This is a modified version of an article which appeared in January 1970 edition of The Clergy Review’ pp.52-63. As I have already mentioned in the Introduction to this volume, it was written to prepare the readers (mainly clergy) for the demise of the ‘Questions and Answers’ feature in the periodical. It was intended as a move to implement the vision of Vatican II with its emphasis on the role of conscience and personal responsibility and also to encourage priests (and moral theologians) to help people grow in the skills of discernment and decision-making needed if they are to benefit from this development in pastoral practice.
Introduction
Some time ago, after giving a talk to a group of Catholic doctors, I was asked for an answer to a very complicated case in the field of Medical Ethics. I admitted quite frankly that far from being able to give a clear answer I could not even understand all the medical data in the case. I suggested that it was not the role of moral theologians to provide ready-made answers but that their task was to help people made their own responsible decisions, taking into account all the factors which are morally relevant in any situation. In the case in question, I insisted, it is the doctor who must decide, not the moral theologian, since only a doctor could fully understand all that is involved in a complicated medical problem.
Later in the evening a lady came up to me and said very sympathetically, ‘I was sorry for you this evening, Father, when you were unable to answer that question. It just goes to show that moral theologians ought really to be trained as doctors too.’ No doubt she was trying to console me. In fact, she merely confirmed me in my basic position. What she was forgetting was that moral theology concerns every area of life – education, marriage, politics, law, economics, war, penal affairs, industry, social work and race relations. If her suggestion was taken seriously, a moral theologian would need to qualify as a teacher, lawyer, social worker, criminologist and economist, as well as getting married, engaging in politics, joining the armed forces and perhaps serving a prison sentence for good measure.
There has been a tendency to regard the moral theologian as ‘the one with all the answers’ and moral theologians themselves have not exactly discouraged this attitude. In fact, if one looks at the moral theology section of a seminary library, one will find a number of books with ‘Questions and Answers’ style titles. To be fair, many of the questions posed concerned issues of canon law and asked for a precise interpretation of some difficult point in law. Even one of Bernard Häring’s books was entitled, Bernard Häring Replies: Answers to 50 Moral and Religious Questions.
Hearing the Call of God in the Historical Situation
The role of moral theologians today is more one of being ‘people with questions’. I do not mean that their heads are full of unanswered questions (though there is some truth in that), rather, they are people who help others to question their own way of acting – not in any morbid introspective sense – but through a growing realisation that human living is simply a lived-out answer to God’s question, ‘Do you love me?’. The role of moral theologians is to highlight the connection between this question and human living. In this way, they will help individual Christians hear this question as it come to them in the demands of every life, so that they in turn can question the response they are making to these demands in their own unique personal situation.
A basic truth that we moral theologians must constantly draw attention to is that God’s living call to people only has reality in the present to be lived and in the future to be realised. It is precisely in the situations of the present day itself that God’s challenge to us is to be found, not in any body of universal principles or laws. Edward Schillebeeckx expresses this truth very powerfully:
There is only one source of ethical norms, namely, the historical reality of the value of the inviolable human person with all its bodily and social implications. That is why we cannot attribute validity to abstract norms as such. Moreover, no abstract statement can produce a call or invitation … Therefore, these abstract, generally valid norms are an inadequate yet real pointer to the one real concrete ethical norm, namely, this concrete human person living historically in this concrete society. Ethical norms are requirements made by reality, and the so-called abstract general norms are but the essentially inadequate expression of this. Therefore, it is not the inadequate expression which, by itself, constitutes the ethical norm, but it is a pointer to the one and only norm: these persons who must be approached in a love that demands justice for all. (God, the Future of Man, Sheed & Ward, London, 1969, pp. 151-2)
Moral theologians who are not open to the demands of present-day situations might be called ‘historians of moral theology’ but certainly cannot be called moral theologians in the full sense of the word.
It is precisely in the face of the present-day situation that the distinct role of moral theologians is most clearly to be seen. They are indeed the ones with the questions but their questions must be realistic; they must be relevant to contemporary living. This is not just a question of adaptation of language. It is more a matter of discerning where the enduring demands of Christian living become incarnate in life today. Moral theologians do not make them incarnate. As demands they are already present. The man lying wounded on the Jericho road is incarnate in far too many forms in our world today. It is the role of moral theologians to help to locate the Jericho roads of today (i.e. where the unanswered needs of persons are to be found in our age) and to make Christians travelling on these roads (i.e. in industry, city-dwelling and immigration) aware of their responsibility. Moral theologians cannot produce blueprints for making the Jericho roads of today safe places for travellers; but they can and should insist on and explain the values to be promoted and the aims to be kept in mind. Moreover, moral theologians can sometimes draw on the wealth of Christian experience and offer more specific guidance, although they should avoid the temptation of thinking that Christians are the only ones who have anything to contribute in this way.
Towards a Wider Moral Outlook
Does this mean that moral theologians are going out on strike – no more answers to questions asked? Not at all! It is simply that moral theologians are keen to play their true role in the Church. If asked concrete questions, moral theologians will attempt to answer them – but the chances are that their answers will simply pose further questions. For instance, if moral theologians are asked whether it is right for a family to take squatters’ rights in an unoccupied house if they cannot find accommodation anywhere, it is likely that they will refuse to answer that question in isolation but will link it with other questions which cannot be separated from it. For example, is it right for multiple houseowners to refuse entry to homeless families when one of their houses is lying unoccupied; is it right for those in local government housing departments to tolerate a situation in which families are homeless, especially when local property is lying empty; is it right for the citizens in a locality to remain silent if such a situation is tolerated. These and similar questions all find their origin in a basic Christian truth which goes back to the times of the early Church and which has often been quoted in recent Church statements, most notably by Paul VI in his Encyclical, Populorum Progressio:
No one is justified in keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need, when others lack necessities. In a word, ‘According to the traditional doctrine found in the Fathers of the Church and the great theologians, the right to property must never be exercised to the detriment of the common good’. (no. 23)
Moral theologians will refuse to be hemmed in by the questions put to them since they will consider their main task to be to bring to light the question that Christ is asking in any situation. This is the moral theologian’s principal concern. It is not up to moral theologians to praise or condemn; theirs is not a judgemental science. Theology, as its name implies, concerns God; it is trying to know and understand God as he reveals himself. Moral theology in particular is trying to know and understand God as he speaks to us and challenges our love for him in the demands of ordinary everyday human life. The way a specific question is posed might very well hide God, since its formulation might be based on a view of God which is itself questionable to the modern mind. For instance, how is a moral theologian to answer the question, ‘Is it a serious sin to miss Mass on Sunday?’ Underlying such a question there might be a host of misconceptions about sin, Church law, liturgy and the Mass itself.
No one is denying that questions need to be asked. Every question is a request for help and cannot be ignored. However, the help needed may not be obvious. Often what may be needed is a change of outlook regarding the answer expected. There is a world of difference between, ‘Tell me what is God’s will for me in this situation’ and ‘Help me to be able to discern what is God’s will for me in this situation.’ If moral theologians can help at this second level, they are en route to making themselves redundant from the questioner’s point of view. That cannot but be a good thing. Pius XII himself said:
All sound education aims at rendering the one educated independent, within proper limits. This is also true of the education of the conscience by God and the Church. Its aim is someone who is of age and who also has the courage which goes hand in hand with responsibility (18 April 1952, cf. Catholic Documents, VII, p. 19).
This idea of a joint search for God’s will is even true of the Church herself in her relationship with the world. Schillebeeckx writes:
The Church does not simply have something to communicate. In order to communicate, she must also receive from and listen to what comes to her from the world as ‘foreign prophecy’ but in which she nonetheless recognises the well-known voice of her Lord. The relationship between the Church and the world is thus no longer the relationship of a ‘teaching’ Church to a ‘learning’ world, but the interrelationship of dialogue in which both make a mutual contribution and listen sincerely to each other (God, the Future of Man, Sheed & Ward, London, 1969, p. 126).
One of the basic values insisted on in Vatican II was personal responsibility. This obviously includes the idea that the consciences of Christians must be better educated so that they are not constantly asking questions of moral theologians or their local clergy. Rahner makes an interesting comment on this point:
Catholics are therefore inevitably left by the Church’s teaching and pastoral authority more than formerly to their own conscience, to form the concrete decision independently on their own responsibility. The confessional in particular will therefore be concerned more than formerly with fundamental formation of the conscience which will then be committed to its own responsibility for the actual decision (The Christian of the Future, Herder-Burns Oates, London, 1966, pp. 43-44).
Christians can no longer see themselves as living in a kind of extra-territorial colony in the world. They are very much of the world precisely because they have been given the mission of being a sign of God’s action in the world. This is clearly expressed in Council’s Constitutions on the Church (LG), no. 1, 9 & 48 and on the Liturgy (SC) no. 5. Moreover, the whole of the Constitution on the Church in Modern World (GS) spells out the implications of this notion. It has also influenced many of the other Council documents, notably, the Decrees on the Church’s Missionary Activity and on the Laity.
Because of this change of approach to the world and also because of the complexity of the problems of human living today, moral theologians cannot go far along the road to personal decision with individual Christians. Again Rahner expresses this truth very clearly:
The Church cannot overlook the fact that the road from universal principle to concrete prescription is even longer than it ever was, and that in practice the Church by official teaching and guidance, can accompany the individual to the end of this road much less often than formerly. Instead, however, and as the best substitute, the Church would need to give the individual Christian three things: a more living ardour of Christian inspiration as a basis of individual life; an absolute conviction that the moral responsibility of the individual is not at an end because he does not come in conflict with any concrete instruction of the official Church; an initiation into the holy art of finding the concrete prescription for his own decision in the personal call of God, in other words, the logic of concrete particular decision which of course does justice to universal regulative principles but which cannot wholly be deduced from them solely by explicit casuistry (op. cit., pp. 46-47).
What Rahner is saying here is very similar to GS. no. 43:
Lay people should also know that it is generally the function of their well-formed Christian conscience to see that the divine law is inscribed in the life of the earthly city. From priests they may look for spiritual light and nourishment. Let the laity not imagine that their pastors are always such experts, that to every problem which arises, however complicated, they can readily give them a concrete solution, or even that such is their mission. Rather, enlightened by Christian wisdom and giving close attention to the teaching authority of the Church, let the laity take on their own distinctive role.
However, Vatican II has called us away from a too individualistic morality and has laid great stress on the importance of social justice. The message of GS is particularly strong:
Profound and rapid changes make it particularly urgent that no one, ignoring the trend of events or drugged by laziness, rests content with a merely individualistic morality. It grows increasingly true that the obligations of justice and love are fulfilled only if everyone, contributing to the common good, according to their own abilities and the needs of others, also promote and assist the public and private institutions dedicated to bettering the conditions of human life … Let all consider it their sacred obligation to count social necessities among the primary duties of the modern age and play heed to them (no. 30).
If moral theologians are to be faithful to their task as outlined in the Vatican II documents, they will have to widen their own horizon of moral questions and will have make a sustained effort to make such a wider outlook something which is taken for granted among Catholics. That such a widening is urgently needed is clearly exemplified by comparing the very slight reaction to Populorum Progressio and the massive protest and upheaval which followed Humanae Vitae. If the former were taken seriously its effects would be far more revolutionary.
In the light of the above comment, I am very conscious that this volume does not contain many items dealing with specific issues of social justice. Yet issues of social justice have occupied a major place in my personal odyssey of receiving Vatican II. In my formal teaching, at both Heythrop College and Liverpool Hope University, a large part of the syllabus I followed dealt with general and specific issues of social justice. Two months of my sabbatical in 1980 were taken up experiencing liberation theology in practice especially in the Philippines and in other parts of the developing world. As a member of CAFOD’s HIV/AIDS advisory committee for nearly twenty years I was given the opportunity to visit Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Thailand and the Philippines and was able to see for myself how HIV/AIDS was a major development issues in many developing countries and how poverty, rooted in injustice, played a major part in the spread of the pandemic. Much of my writing in this area took the form of my personal diaries written during those visits and highlighting how some of the major root causes could be traced back to the roots of this injustice located in the developed world. I brought that out strongly throughout my book, NDSE. In fact, my final summing up in the concluding section (pp. 210-213) carries the heading, ‘A Time of Grace: AIDS – A Window of Opportunity for our Global Society’.
At a more general level, most of my pieces about social justice have taken the form of homilies. In this volume the first two items in the section, ‘The Eucharist and Vatican II’, are examples of such homilies. The item immediately following this one is also a piece concerned with social justice. I wrote it at the request of CAFOD for their resource book, Livesimply for their 2008 campaign under that title.
I am very aware that this volume has little to contribute to what is probably the most far-reaching moral issue of the present day i.e. the global financial crisis. Quite honestly, I am left baffled by the complexities of modern global economics. The evils of the system seem to be staring us all in the face:
How these evils can be overcome is another matter. I have often commented on the fact that I am often referred to as an emeritus moral theologian and have remarked that a literal translation of the term emeritus is ‘past it’. In the present economic crisis I am very conscious just how true that description of my competence is.