The Evolution of Moral Theology: Part 3

James F. Keenan, SJ
Professor of Theological Ethics, Boston College

Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Catholic Social Thought
Summer Lecture Series
July 16, 2008

Synthesis: The Law of Christ
Bernard Häring (November 10, 1912 - July 3, 1998)

In the 1950s, after the work of the early reformers, Catholic moral theologians either followed the lead of Lottin, Tillmann, Gilleman, and Mersch or stayed with the manualists and taught moral theology as an aid for the priest confessor. In an essay reflecting on the development of moral theology during that period, Richard McCormick characterized the latter as “all-too often one-sidedly confession oriented, magisterium-dominated, canon law related, sin-centered and seminary controlled.” He added that its theological anthropology looked like: “the agent as solitary decision-maker.”

The reformers instead focused on the life of the baptized Christian living in community. They tended to address more fundamental issues like who we are in light of the event of Jesus Christ (Mersch), how charity sustains the deep tendency toward the moral life (Gilleman), or what the identity of discipleship offers to the moral life (Tillmann). Bernard Häring summed up the interests of the reformers: “Moral theology as I understand it, is not concerned first with decision making and discrete acts. Its basic task and purpose is to gain the right vision, to assess the main perspectives, and to present those truths and values which should bear upon decisions to be taken before God.”

Before we turn to Häring’s The Law of Christ, we ought to consider the ramifications of Häring’s remark that moral theology is “not concerned first with moral decision making.” As we will see, by 1950, after several attempts to offer a new foundation for the prescriptions and prohibitions of the manualists, most Catholic moralists realized, as Lottin had implicitly argued, that the manuals were irreformable and that moralists needed to generate new foundations, out of which would come new moral normative guidance. This, of course, was the great and unique accomplishment of Fritz Tillmann.

While moralists were interested primarily in more fundamental issues, they never took their eyes off of the articulation and necessity of moral norms. Normative guidance, whether proscriptive or prohibitive, is imperative for any true ethical system. If moral theologians were not to use the manuals, they would need to develop a method of articulating norms from their own fundamental moral system.

However, the world could not stop as moral theologians developed normative guidance from their newly contextualized fundamental moral theology. When, for instance, the bishops of the papal birth control commission assigned Josef Fuchs the task to write the so-called “majority report,” which would say that married couples could in conscience for the sake of responsible parenthood practice birth control, they were not looking for him to offer an expose on the fundamental option or a treatise on intentionality. But they were also not asking for a simple norm, as the moral manualists would have offered, like, “Yes, married couples may use birth control responsibly” or “Yes, you can!” Rather the bishops were looking for a contemporary fundamental stance on the relationship between marriage and child-bearing and the roles that the Christian conscience and church teaching have in moral decision-making and actual guidance in how those decisions were to be made. Similarly, when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops asked Bryan Hehir to write what would become "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response," they expected the reformed theological foundations about what the claims of peace were today, what the Christian issues of protecting human life were and whether and when the resort for war was morally feasible. In short, in these and many instances, people were looking for moral theologians to articulate new arguments leading to guidance for action.

Today we see normative guidelines constantly being expressed in part because we have an appreciation of the historicity of norms. The metaphysical foundations of the moral manuals undermined our ability to witness to the way moral norms are articulated, developed, shaped and received. In rediscovering our history, in shaping a vision of Jesus Christ, and in having through charity the ability to hear and respond to his call, we are able to understand better the journey that lies before us. We are also better able to recognize the need and have the ability to articulate new norms that we might assist us as guideposts along the way.
Before entering into the unique synthesis accomplished by Häring, then, we might want to get ahead of our historical investigation for a moment to explore how hierarchy and theologians eventually offered new foundational premises or expanded older ones and promoted new values, new virtues, new self-understanding, and even new norms (or at least new applications of norms). All of this emerged as part of the effects of the creative development of moral theology that happened after Häring’s The Law of Christ, that is over the last forty years.

By doing this exercise those impatient about foundational language might be able to appreciate that eventually the work of theology got us to a practical and better place. Indeed, we need, throughout this investigation, to remember that the end of all being and the end of all moral processes are the same: to act. The end of all moral inquiry must be about morally objectively right action.

Let us consider then four new expressions all that emerged only in the last forty years: sanctity of life, consistent life ethics, the preferential option for the poor, and solidarity. Let us see, too, where these new expressions can concretely take us.

It is difficult to think of another phrase more commonly associated with contemporary Catholic moral teaching than the phrase “sanctity of life." Surprisingly, the term itself is rather new: No Catholic dictionary or encyclopedia before 1978 had an entry on it. For instance, in the 15-volume New Catholic Encyclopedia of 1967, the term has no entry. (It appeared as a modest afterthought in an unsigned entry in the later supplement. ) Nor is it found in new theological dictionaries from the United States, England, or Germany. It did not appear in the German Concise Dictionary of Christian Ethics, although there was a passing reference in the Italian counterpart.

"Sanctity of life" certainly has its roots in modern Christian writings. In 1908, the Jesuit moralist Thomas Slater discussed suicide and declared, "The reason why suicide is unlawful is because we have not the free disposal of our own lives. God is the author of life and death, and He has reserved the ownership of human life to Himself." At its roots, sanctity of life was about God's ownership: we do not own our lives; God does. Therefore, we are not free to dispose of them.

Later, Pope Pius XI declared in Casti Connubii, "The life of each is equally sacred and no one has the power, not even public authority, to destroy it." In a manner of speaking, in this context, our life was an object, a sacred one because, again, it was God’s.

The phrase "sanctity of life" first explicitly appeared in papal writings in the encyclical Mater et Magistra. In its original form, "sanctity of life" functioned as a euphemism for God's dominion. Thus, in Humanae Vitae, life is sacred because its owner, God, willed it so; like other objects that God owned and sanctified—the marriage bond and the temple, for example—life cannot be violated. The sacredness rests not in anything intrinsic to the marriage bond, the temple, or human life; it rests on the claim of God, who made and owns the sacral quality of the marital bonds, temples, and human lives.

Pope John Paul II significantly developed the term. In 1987, in his apostolic exhortation, Christifideles Laici, he spoke at length about the inviolable right to life, saying, "The inviolability of the person, which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life." Nowhere did he refer to God's dominion or prerogatives. Rather, the argument is simply that we are in God's image; as God's person is inviolable, so is God's image.

In the same year, in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s declaration on reproduction, Donum Vitae, we find: "From the moment of conception, the life of every human being is to be respected in an absolute way because man is the only creature on earth that God has 'wished for himself' and the spiritual soul of each man is 'immediately created by God'; his whole image bears the image of the Creator." The document continues: "Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the 'creative action of God' and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can, under any circumstance, claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being."

This latter section is repeated later in paragraph 53 of Evangelium Vitae and becomes the single text in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 2258) to interpret the Fifth Commandment. The entire paragraph was John Paul II's most extensive statement, before Evangelium Vitae itself, on both the sanctity of life and God as Lord of life. In it we see some of the key elements that later appear in the encyclical: that human life is singular; that it is created in God's image; that it is uniquely created by God for a special relationship with God, which is, in turn, the human's destiny; and that, finally as source and end of human life, God is Lord of life. While not at all abandoning the "God's ownership or dominion" argument, the pope gives it newer meaning by highlighting the uniqueness of the human subject.

The act of creation is where God invests each human life with its inviolable character that now lies within the human, the image of God. The human is not to be killed, therefore, because of who the human is. Human life is not an object that God owns: Human life is a subject that bears the inviolable image of God. The pope like all other theologians of the twentieth century made the turn to the subject with its inevitable results. This image of God is hardly extrinsic. In John Paul II's personalist writings, all people are invited to see within human life an indelible mark of its sacredness. The pope breathes life into the concept of "sanctity of life."

Because of this new foundation in teaching on life issues, the pope needed to revisit certain norms. Previously, the church permitted capital punishment. The Catechism that the Pope’s own administration had published had stated the traditional teaching of the Church had permitted capital punishment. But in 1997, after Evangelium Vitae, the Catechism was edited and now reads (2267) that : the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."

The normative teaching on capital punishment is now evolving toward its abolition because now we talk about the intrinsic dignity of all people, the innocent and the guilty, through the language of sanctity of life. We act differently in part because a fundamental concept illuminates better the place we are so that we may understand better what Jesus Christ wants of us.

This insight is further supported by another new concept. On December 6, 1983, in his Gannon Lecture at Fordham University Cardinal Joseph Bernardin launched an argument for a consistent life ethics. While sanctity of life would help us to appreciate the dignity of the human being as being intrinsically in the image of God, the Bernardin concept would prompt us to consider and apply the sanctity of life argument to every stage and every area of life. It would certainly compound the urgency of changing the teaching on capital punishment, but it would also bring sanctity of life to other ethical issues that were not normally thought of under that rubric, like health care, education, and employment.

From 1983 to 1996, the cardinal gave thirty-five lectures and speeches on the topic. Now twenty-five years later these are gathered together into a single volume by Thomas Nairn, with an important introduction by Thomas Shannon. We are only now beginning to understand the impact of those discourses.

The “preferential option for the poor” was articulated by Gustavo Gutiérrez and it did not exist as such before the 1960s. Today, it is a constitutive part of the moral theological tradition of the Roman Catholic community and it has normative claims on us. It affects not only the way the church as an institution prophetically advocates on behalf of the poor, but it also allows us to propose to governments and NGOs the need to consider the just allocation of resources. Moreover, many religious and lay movements see in this option the possibility of a new direction to incorporate those who have long been ignored on the margins, especially with regard to the access of education and healthcare. Finally, it imposes on the church normative guidelines for its ethical practices with its employees.

The concept has universal claims in the church. Even when liberation theology came under critique of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1984, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger was careful to not undermine the claims of the option of the poor: “This warning should in no way be interpreted as a disavowal of all those who want to respond generously and with an authentic evangelical spirit to the "preferential option for the poor." Since then, the claim “preferential option for the poor” is no longer a local, Latin American moral claim; today it can be found in every Catholic social ethical discourse on every continent and in every level of our hierarchy.

Finally, John Paul II again developed another concept, solidarity, taking it from a variety of other more secular movements but making it a keystone in his own understanding of the Catholic social tradition. Just as Bernardin’s consistent ethics of life fortified the claims of John Paul’s sanctity of life, similarly John Paul’s solidarity gave the preferential option for the poor greater claim. In a variety of major encyclicals, Pope John Paul II took the virtue of solidarity and generated a host of insights into concrete right moral conduct in such a way that the language is foundational to Catholic social tradition.

These developments in the foundational concepts generated newer understandings about what Jesus Christ expects of us and empowered us to revisit a variety of agendas so as to stipulate the ways we should live and act. Interest in fundamental issues did not mean that moral theology would be more remote from practical concerns than the manualists were; on the contrary, by re-investigating the fundamental concerns moral theology would discover a new freedom to understand the demands of being a disciple under the new law of Christ.
For the reformers, there was a deep connection between their fundamental concerns and the world in which they lived, and that link was founded on experience. Experience differentiated the reformers from the moral manualists. McCormick, for instance, noted: “There is a residue of truth in the general assertion that for some decades Catholic moral theology proceeded as if its responsibility was to form and shape experience, but hardly ever to be shaped by it.” For the revisionists, however, experience had an evident claim: Again McCormick stated: “One of the richest and most indispensable sources of moral knowledge is human experience and reflection. To be ignorant of it or to neglect it is to doom moral theology to irrelevance and triviality.”

Experience animates the writings of Bernard Häring. The Irish Redemptorist Raphael Gallagher noted four experiences that shaped Häring’s landmark work: having studied the moral manuals; having lived through the war; being formed in the Redemptorist tradition; and, learning from his reforming predecessors.

When asked to study moral theology, Häring reported that “I told my superior that this was my very last choice because I found the teaching of moral theology an absolutely crushing bore.”

Elsewhere Häring remarked that because he found the manuals so personally unhelpful, he realized the need for other resources. He wrote:

In 1936 when I came to study moral theology under the guidance of a professor who was a canon lawyer, he used the manual of Aertnys-Damen; we students found ourselves in crisis and even disgusted. For my personal-in-depth development I found other ethical writers of great value. Thus I created a deviation between the official morality for the preparation of the office of confessor and the personal work for a morality to live and to announce.
Häring’s experience of the war was central to his writings. First, the war empowered him to stand and witness to truth in the face of a criminal regime. “During the Second World War I stood before a military court four times. Twice it was a case of life and death. At that time I felt honored because I was accused by the enemies of God. The accusations then were to a large extent true, because I was not submissive to that regime.”

The war also allowed him to see how Christians acted. He wrote how he “experienced the most absurd obedience by Christians toward a criminal regime. And that too radically affected my thinking and acting as a moral theologian. After the war, I returned to moral theology with the firm decision to teach it so that the core concept would not be obedience but responsibility, the courage to be responsible.”

Gallagher notes how the experience of the Redemptorist order, from reading the writings of Alphonsus to preaching parish missions all brought Häring an intimate understanding of the end of moral instruction and the need for that instruction always to be constituted by a care for the whole person.

Finally, Gallagher insists that studying at Tübingen gave Häring an experience of the reformers. Häring certainly relied on Lottin, Tlilmann, Mersch, and Gilleman but appropriated three others, as well. The first was Johannes Stelzenberger (1898-1972) who, after being released in 1949 from a Russian prisoner of war camp, held the chair in moral theology at Tübingen from 1950 to 1965. Instead of focusing on discipleship or the self-understanding of Jesus, he looked to the kingdom of God. Stelzenberger only discussed this theological approach, however, and never provided a moral theological application of such a proposal as Tillmann did with The Master Calls.

The second figure is Gustav Ermecke (1907-1987) who taught moral theology and social doctrine at Paderborn from 1950 and at Bochum from 1965. Ermecke’s believed that the best way of reforming moral theology was to develop a strong theological basis for fundamental moral theology to complement the practical casuistic manuals. For the former he argued that if we are made in the image of Christ, we had to develop a Christ-centered moral theology. This would lead, in turn, to understanding Christian morality as both the realization in action of the grace Christ gives us and the attainment of supernatural ends through Christian moral living and acting. But, unlike Stelzenberger and Tillmann, he concluded that a single unifying category for moral theology was impossible and argued that moral theology ought to aim to be comprehensive.

Finally, Häring also depended on his professor and doctoral dissertation director from Tübingen, Theodor Steinbüchel, who celebrated the work of Fritz Tillman. Steinbüchel provided Häring with a way of appreciating both graced human freedom and the call to decision-making as key elements for realizing the call to pursue moral truth.

The sustained labors of generations of moralists was the intellectual framework for The Life of Christ. As such his work represents a certain coming together of almost forty years of a variety of attempts to resituate moral theology as a theological enterprise, deeply connected to dogmatic (Lottin, Mersch, Stelzenberger, Ermecke), biblical (Tillmann and Steinbüchel) and ascetical (Gilleman) theology.

Moreover, it also represents a decisive break with the manuals. Early nineteenth century attempts sought a new theological foundation for moral theology but still turned to the manualistic logic in order to write about the practical order. Later, Ermecke suggested a more intentional coupling of the Decalogue’s application in the manuals with an imitatio Christi as the foundational theology. Eventually the theologians realized that the practical order could not be adequately addressed in the twentieth century by following, in any way, the manualist logic. That said, of the reformers who did totally abandon the manualists, Lottin, Tillmann, Gilleman, and Mersch, only Tillmann provided concrete norms for action. Now, it would belong to Häring to do a “synthesis” and at the same time generate new modes of constructing normative guidance for right moral conduct.

In 1954, in the Redemptorists’ University of Rome, the Alfonsianum, Bernhard Häring published the sixteen-hundred page magisterial manual, three volume, The Law of Christ: Moral Theology for Priests and Laity. Of his one hundred and four published books, this is certainly the landmark contribution.

The opening words of the foreword were decisive: "“The principle, the norm, the center, and the goal of Christian moral Theology is Christ.” Each word was central: Christ is the principle, the foundation, the source, the well-spring of moral theology; Christ is the norm, indeed a positive norm, a norm about being, a norm about persons and personhood; Christ, not the human, is the center; and Christ is the goal for charity is union with God forever.
The first volume was on general moral theology. The second volume, Special Moral Theology, is composed of two “books”: our fellowship with God and with humanity. The third volume, Special Moral Theology, concerns our ascent to the all-embracing majesty of God’s love and is the most practical section.

There are innumerable topics that could give us a glance of Haring’s contribution: let us focus on two: the foundations and the practical.

The first paragraph of the first chapter of the first volume was riveting:

The moral theology of Jesus is contained in its totality in the glad tidings of salvation. The tremendous Good News is not actually a new law, but the Sovereign Majesty of God intervening in the person of Christ and the grace and love of God manifesting itself in Him. In consequence all the precepts of the moral law, even the most sacred, are given a new and glorious orientation in divine grace and a new focus, the Person of the God-man. There is nothing novel in the call to repentance for all sin. What is new is the glad tidings announcing that now the time for the great conversion from sin and the return to God is at hand.

This is a summons, the moment of Kairos is here. Christ, the glad tidings, beckons us. “We understand moral theology as the doctrine of the imitation of Christ, as life in with, and through Christ… the point of departure in Catholic moral theology is Christ, who bestows on man a participation in his life and calls on him to follow the Master.”
Noticeably different from his predecessors, Häring privileges human freedom as foundational to moral goodness. For Haring freedom is the possibility of responding to God’s call and to do God's will. But that freedom is itself a gift. As God calls, God provides. Sin is the refusal to accept the gift and the call; it is therefore the defeat of freedom and the entrance into slavery.

There are many reasons for this turn to freedom: the Facist and Nazi movements that imprisoned millions across the European continent; the subsequent developments in the philosophy of existentialism; the incredibly obsessive control of the manualists and the ever encroaching Vatican dictates; the Soviet expansionism into Eastern Europe; and, the growing appreciation in ordinary European culture of human freedom. Moreover theologians have been writing on particularly his former doctoral director, Theodor Steinbuchel.

Raphael Gallagher points out another ground: revelation. Häring has 2031 scriptural citations in the Law of Christ and 659 of them come from Paul, “the apostle of Christian freedom.” The glad tidings are precisely that which makes us free. We have law as a pedagogue, teaching us how to proceed and revealing to us, forensically, our sins. But the Gospel, the law of Christ, makes us free to follow him. The Galatian message of Paul rings true in the life experiences of Häring, particularly those during the war; by his own testimony, Häring was free to stand and witness. Personal freedom is the foundation for doing good and for doing moral theology.

From freedom we move to conscience. Häring’s extensive description of conscience anticipates, inspires, and forms some of the most important words from the Second Vatican Council, the definition of conscience from Gaudium et Spes paragraph 16.

In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to his heart: do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged. Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths. In a wonderful manner conscience reveals that law which is fulfilled by love of God and neighbor. In fidelity to conscience, Christians are joined with the rest of men in the search for truth, and for the genuine solution to the numerous problems which arise in the life of individuals from social relationships. Hence the more right conscience holds sway, the more persons and groups turn aside from blind choice and strive to be guided by the objective norms of morality. Conscience frequently errs from invincible ignorance without losing its dignity. The same cannot be said for a man who cares but little for truth and goodness, or for a conscience which by degrees grows practically sightless as a result of habitual sin.

We should not overlook that Häring’s main contribution to the Council was in the writing of Gaudium et Spes, though he also assisted in other documents, among them the chapters on the laity and the call to holiness in Lumen Gentium and the oft quoted paragraph 16 from optatam Totius.

In the third volume, Häring examined a host of topics for six hundred pages. from truthfulness to beauty; from a “just economic order” with comments on private and communal ownership as well as the social incorporation of the working class, to the extended study of thirteen species of contracts (from promises to rentals to annuities); and from bodily life and death and “sinful assaults on bodily life”, (suicide, murder, abortion, euthanasia) to health and surgery.

The longest section concerns sexuality and marriage; in it are hundreds of different topics from “false approaches to the mastery of passion” and “intercourse of the sexually impotent and sterile” to “the love prelude” and “the so-called ‘safe period’.” In this section there is great wisdom, both pastoral and moral, as for instance in this comment. Moreover, there is great sensitivity in his willingness to enter into a variety of specifics that must have been a source of considerable anxiety for many devout Catholics. Yet, one cannot but wonder as to how much social control the clergy’s teachings had over the sexual lives of its lay members that such a plethora of concerns are examined. It will be no surprise that precisely in the matter of marital love the reform of the church will face its Rubicon.

Not all moral theologians agreed with the reformers. One pair of theologians considerably against these innovations were John Ford and Gerald Kelly, Americans Jesuit casuists who wrote the “Notes in Moral Theology” for Theological Studies from 1941-1954.
Kelly can rightly be called the father of medical ethics, especially for his book, Medico-Moral Problems. There he helped shore up questions regarding the right of Catholic patients to forego or withdraw from death prolonging technologies. Even in the 1950s, Kelly argued and was accepted as authoritative in holding that a Catholic could not only forego (or withdraw) from surgery, a ventilator, medication, or resuscitation, but they could also forego or be withdrawn from artificial nutrition and hydration.

Ford, a moral theologian at Weston School of Theology, became well known for an electrifying essay against obliteration bombing, right in the crucible of World War II, that is, in 1944. This enormously important article did what his European colleagues on either side of the war did not do: criticize and condemn the saturation bombing of cities. In this as in many matters, Ford was singular. For instance, Ford was also known for arguing that people with alcoholism were in all probability physically sick rather than morally bad. He saw alcoholism as a physical and not primarily a moral disability.

These were two very credible manualists, who wanted to preserve the insight of manualism. Their two volume Contemporary Moral Theology served as a real mark of the classical paradigm’s attempt to keep the historical-minded model from replacing it. In fact though Davis and Jone express a certain respect for the developing frequency of Church teaching, Ford and Kelly develop an actual theology about the theologian, not primarily as searching for the moral truth, but as receiving it from Rome. That is, Ford and Kelly are not like Davis and Jone. One reads a certain exasperation in the latter's attempts at keeping up with the Vatican declarations. In Ford and Kelly we find instead an ever expanding welcome and, even, an encouragement for such papal exercises.

Thus, Ford and Kelly believed that the first place to look for a moral problem is to Rome: “The principal approach to any theological treatise should be the teaching of the magisterium, especially of the Holy See itself, when such teaching is available.”
Ford and Kelly are convinced that Rome is the only authentic interpreter of the laws of God. “It is only through conformity with the teaching of the Church that the individual conscience can have security from error. The ‘autonomy of the individual conscience’ cannot be reconciled with the plan of Christ and can produce only ‘poisonous fruit’.”
Today most contemporary moral theologians interpret magisterial utterances critically within the context of the entire tradition, which Bernard Häring calls “a stream of life and truth under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who introduces each generation in its dynamic historical context into the one great truth revealed by Jesus Christ.” Ford and Kelly did not employ any critical reception.

The hermeneutics of interpretation that Ford and Kelly endorsed is completely dependent on whatever authority the magisterium claimed. Because they invert the order of authority that the high casuists used, that is, because they recognize the external authority of the papacy and of Roman dicasteries before, and in fact without considering the internal authority of the argument (does the argument cohere in itself and with the tradition), they have no way of distinguishing magisterial claims as actually correct.

Their stance is dramatically conveyed in a stunning paragraph by them:

An earnest student of papal pronouncements, Vincent A. Yzermans, estimated that during the first fifteen years of his pontificate Pius XII gave almost one thousand pubic addresses and radio messages. If we add to these the apostolic constitutions, the encyclicals and so forth, during the same period of fifteen years, and add furthermore all the papal statements during the subsequent years, we have well over a thousand papal documents… Merely from the point of view of volume, therefore, one can readily appreciate that it was not mere facetiousness that led a theologian to remark, that even if the Holy See were to remain silent or ten years, the theologians would have plenty to do in classifying and evaluating the theological significance of Pius XII’s public statements.

Ford and Kelly’s approach is eventually critiqued by their peers. In a lengthy review of the second volume of their work, Daniel Callahan describes the authors as “loyal civil servants” and “faithful party workers” and dismisses their work “as years behind the (theological) revolution now in progress.” McCormick reported that Kelly suffered “chest pains” upon reading the review.

The Vatican as Moral Teacher

As moral theologians turned to the person to find moral truth, the hierarchy began to appropriate the methodology of the manualists that contemporary theologians were repudiating. They began to assert the claim that consistency was a constitutive guarantor of the truthfulness of their claims and began to preserve their own teachings as normative by updating and commenting on them. Thus, a central feature of any contemporary papal or episcopal document is the frequent citation of previous teaching moments by such authorities. David Kelly calls it an “ecclesiastical positivism.”

But let us conclude on a narrative of conversion, that of , Josef Fuchs. Before 1964, Ford and Kelly’s belief in the frailty of reason and the surety of Church teaching is fairly pervasive. For instance, Josef Fuchs writes: the magisterium’s “duty within the actual order of salvation is to form the consciences of all men, primarily those in charge of public life.”
Fuchs was appointed by Pope Paul VI to the commission studying the Church’s teaching on birth control (of which Bernard Häring was also a member). Purportedly because the commission’s first meetings tended toward reform of the teaching on birth control, the Pope desired more traditional moral theologians on the commission, among them, Fuchs. In Fuchs’s own life, we find that the shift of locating truth not in propositions but in persons was not a simple intellectual one. Moral theologians do not come to these convictions in simple meditations. Rather, these convictions arose from seminal experiences. By listening to the testimony of married couples, Fuchs slowly recognized that his original supposition was inadequate, and began to explore critically a key question: whether the method of directly applying a norm to a case is also adequate for determining moral truth. If that question were posed to Josef Fuchs in 1952, his answer would have been a resounding yes; by 1968, it was an equally decisive no.

Fuchs especially began to realize that the competency of a moral decision deeply depended on the ability to consider adequately the various claims on an agent. As he listened to the testimonies of married couples on the birth control commission he began to see that their understanding of the various claims on them was more comprehensive and more adequate than the general teachings of Rome. Fuchs began to see here that one found moral truth through the discernment of an informed conscience confronting reality.

Fuchs’s intellectual conversion became an important impetus for others. Let me cite two very significant examples of the impact Fuchs’ conversion had on others. Recently Jack Mahoney, author of The Making of Moral Theology, recounted to me a meeting of Jesuit moral theologians in 1964. Each year these moralists gathered at Schrub Oak, the Jesuit philosophy school in New York State. As other orders did, they would discuss many and very diverse cases and go around the room polling each for his opinion on the topic. At this meeting, Mahoney said they were thirty to thirty-five Jesuit moralists including, Richard McCormick, Gerald Kelly, Cal Poulin, John Connery and others. Ford was in Europe at the time. When they turned, at this meeting, to the topic of birth control, they did not in any way question the birth control teaching from the 1930s in the encyclical Casti Connubii. Instead they took the case about whether a woman could use the birth control pill to regulate her menstrual cycle. This was a position that most moralists thought was morally acceptable and in fact when Humanae vitae was published four years later, it acknowledged this action as morally permissible.

The argument was simple: church teaching condemned birth control, not the pill. If the pill is used for contraception then it is morally wrong. If it is used to regulate a cycle, it is morally innocent. One Jesuit Father after another said it was acceptable, but the last person to speak was Father Richard McCormick. He said, “I hear Joe Fuchs is reconsidering his understanding of the morality of birth control.” Mahoney reports that there was an audible "Collective intake of breath." Then one after another, the Jesuits said, “Can we talk about birth control?” Josef Fuchs’ change gave his brother Jesuits the moral permission to examine a topic that previously was off limits.

Secondly, on the Commission, Fuchs was appointed by his peers to become the principle draftsman of the report that represented the views of fifteen of the nineteen theologians. This report recognized that moral truth regarding birth control could be articulated by those married persons who in conscience needed to determine whether the serious issue of birth control ought to be a means toward realizing themselves as responsible parents. In presenting the report, Fuchs explained that the locus for finding moral truth had shifted from utterances to persons: “Many confuse objective morality with the prescriptions of the Church….We have to realize that reality is what is. And we grow to understand it with our reason, aided by law. We have to educate people to assume responsibility and not just to follow the law.”

Later the commission’s governing group of cardinals and bishops asked Fuchs why he had changed his entire understanding of moral decision-making. He responded by narrating his own doubts arising in 1963; how he stopped teaching for a year (1965–1966) at the Gregorian University because he could not take responsibility for teaching a doctrine he did not accept; and how in 1965 he ordered the university press not to reprint his work De castitate. In light of his answers, the episcopal committee voted first on whether contraception is an intrinsic evil (nine, no; three, yes; three, abstentions), then appropriated and formally approved the majority report that he wrote for the theologians.

At the same time, we must not forget that Father John Ford was on the same commission. He had nominated the once conservative Father Fuchs to be on the commission. He was surprised that now Father Fuchs was the leading spokesman for those wanting to acknowledge that Catholic couples had the moral responsibility to consider how to engage in responsible parenting, including the regulation of births. He took two measures. He became the author of the minority report, a response to the majority report. He then became a frequent visitor to Pope Paul VI. There he reminded the pope repeatedly, (we have these visits recorded in his own journal which have been archived) that as pope he had to uphold the teaching of his predecessor. In effect, according to Ford, Pope Paul VI as pope he did not have moral authority to overturn Casti Connubii.

The majority report was later rejected by Pope Paul VI, who contended, in Humanae vitae (para. 6), that “certain approaches and criteria for a solution to this question had emerged which were at variance with the moral doctrines on marriage constantly taught by the Magisterium of the Church.” With Humanae vitae, we see, then, the first significant papal endorsement of moral manualism after Vatican II and, concurrently, an implicit rejection of the moral theologians’ innovative approach.

With its publication, an inevitable collision between the two approaches to moral theology arose. With the encyclical, the Pope claimed that the consciences of all the faithful must adhere to the continuous teaching of an utterance defined as universally, and absolutely, morally true.

In 1983 Fuchs provided some commentary on this phenomenon:

Since the Council of Trent, but especially in the last century, a strong juridical understanding of the magisterium as “demanding assent,” has become central; this was not so earlier. According to this understanding, the moral theologians’ task should be understood primarily and extensively as the scholarly reflection and confirmation of already existing magisterial directives in moral questions. This is how it is expressed above all in Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis (1950). Even today, this understanding is widespread although the Second Vatican Council began to shift the emphasis by its reference to the whole People of God as bearer of the Holy Spirit.

Copyright Jim Keenan.