The Task of Moral Theology Today

The Church participates in Christ’s role as teacher. Like any good teacher, she must consider the particular strengths and weaknesses of the students before her, aiming always to hand on the truth that is most needed at the current time. We often see such responsiveness in Magisterial teaching on morals. Indeed, it is the moral life, rooted in the practical decisions that we make every day, that is often first in mind when we consider what it means to live as a Catholic. Certainly, our moral makeup is of immediate impact on our very salvation. Accordingly, the Church must prescribe correctives, much like a physician would. Among an athletic bunch, the doctor need not prescribe exercise, but perhaps he will have to prescribe a proper amount of rest. In a sedentary group, the doctor will have to prescribe more exercise than rest.

The Church and her theologians have issued these correctives many times over just the last one hundred years. During the mid-twentieth century, at a time when many had an overly duty-based sense of morality, theologians like Servais Pinckaers, O.P., reminded us that the moral life is not arbitrary or transactional (“If I do x, then God will give me y”), but rather prescriptive of how to be most happy and authentically human. Such was one necessary corrective.

In the 1990s, St. John Paul II’s monumental encyclical, Veritatis splendor, reminded the faithful that moral acts have their own natures, which must be in accord with human dignity; we cannot justify utilizing intrinsically evil acts even if they might lead to some good outcomes. This was another necessary corrective. Accordingly, these two theologians and their wisdom have dominated moral theology for decades.

It ought not to be controversial to state that the last several hundred years of human history have been a time of significant moral confusion. Thus, in order to speak to the world, Pinckaers emphasized the philosophical and natural foundations for Christian morality. Certainly you do not need to be a Christian to recognize the connection between virtue and a happy life, the importance of the cardinal virtues, etc. This illustrates a foundation upon which people of good will can agree. The Church has also been obliged to teach with clarity on specific moral acts, especially those named in Veritatis splendor as being intrinsically evil.

Yet, these prescriptions are now decades old. Because of the blessed success of Pinckaers and St. John Paul II, moral theology no longer requires the same reforms that it once needed. What prescriptions must moral theology make today? While I am certainly no Pinckaers, I do have a few humble thoughts.

Perhaps it is time for the Church to return to an emphasis on the supernatural character of the moral life and its end goal: the radical holiness of the soul in total, beatific communion with God. It is essential that we know about both the natural foundation for holiness and what obstacles that keep us from it. Yet, moral theology studies the Christian life, which infinitely transcends both the natural order and the necessity of not-sinning. Most fundamentally, moral theology ought to give us an academic investigation into holiness itself. Holiness includes and presupposes the healing power of grace. Yet holiness is constituted principally in the radical elevation of the soul to communion with the transcendent God. Moral theologians speak about both healing and elevating grace. In a world with much brokenness, it is only natural that we have addressed healing. But we must never forget that this healing is for the sake of being raised above a merely natural moral health, and it is that supernatural holiness that we all long for most of all.

Take the gifts of the Holy Spirit as examples. According to the universal witness of the Fathers and Doctors, these gifts are a normative and essential part of holiness and salvation. Yet, in my experience, they are woefully under-represented in contemporary courses and writing on moral theology. They are often memorized as part of catechetical instruction and then forgotten, or they are awkwardly tacked on to the end of a textbook on moral theology. The result is that the movements of grace, contemplation, and the like (things that all Catholics experience), are left in the realm of the purely rhetorical or exhortatory. The objective character of particular acts is considered at length, but the Christian’s sanctification is often explored only in homilies and non-academic writing.

The Church already possesses a rich tradition of spiritual and mystical theology. This theology gives us a systematic, scientific understanding of the essential phenomena mentioned above (grace, contemplation, etc.). Spiritual theology sheds the light of theological precision onto the testimony of the extraordinary lives of the saints and mystics, thereby ensuring that this witness bears fruit in the theological life of the Church. Today, I believe that theology should once again prioritize such systematic treatment of the supernatural experience. We ought to reclaim a contemplation of the mystery of the iIndwelling of the Holy Spirit, who works beyond our own understanding and power to take us into the hidden life of the Trinity.

Such a reclamation project will be important chiefly because it will help moral theology to regain a proper focus. Our considerations of nature and sin should never be isolated, but always seen in the light of the end of the spiritual life (the proper object of moral theology), union with God. Human nature and the laws that govern it are given for the sake of this. With this direction, moral theology is seen in its full grandeur. As one wise theologian has remarked, moral theology has become “the science of sins to be avoided” [1]. This is not to say that sins ought not to be avoided! But moral theology points us not merely to banal obstacles on the field before us. Rather, it urges us on toward the wonder that sits upon the horizon. As the great mystic and theologian, St. Dionysius, said, theology is meant to move us toward union with the mysteries of God which “completely fill our sightless minds with treasures beyond all beauty” [2]. It is good to know nature and sin. Without such knowledge, we could not raise our gaze upward. But after gaining a sure footing on the ground, we must always remember to look up.

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[1] Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Christian Perfection and Contemplation, trans. M. Timothea Doyle, O.P. (B. Herder Book Co., 1942), p. 13.

[2] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, in The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (Paulist Press, 1987), p. 135.