the time sitting in large groups just scrolling through their phones in total misery. There is nothing flourishing about them – it is just a purely passive existence. I think of St. Pier Giorgio Frassati when he talked about the temptation simply to exist rather than to truly live. To live without faith, without a heritage to defend, without battling constantly for truth, is not to live but to ‘get along’; we must never just ‘get along’. The call to happiness is related to the call to greatness. To say to people: you were made for something better than just being a cog in a corporate cyber world. You were made for more than this. You were made to flourish, to experience the world and all its beauty.”

“Our conference calls people to look up from their phones, to consider what they were made for, and to take up that call. For young people who return to faith or come to faith, there is often a great desire to share it with others. They want to communicate in an intelligent, attractive way that is sustainable over a lifetime.”

He admits there is a risk in tailoring your message too much to young people. “It’s important that as Christians we have confidence in our theological and spiritual tradition. We are not simply asking what will get the most views or the highest number of hits, but what do people need to hear? What does the Gospel demand that we say and teach in this time, in this place, to these people?”

Impact of AI

“I think it is vital in our time, when people are so impressed with what AI is able to do, to think about what it means to be human and to reclaim that. One of our Dominican friars in Rome runs a conference called Remaining Human in the Age of AI. You can think about it through many dimensions, such as human community and freedom, and happiness is another way to approach that problem. To think about what we are capable of, what machines are not capable of, and meditating on the difference between us and machines encourages us to value our dignity.”

“Augustine’s emphasis that we are made for God – that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. That is essentially the message of the conference. Happiness is possible. It’s not a myth or an illusion. But it’s only possible in God.” As St. Pier Giorgio Frassati said, “True happiness does not consist in the pleasures of this world, or in earthly things, but in peace of conscience, which we only have if we are pure of heart and mind.”