1708 By his Passion, Christ delivered us from Satan and from sin. He merited for us the new life in the Holy Spirit. His grace restores what sin had damaged in us.
Paragraph 1708 describes the work of Christ: He delivered us from Satan and from sin. He merited for us the new life in the Spirit. His grace restores what is damaged by sin. The term for all of this is “salvation.” I can recall when I moved to the deep south in the 1970’s the intense evangelicalism of my neighboring churches, and from time to time I was asked personally if I was “saved” or “born again.” The wrong answer, I quickly learned, was that I had been baptized and saved in the Roman Catholic Church as an infant. Nothing made a 1970’s evangelical blanche more painfully than this string of Catholic “heresies.” My heresies? First, the Catholic Church of Rome was “the professional lady from Babylon and thus the anti-Christ.” Second, Catholics don’t baptize correctly in that we rarely use full immersion. [Catholic law permits full immersion, but I digress.] Finally, infants are too young to profess Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. I miss the Evangelicals of years ago. Having sold their souls in 2016 on the empty promise of a Pro-Life agenda from the current administration, they are torn by anger, division, and I believe shame, in the position they now find themselves. I pray for them now more than I used to. I surmise that in the last generation or so, Evangelicals have opted to “save society from itself” by closer entrenchment in real world politics, particularly in matters of family life and sexual mores. The general principle of bringing the good news to the market place is laudable, necessary in fact, though I think the communicative art of persuasion and example is preferable to state-imposed morality, as a rule, which smacks more of Gelasian “two-sword” governance. The language of para. 1708 is time conditioned; Christ is depicted as delivering us from Satan, the personification of evil. In the early passages of Mark’s Gospel, the Sunday texts for 2018 [Year B], Christ demonstrates his mission of ushering in the kingdom of God by the expulsion of demons and multiple healings—both actions understood at the time [and today] as works against evil. Some caution is necessary here; it is easy to slip into an easy image of Christ engaging with another powerful force for the destiny of man, but as we discussed last week, later Jewish thought came to understand that evil is internal, within the psyche of man. I am uncomfortable with terms like the Evil One, Lucifer, or personified devils, because such talk suggests of duel kingdoms, God’s and the evil beings, the latter attributed with powers to overcome the morals of good souls and steal them from God. This strikes me as a diminishment of God’s infinite power. The language of devils, not unique to Christianity, does serve a useful purpose in avoiding language that implies God create evil (as in Genesis 3, where the serpent in the garden is said to be “the most cunning of all the creatures God had made.”) The idea of devils and evil ones was suitable for the culture of Palestine and the early Church, but for the most part our language today does not address evil in those terms. What was once described as demonic possessions might find better explanation in mental illness or mass hysteria—the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials of 1692 are an excellent example of histrionic attribution of evil to the devil at the cost of 20 lives. The ugliness of evil and sin can be so invasive that we feel compelled to look outside of the human experience. Coming up in the Thursday Reformation page of the blog in a few weeks is a discussion of the impact of the Black Plague (1347+ A.D.), a catastrophe described quite graphically in The Great Mortality (2005), which killed 50% of the European population alone. (See my review.) The United States Atomic Energy Commission uses the plague as a model for post-nuclear war consequences. (TBP, p. 11) One would imagine that this ravenous terror—thought to be the end of the world from England to Italy—was borne by the full army of Lucifer and his minions. In fact, the cause of the disease was simple mutation of the virus Y-Pestis, a direct descendant of a virus that afflicted the Roman Empire a millennium earlier. Y-Pestis mutated on the backs of field rats in China, journeyed to Europe alongside Turkish traders on new medieval trade routes, and infected every European port with amazing alacrity. That the world is filled with injustice, crime, natural catastrophe, and perhaps most of all, chronic failures of humans to connect in constructive ways is beyond dispute. Para. 1708 states Jesus’ salvific agenda, of delivering us and remaking us. We Catholics use the words “Jesus” and “saves” probably daily. But as one Catholic journal put it this week, how do you preach salvation to a population that believes it has no guilt to be rescued from, which is pretty much what I see and hear from my own little cabbage patch? A major part of the answer is the absence of a sense of Jesus as a Cosmic Savior. As St. Paul writes eloquently, the impact of the cross extends throughout the cosmos, including entire human systems of enterprise. Catholic catechetics continues to focus on a highly personal and highly specific focus of morality, just about all of it sexual. I don’t deny that there are critical issues of personal morality, but more oriented to the concept of Christ’s kingship is a saved people, as in plural. The Church has a feast to emphasize universal salvation, Christ the King. My argument with neo-Evangelicals is similar to my concern about a highly personalized Catholic morality. Next week many churches will conduct Pro Life awareness, obviously a major need in the present day. But I was moved to look up how children in our country fare once they survive the birthing experience. I came across a Washington Post piece from 2014 reporting on a study of infant mortality, i.e., in the first year. The United States, which leads the world in medical spending, ranks 26th in infant care. In twenty-five nations, newborns have a better chance of reaching their first birthdays, in some cases by a factor of three. The conclusion of the study cites a significant decline in the availability of infant health care after leaving the hospital, proportionate to income. Jesus never used the words systematic or holistic in his teachings, and understandably so, given his time. But his call to a moral life and the reach of salvation goes out to individuals and communities. If we as individuals are judged for our individual conduct and rewarded our faith, how will God address our corporate conduct?
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1707 "Man, enticed by the Evil One, abused his freedom at the very beginning of history."10 He succumbed to temptation and did what was evil. He still desires the good, but his nature bears the wound of original sin. He is now inclined to evil and subject to error:
Man is divided in himself. As a result, the whole life of men, both individual and social, shows itself to be a struggle, and a dramatic one, between good and evil, between light and darkness.11 I was hoping for an easy morning, as today is clinic day, but it appears that I will need to explain the nature of evil itself before I pack my lunch and IPad and head out to work. The Catechism itself chose the easy route of “blaming it on the snake,” so to speak, in its explanation of how sin and evil came into the world, with its use of the term “Evil One.” The footnotes for Paragraph 1707 take us back to the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (joy and hope), “The Church in the Modern World.” While I don’t think I have it in me to explain the nature of evil, today’s post may set the parameters of the question, at any rate. Footnote 10 comes from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chapter 1, which makes for captivating reading. Paul states that from the beginning of time, “[God’s] invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.” Put another way, man has always enjoyed the capacity to discern God by the very way he is created and composed. If this is so, why do all of us miss the mark of good living, sometimes quite dramatically? Paul is writing for a Gentile audience, and he asserts that although every man knows God, “they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks.” He goes on, “They became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened,” exchanging “the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes.” Again, recalling the setting of this letter, Paul is calling out the Roman practices of worshipping a human being (emperor worship) or various forms of idolatry. The mention of a snake is almost certainly a reference to the fertility rites of many religions of the time where public ceremonies involving a living or depicted snake invoked divine intervention on behalf of the female population. This form of phallic idolatry afflicted Israel as well, and it may be the reason that the snake, of all creatures, introduces sin into the world in the telling of the Garden account from Genesis. Paul does not explain why humankind turned its back on the evident glory of God, but he accepts this as the human condition. Because of the denial of the true God, “God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies.” Paul becomes more specific: “females exchanged natural relations for unnatural…and males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another.” It is intriguing that Paul would use homosexuality as his prime witness for human degeneracy. He may be reflecting the prominence of same-sex activity in Roman society, or he may be falling back to his training in Jewish Law, which teaches that “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltness is upon them." [Leviticus 20:13]. Catholic tradition is not nearly as extreme; the Catechism itself [para. 2357] admits that regarding homosexuality, “its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained.” The theology of Paul on the origin of sin—in his explanation to Gentiles-- can be summarized here as inherent hubris, a pride with no impulse to bend the knee to a God visible in all his works. In the late Old Testament writings, Scripture addresses the origin of sin and evil in both philosophic and metaphoric language, the most famous attempt being Genesis 3. An unfortunate catechetical failure over the years has been the absence of any sustained effort to mine Genesis 3 for its moral richness with adult spirituality. To unpack Genesis 3, it is necessary to state, for the last time, that the text is revealed philosophy, not chronological history. The authors of Genesis 3 begin with the assertion that “the serpent was the most cunning of all the creatures God had made.” The idea that God is the creator of “cunning” is still a puzzle to this day. The old literal interpretation of my childhood, that Satan appeared to Eve disguised as a snake, was rather comforting—until about the eighth grade, when I had the impertinence to ask the Christian Brothers, “Well, who made Satan?” [And if you don’t believe in Karma, I get unsolicited email today from people advising me that Satan is taking over the planet, or at least the Café.] Genesis 3 lays it on the line that in some way evil is inherent in creation. Its implication is not that God made bad things, but rather, “free people,” beings who were and are made in such dignified fashion that they enjoy God’s creative freedom, the ultimate free choice being the acceptance of and obedience to the Creator. Man is made with enough power to damn himself, too. In remarkable prose, the authors of Genesis proceed to make their point that humans do not choose infallibly. “The woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” Genesis 3 shares with St. Paul the idea that the ultimate human sin is hubris. The serpent, or “best supporting actor,” puts forth the Achilles heel of human existence, “God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil.” We are a proud people, independent gods, who do not wish to acknowledge our vulnerabilities. Genesis goes on to enumerate the breakdown of the human condition caused by the human condition of sin: (1) Adam blames Eve for their collective sin, she who was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; the capacity to love is damaged; (2) Eve blames the snake, symbolizing the break between man and nature; not for nothing did Pope Francis write Laudato Si; (3) Adam and his descendants will be at war with nature in order to eat; “Thorns and thistles it shall bear for you….” (4) The issue of childbirth is the most psychologically complex of the couple’s curses. “I will intensify your toil in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” The very continuation of humanity will depend upon a life-threatening and intensely painful experience of childbirth. And for all of that, the urge for the husband in the sexual sense will remain intense, despite his domination over her. The text here should not be interpreted in any way as a critique of procreation, or even less as a commentary on the status of womanhood, but rather as a proof from experience that human experience—of man and women--is complex and not always trustworthy. As Paul observed, we are creatures of our passions; the spirit may be willing, but the flesh is weak. In any event, we are not independent “gods” nor can we blame our sins on the "Evil One." 1706 By his reason, man recognizes the voice of God which urges him "to do what is good and avoid what is evil."9 Everyone is obliged to follow this law, which makes itself heard in conscience and is fulfilled in the love of God and of neighbor. Living a moral life bears witness to the dignity of the person.
I was looking at my calendar this week and I realized I am due to start taking courses again in counseling psychology and law to meet license renewal requirements. Shopping for courses—actual class settings or the on-line offerings—is discouraging, because my field—and its cousin psychopharmacology—has produced little in the way of groundbreaking insights in the healing of the mind. A depressed patient in 2018 is still prescribed, as a rule, some variant of the old work horse Prozac (fluoxetine). Many of you may be surprised that electroconvulsive therapy (aka, unfortunately, “electroshock therapy”) is a depression treatment option still available to practitioners, particularly in cases of severely depressed pregnant women for whom medication may be harmful, though the improvement is short term and the treatment must be retreated frequently. Not unlike other fields, mental health passes through trends. When I started in practice, the prevailing wisdom was “letting go of your anger,” or getting patients to articulate and feel repressed rage. Later studies showed that this kind of therapy simply improved the client’s skills at expressing anger (a serious flaw in Dr. Melfi’s TV treatment of Tony Soprano, who, by the way, was prescribed Prozac, too, which can have energizing side-effects.) Post-traumatic stress treatment has been a staple of workshops since the first Gulf War, but one major failure here has been a lack of full appreciation of actual brain damage which impedes “techniques” that we might use in our offices. (There is a considerable gulf between the orientation of masters’ therapists like myself, life managers if you will, and psychologists who must hold doctorates and are better versed in the holistic interplay of biology and mind activity.) This year my catalogues are full of training sessions on “mindfulness,” our cure du jour. I have seen the term frequently but had not looked closely at this school of treatment till this week. The magazine Psychology Today describes mindfulness as “a state of active, open attention on the present. When you're mindful, you carefully observe your thoughts and feelings without judging them good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to your current experience, rather than dwelling on the past or anticipating the future.” Before I start hurling brickbats at this trend, I will say that helping patients understand why they are emotionally distraught in a given moment is extremely important. I have often commented to a patient, “you look like you’re about to burst into tears,” which gives the patient (I think) permission to say what has been long repressed. I subscribe to the Rational Emotive School (RET) of Albert Ellis and his offspring the Becks, which among other things assists a patient to reexamine his or her current life script or interpretation of personal history. Mindfulness can be a critical tool in therapeutic progress. However, if you Google “mindfulness,” you will find that the term and the practice have a strong affinity to Eastern thought and practice, particularly Yoga. Wikipedia’s definition is useful if incomplete in making this connection. The goal of mindfulness and its attendant lifestyle is escape from the past and the future and absolute focus on the moment. Eastern mysticism in general is profoundly metaphysical; it holds that human experience is profoundly internal, waiting for discovery when the human subject can escape the care of this world. One can quickly see some points of contact between Christian mysticism and Eastern philosophy, particularly the premise that there is a rich life beyond the scientific, observable field. The Trappist mystic and spiritual writer Thomas Merton devoted the last decade of his study to exploring possible bridges between Eastern and Western thought and religious practice. Ironically, he was killed in this quest in 1968, electrocuted while presenting a workshop to Eastern monks in Burma. His death is a serious loss to the Church, particularly in its moral and spiritual possibilities, as we continue to seek a unity of the temporal and the eternal in personal development. Paragraph 1706 states that “Everyone is obliged to follow this law [do good and avoid evil], which makes itself heard in conscience and is fulfilled in the love of God and of neighbor.” The challenge is in the hearing. The Catechism cannot be precise on the dynamic of the communication between God and the mind, nor for that matter, God and the will, or even our own minds and wills alone. The nature of such communication is beyond our ability to find adequate linguistics; when we profess faith in God, we profess faith in a process we believe is happening but cannot explain with precision. However, the disposition to hear and understand is something we do control to a point; the Catechism is clear in many places that we are created with freedom to meaningfully choose the good [the Revelation of God] or reject it. The mystery turns on why some individuals embrace the good and others do not, or more to the point, why we ourselves make good choices at one point and poor choices in another. What is impacting us at the moment of a poor choice? Putting the question this way, mindfulness is a valuable spiritual tool. The insights of mindful thinking and process are not usually so flattering—as Shakespeare observed, “it is the worst treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” I do plenty of “good things” for a mixed bag of reasons; the key is honesty, and I have always believed that God loves a less than cheerful giver of mixed motive so long as his will is obeyed. The caveat with mindfulness is whether the accent upon the immediate is an enlightenment or an escape. If it is true, as I have observed, that Yoga and self-awareness are as hot a ticket as ever on the train to better living, it is also true that California and other states and locations have recently taken steps toward the legalization of recreational marijuana. It has been a lot of years since my college days, but the pot smoking jargon then went something like “trip out” or “take a trip,” which sounds a lot like escapism. The same can be said for any mood-altering or mind-altering substance that takes us out of the present. Moral consciousness and the clarity of mind and heart to hear our better angels is the mental heart of prayer and good conduct. 1705 By virtue of his soul and his spiritual powers of intellect and will, man is endowed with freedom, an "outstanding manifestation of the divine image."
As a catechist I have always felt a little queasy about introducing the word “freedom” into any learning setting, because the theological term “freedom” is not quite the same as the American or Western meaning of the term. The religious sense goes back to St. Paul, who speaks of “freedom from the Law.” The American sense speaks of freedom to do, as in freedom of speech, bearing arms, voting, and drinking (but don’t do them all at once). Consequently, when religion classes or sermons announce that as creatures of God we are free, what we hear is that we are free to do a lot of things, and a teacher or a preacher must quickly back track with the old “but you are only free to do good things.” If we are endowed with freedom, it sometimes feels like Ralphie’s Christmas gift from an elderly relative—the homemade rabbit pajamas with the feet. St. Paul’s discussion of freedom has as its context the emergence of Christianity from Jewish practice, a major theme in Paul’s letters. In Paul’s view of things, the gifts bestowed by God included a freedom of the conscience brought about by the power of Christ’s cross to conquer sin. Paul understood the revolutionary nature of God’s intervention as a renewal of humanity, and the power of God’s grace as without equal. His argument with Jewish Law and practice was its underlying claim to save by observance, and its clean division of observant from outsider. The prophetic insight that salvation was universal in nature was apparently not a staple of Jewish thought and practice at the time of Jesus, who himself was severely criticized for his excess of mercy beyond religious, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. Nor did the Apostles first grasp the implications of this universalism, either. It was Paul, the Church’s true first theologian, who came to understand that the saving grace of God through Jesus was a cosmic event that required no ritual preconditioning, specifically in his context, Jewish initiation. The pastoral circumstance was the requirement of male circumcision as understood by the Apostles. Paul challenged the need for circumcision as a precondition for Christian baptism, and he successfully made his case at the “Council of Jerusalem” in 49 A.D. For Paul, freedom was the essential opting for Christ. He referred to Jewish law as a burden, a pedestrian distraction at best and an unnecessary burdening of the conscience at worst, since the grace of God was a “remaking” or “rebirth” of the Christian convert. Matters of religious law such as issues of cleanliness and trifling Sabbath regulations had no standing in the court of the Son of Man, whose death and resurrection had delivered humanity once and for all. It should be obvious to anyone who has ever tackled an Epistle of Paul’s that his use of the word “freedom” is neither a get-out-of-jail-free-card nor carte blanche to “do as you will.” The Apostle to the Gentiles railed frequently against behaviors unbecoming of those who have been remade through baptism into the image and likeness of Christ. Sinful acts, in his theology, are ultimately betrayal of the most significant choice, freely given, to be born again in Christ. We might turn here to a leading moral figure of our own time, one who has appeared here in our posts before, Father Bernard Haring, author of the Law of Christ (1956). Haring, whose World War II experiences inspired him to a rethinking of Christian morality, turned to a more Pauline base of morality, a “fundamental option” or psycho/spiritual reordering of life to the centrality of the redemption brought by Christ. Haring and the Vatican II school of moralists who followed came to understand that morality is the outcome of spiritual conversion, a change that every person is free to accept or decline. Thus, the better understanding of freedom in the Christian-Biblical sense would be the assertion that true freedom is exercised once—at baptism—and reasserted in the multiple choices that life and circumstances bring. Haring and future generations would assert that the manualist school of morality in which they were trained placed too much emphasis upon defined individual acts—many of which, of and by themselves—had the power to damn the soul independently. This is a forest for the trees arrangement that Pope Francis has addressed in our time—that individual acts and their definition must be addressed and assessed in the broader parameters of a Christ-centered conscience, in the Sacrament of Penance. The moral pastoral practice of my upbringing placed an almost neurotic preoccupation upon the deed, isolated from any broader considerations of theology and at times, common sense. When I received my First Communion in 1956, the “locker room instructions” included warnings about the teeth touching the host (despite the Biblical command, “Take and Eat”), breaking the communion fast by swallowing toothpaste or sneaking a taste of one’s first communion cake frosting before Mass. This degradation of liturgical law is the result of a peculiar heresy in the Church known as Jansenism, originating in the sixteenth century, which has never actually disappeared in toto. This labored mentality pervaded human growth—if seven-year-olds were burdened under such specificity of law, imagine puberty, married life, and aging. St. Paul understood that preoccupation with law for its own sake was an unnecessary burden in the economy of salvation; he instructed the Church through his letters and preaching that the cross of Christ had freed the believer from the burden of excessive and extraneous legal burdens, thus identifying the term “freedom” as release from legalism and scrupulosity. The Gospels, written after the Pauline letters, would depict Jesus breaking Jewish law in the performance of acts of healing, charity, forgiveness, and outreach. The Gospels would round out the term “freedom” as a release from restraint to do the good works associated with the coming Reign of God. There is no hint in Scripture of a freedom to sin. As noted earlier, the ultimate freedom is the opportunity to behold the risen Jesus, fall to one’s knees, and repeat the words of the Apostle Thomas, “My Lord and my God.” 1704 The human person participates in the light and power of the divine Spirit. By his reason, he is capable of understanding the order of things established by the Creator. By free will, he is capable of directing himself toward his true good. He finds his perfection "in seeking and loving what is true and good."7
As with last week’s Monday post, Paragraph 1704 of the Catechism continues to draw from the Council’s Gaudium et Spes to develop a “moral anthropology,” so to speak, or a description of the human species that explains the human capacity to do good and avoid evil. Footnote 7 cites GS para. 15 in its assertion that man, by the very nature of his creation, can participate in the light and power of the divine spirit with two capacities: natural reasoning enables a person to understand the correct ordering of things as established by God; the natural will, the power to judge and decide, can prompt a human toward his or her true good. GS heaps generous praise upon the achievements of the human species. Gaudium et Spes is addressed to all mankind; it is not an in-church instruction, so it can afford to be generous. It cites modern achievements in empirical sciences, technology, and liberal arts. It is safe to assume that GS is including scientists and thinkers outside the Catholic fold, because the heart of the argument is the universality of the human capacity to know and will greatness. GS goes on to say that mankind “has always looked for, and found, truths of a higher order.” This is consistent with the Aristotle-St. Thomas Aquinas grand medieval synthesis of all knowledge ending with the beatific vision. GS refers to the summit of learning and investigation as “wisdom,” where “the intellectual nature of man at last finds its perfection as it should….” The Vatican II document declares that “filled with wisdom, man is led through visible realities to those which cannot be seen.” Again, the medieval synthesis is in play, whereby visible observation of the natural order proceeds seamlessly to the invisible metaphysical classifications of species and the ultimate reality of a real yet undescribed First Cause, as Aristotle would have put it, or an all-powerful and loving God, as Aquinas asserts. My goal here this morning is not to bury you in erudition, but to follow up on the dual teachings of the Council and the Catechism on the magnificence of the human species in its capacity to grasp essential truth and its ability to love. Morality cannot be discussed without some idea of what the human species is capable of, nor can it be taught without reaching the dual faculties of seeking (intellect) and loving (will). I would suggest that a flaw in catechetics is the compartmentalizing of “moral information” or principles from the broader human experience of seeking truth and acting in tandem with that truth. Since GS respects the competence of the empirical sciences, how does para. 1704 of the Catechism and Gaudium et Spes itself stand up to empirical critique? Is it even possible to scientifically correlate intellectual growth and virtue? In my own graduate moral studies (1971-74) one of the most influential figures of the time was not a churchman but an American psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987). Kohlberg was a prisoner of war in Cypress during World War II but eventually returned to the United States to pick up his advanced degrees in psychology. When it came time for him to select a thesis topic at the University of Chicago, he submitted the topic of “moral judgment.” This was an extremely unusual concentration for any major university, religious or secular. In fact, the last significant work on moral development dated back to Jean Piaget a quarter-century earlier. Kohlberg’s work was not immediately accepted. The psychology field was dominated by Freud’s theory that human behavior is determined by outside forces (the “Super Ego”) or by B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist system of punishment and rewards. For Freud and Skinner, moral determinations were reactions to outside forces. Kohlberg, by contrast, believed that moral formation generated inside the human’s experiences and correlated to intellectual maturity. His target audience was the U.S. public school audience, though one cannot help being struck by parallels to Gaudium et Spes, which appeared at roughly the same time as Kohlberg’s first books appeared. Those who know little of Kohlberg may remember his “six stages of moral development” and the novel method of testing applied. Kohlberg created moral dilemma stories for his subjects (72 all male lower and middle-class boys); the most famous: “would be permissible for a poor man to steal medicine for his dying wife?” The children’s responses became the basis of his six-stage theory of moral development, but Kohlberg was more interested in why they had given their answer than in an objectively correct right-or-wrong answer. (The “dying wife” scenario does allow for multiple considerations.) Kohlberg observed that some of his subjects chose not to steal the medicine to avoid punishment, and others did so to gain something in the process. These are his steps one and two. Others posited their answers to gain the approval of others (stage 3) or to maintain a respect for law and order (stage 4). In my school days, stage four was called “The Archie Bunker” stage, after the TV blue collar character who decried the disorder of the Viet Nam War and Civil Rights protests. The most advanced subjects provided rationales of respect for laws and moral rules (stage five) and abstract principles of justice and equality (stage 6). Kohlberg believed that achievement of stage 6 was unusual. Kohlberg devoted much of his working life to integrating the ideas of morality and social/intellectual development. He believed in using biographies of famous and virtuous men such as Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He understood that the young needed provisional instruction in making basic choices upon which to develop the cognitive tools for appropriate moral decision making. In 1981 the Methodist theologian James Fowler attempted to elaborate the process of internal moral decision making based upon the theories of Piaget, Kohlberg, and Erik Ericson, but in my Amazon review of Fowler I found his approach and case study much harder to discern than Kohlberg’s. It is important to note for Catholic readers that Kohlberg’s theory came under fire by another theorist, Carol Gilligan, who achieved fame in 1982 with her In a Different Voice (1982). She observed that Kohlberg had only tested boys, and that feminine conceptual development takes different forms from the male. For much of my lifetime Catholic moral theorizing has been conducted by clergy, particularly in seminary settings. Today much of Catholic moral theology is undertaken by women, religious and lay, in the relatively diverse settings of Catholic, Protestant, and secular universities. The feminine impact upon Catholic academia, including moral theology, should be interesting to behold as we progress through the next decades. 1703 Endowed with "a spiritual and immortal" soul,5 the human person is "the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake."6 From his conception, he is destined for eternal beatitude.
Paragraph 1703 of the Catechism is derived entirely from the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (1965). GS is one of the most intriguing of the Council documents. It was the last to be promulgated, and no previous council had issued a declaration quite like this one. Previous Church Councils had addressed errors to be corrected or matters for enrichment or clarification. Even the previous documents of Vatican II had addressed specific issues of potential good, such as a reform of the liturgy, the future of religious life, and the leadership roles of bishops. Gaudium et Spes, or Joy and Hope in English, steps aside from the traditional teaching mode and “offers the world a gift.” GS is an address to the whole world, not simply professed Catholics’ a universal invitation to a richer way of life. In the process, GS amplifies the nature and identity of all mankind, or as para. 1703 puts it, “the human person is the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake.” A being with such an exalted beginning is certainly destined to a potential glorious end, and the Church is inviting all created mankind to full communion of faith. It is not hard to understand why the editors of the Catechism open the morality section with this reminder of mankind’s true nature and destiny, since, in the Catholic idiom, identity is achieved by the very nature of creation and then one’s destiny in the beatific life of the world to come. Morality at its heart is recognition of identity and behaviors consistent with that recognition. The best definition of original sin is failure to know ourselves. We are made from privilege known to nothing else save God. I saw in the news this weekend that scientists reignited the booster rocket on Pioneer I, the U.S. exploratory spacecraft, for the first time in 37 years. At its present speed Pioneer will pass within one light-year of our closest neighboring star in the year 41,000 A.D. [Don’t wait up.] Grasping a sense of the size of the universe is as good a metaphor as any for the immensity of the world in every sense. When Aristotle wrote of a Prime Mover or First Cause, he probably had little sense of the true dimensions of the cause and its effects. Our collective sin is a mistaken self-consciousness of ourselves as bit players in a small stakes game. “Low self-esteem” as a term has been relegated to the therapist’s office, but in truth it is easier to ignore our true identity on the basis that “to whom much is given, much is expected.” The most significant gift of Judeo-Christian culture is the worth of a human being. The dividing line between a believer and an atheist comes down to religious anthropology: what is a man, why is his essence so sacred, and what is his final destiny? Catholic teaching holds to the Jewish-Christian Revelation of the Sacred Scripture regarding the nature of man and the One who made him. The sacredness of human life has been reemphasized as the root principle of morality by Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes a good case in point. It is also the colliding point between faith and secular life, though the battle is fought along an extensive line. The Bible could not be clearer that all are sacred to God because he has created them, notably those having a rough time of it on earth. Matthew 25’s judgment account makes care for the sacredness of the vulnerable and the weak the ultimate determination of eternal reward. For any number of reasons, the universal value of people gets lost in a shuffle of mangled religion, greed, abuse of power, selfishness. To take one example, the principles of para. 1703 and other sites speak of this divine infusion into human life beginning with conception. “From his conception, he [sic] is destined for eternal beatitude.” Modern reproductive medicine has enabled the Church to understand the timing and process of conception, but from earliest times Tradition has protected the unborn and severely censured abortive acts. The virtue of creating new life destined to share in God’s blessings in this life and in the life to come is acknowledged sacramentally in Church teaching on marriage. While disease may present occasions where the lesser of two evils is adopted with regret by parents and health care providers, (see USCCB instructions on saving a mother’s life here) the deliberate termination of embryonic life is condemned, because no human being has the right to deny another human being communion with God and the blessings that follow. It is disturbing to see how often the gift of life is overlooked, or in some cases even scorned. In the United States there is a constant and heated conversation over the degrees to which national policy—such as in tax reform—values the worth of some lives over others. Immigration in cases where immigrants came to the United States to escape life-threatening situations or to join family of origin is another. Management of the opioid epidemic is yet another, as is the care of the sick, the aged, and the mentally ill. When Jesus reminded Peter that forgiveness must be tendered 7 x 70 times [an idiom for infinity], implied in his message is the fact that consciousness of sin and true repentance is a lifelong project. Even the worst of criminals need time to discover their identity as beings created by God for a higher purpose. When we short-circuit the course of life and its quality in any way, the probably cause is identity crisis: we have forgotten who we are, God’s extraordinary hope for us, and our ultimate destiny, of which St. Paul says that “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, what God has prepared for those who love him.” 1702 The divine image is present in every man. It shines forth in the communion of persons, in the likeness of the unity of the divine persons among themselves (cf. chapter two).
Paragraph 1702 brings a new dimension to our considerations on the moral life: the idea that morality is corporate in nature as well as individual. The Catechism here borrows from its opening considerations on the nature of man as reflective of the life of God, who is triune or threefold, a perfect community of love. Specifically, the text speaks of God’s “communion of persons” and the unity of those persons among themselves. Para. 1702 introduces the corporate sense of goodness: we are created to work together in the fashion of God’s inner unity. Situated here at the introduction to the morality section of the Catechism, is it also reasonable to assume from para. 1702 that given the corporate identity of doing good, there is a kind of corporate judgment after death and/or the end of time? Last Sunday's Gospel (Christ the King, Matthew 25: 31-46) closes the Liturgical Year on a high note or a low note, depending on how and to what degree we are feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and otherwise improving the lot of the suffering and the less fortunate. Like the Beatitudes in Chapter 5 which introduce Matthew’s treatment of morality, the criteria set forth by the king in Matthew 25 are open-ended. There are no numerical or chronological guidelines set forth for the works of charity, though generations before and after Christ would invent guidelines, such as tithing or seasonal giving at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Years ago, I heard a Catholic moral theologian end his lecture with a peculiar thought: when you give a poor man a turkey for his family this Thanksgiving, make a commitment to build justice and opportunity in society whereby next Thanksgiving he can give you a turkey. Not all my moral professors were quite this prosaic, but they did talk considerably about “social justice,” which was something of a post-Vatican II change in emphasis from the moral manual era which preceded it, with its emphasis upon individual guilt and the confessional. After the Council the Church initiated communal celebrations of Penance, particularly during the Advent and Lenten Seasons, where parishes and groups would engage in collective prayers of grief and repentance. I notice a significant decline in such rites over my lifetime, possibly because we as Catholics are not conditioned to think collectively. Human nature being what it is, I can understand a reluctance to consider wholesale embrace of corporate responsibility. Once the parameters of moral responsibility are expanded to collective matters, it is impossible to get anywhere without communication and common commitment, even (especially?) at a grass roots level. I speak from some experience here as a former president of an HOA who devoted considerable time explaining to people why they could not park RV’s on the street or use their neighbors’ lawns as public dog toilets. My expectations from higher forms of civil government decreased considerably after my tenure. Para. 1702 takes us into the challenging world of society, the ultimate “communion of persons” here on earth, and its collective responsibility for the common good. Understanding and implementing a just society is not limited to Catholic morality, nor to religion in general. Remember studying Hammurabi’s Code from 1754 B.C.? [Hammurabi made provision for a primitive form of consumer rights and business ethics, among other things.] Four centuries before Christ, Plato observed the execution of his teacher and mentor Socrates for what amounted to the latter’s philosophical concepts and method; Plato would later write The Republic to explore the possibilities of finding a happy life in a society properly arranged and governed. The inspired Hebrew Scripture lays out “the Law” in very specific terms as the only way for the Israelite nation to survive in an environment surrounded by enemies. While catechetics focuses on the specifics of the Law, notably the Ten Commandments, there is less emphasis upon the reality that God’s moral teachings are directed at the entire Israelite assembly. “You [plural] are my people.” All the twelve tribes are addressed collectively, and particularly noteworthy, all are punished collectively, most notably in the Babylonian Captivity but in many other catastrophes as well. [In the Book of Exodus, God punishes the Egyptians collectively, too, through the ten plagues.] Civilization and technology have become so advanced and complex since Biblical times that discernment of the moral duty described in Matthew 25 becomes much more difficult. It is one thing to extend an individual charitable act—serving Thanksgiving dinner at a local shelter, for example—but another thing entirely to address the broader issues of homelessness, unemployment, domestic strife, substance abuse, and the many other factors that bring the needy to our churches and other charitable facilities. I am thinking of one social issue that is fresh in everyone’s mind, the recent mass shootings from Orlando to Texas. National polls consistently agree that after each massacre Americans want more mental health services for intervention before such heinous crimes, and some restriction on the high-powered weaponry that makes a mass killer more effective. It is impossible to be neutral on the matter of mass murders; in my heart of hearts I believe my fellow citizens have moral stirrings that “something should be done” even if there is considerable disagreement on strategy. The fifth commandment guides the Judeo-Christian tradition: murder is identified as a capital evil, and mass murder exponentially more so. Traditional Catholic morality would look to the identity of a murderer and the appropriate response. Post-Conciliar moral theology looks to preventative responsibility, our need to protect life from conception to the grave, in a “seamless garment” as the late Cardinal Bernardin famously put it. For an example of how Christian and Catholic moralists do their work today, look at this index from the current Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. One of the challenges to moralists is the hard reality that certainty diminishes as one moves from the general to the specific. The same is true in civil law; the Supreme Court cannot overturn the Second Amendment, but it can rule on its specific reach, as it did yesterday for Maryland and Florida. I have not had an opportunity to review Catholic moral writing on appropriate moral responses to the killings over the past several years. However, a reasoned moral position would need to address and weigh several factors. Overriding all others is an often-overlooked unity of ethical principle shared by the Catholic moral tradition and the founding principles of the United States; Catholicism holds the sanctity of human life on the highest plane (as is evident from para. 1702) while the first statement of purpose of the United States defines the basic right of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this sense church and state share a foundational common cause. Moving from the general to the specific presents, not surprisingly, a variance of opinion on the practical ways to guarantee life. In popular on-line discussion, the argument is often reduced to two rather absurd extremes: ban all guns or uncover all potential mass-killers (and do what, a mental health counselor asks.) At the Council Lateran II in 1139 A.D. the Church condemned the use of the crossbow, a case where the technology of weaponry ran ahead of the ability to defend against it; the crossbow was the first armor-piercing projectile. The Church’s teachings on war and engagement from medieval times has also had significant interest in protecting innocent bystanders and noncombatants. Christian tradition has something to bring to the civil table on the matter of the kinds of weaponry available in the marketplace, precisely on the grounds that there is no defense against the kind of assault perpetrated in Las Vegas. On the other hand, there is nothing inherently immoral about gun ownership per se, for reasons of sport, hunting, home security, investing and collecting purposes, etc. A Catholic moralist would probably concur with civil laws regarding safety, storage, and the common good [e.g., registries and reporting stolen weapons] as well as responsible use by law enforcement. The matter of mental health and its role in mass killings is complicated on many levels, and at the end of the day what you must address is the question of habeas corpus. I would never say that the mental health profession has foolproof methods of predicting behavior. The general principle and expectation in the courts is that we as providers have collected a database of past behavior from our patients on which to predict future behavior. We are bound to report imminent threats to prospective victims, of course. But mental health care cannot intrude into the lives of people who don’t seek it, without due cause. Moreover, having undertaken due diligence, what does a therapist—or law enforcement or a family, for that matter--do with an individual with an inclination toward destructive behavior based on prior history? Devin Patrick Kelley’s history is particularly troubling because he was dishonorably discharged from the Air Force, and a sizeable history of the Texas church shooter’s personality issues sits in government computers to this day. Do we move in the direction of preventive detention? Institutionalization? Forced pharmaceutical intervention? How is a balance reached between protecting the rights of the mentally ill and the potential breech of safety posed to citizens whose government is committed to protecting their right to live and develop a future? As I warned earlier, the move from principle to policy is extremely difficult. In the example I cited of mass shootings, the compromises across the board will have to come from the legislative and judicial arms of government. But Catholic morality is clear that our baptismal personal responsibility extends into the care and nurturing of the larger community beyond my personal piety. Again, I see common cause between the Church and the American founding fathers—both advocated for an engaged and thoughtful electorate. This entry today is perhaps too lengthy…but don’t worry that future Monday posts will become an unbearable chore. Consider today’s post as an introduction into the Catholic’s moral positioning vis-à-vis the marketplace of public ethics. 1701 "Christ, . . . in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, makes man fully manifest to himself and brings to light his exalted vocation."2 It is in Christ, "the image of the invisible God,"3 that man has been created "in the image and likeness" of the Creator. It is in Christ, Redeemer and Savior, that the divine image, disfigured in man by the first sin, has been restored to its original beauty and ennobled by the grace of God.4
My wife Margaret alerted me to a very troubling piece in the New York Times by Diana Nyad, possibly the greatest distance swimmer in American history. Nyad, now 68, has accomplished such feats as swimming from the Bahamas to Florida and Cuba to Florida. However, these challenges dwarf in comparison to the lifelong battle she has fought in the aftermath of serious sexual assaults inflicted upon her as a teenager by her swimming coach, a man regarded as an icon in the field of high school swimming. I debated with myself about posting her teenaged experiences, but in the context of the morality stream here at the Café, the ugliness of sin and evil cannot be avoided, particularly given that the victims of sin often have no opportunity to escape it. Be advised that the link here is for mature adults only. Ms. Nyad’s detailed account of events of over fifty years stands in the context of this autumn’s “Me, too” awareness and the allegations of multiple women against a man running for the U.S. Senate next month from Alabama. There is a sad predictability about such cases as the one in Alabama; they are rarely isolated, and it only takes one public accusation to open the door. In Ms. Nyad’s case, she finally decided to describe her experiences to a peer, who in turn admitted that the same coach had repeatedly molested her, too, with the same sex acts. In the Alabama campaign, I have had to process the reaction of the voting citizenry. Business Insider reported on a very recent poll in which “29% of survey respondents said they were actually more likely to support Moore following the accusations, while 38% of respondents said they were less likely to support him following the report, and 33% said it made no difference.” In a heavily evangelical state like Alabama, I found this inconsistency remarkable—though this poll is a referendum on federalism and the media as much as anything--and for a time it roused my lesser angels to quick and superficial conclusions. But given our weekly commitment here on Mondays to the moral life, the subject—multiple subjects, actually—deserve deeper theological consideration. Paragraph 1701 opens the door to our considerations with its assertion that man has been created “in the image and likeness” of the Savior. I would maintain that this Biblical truth is one of the hardest for us to maintain, because we are overwhelmed by what seems to be the opposite. St. Augustine, certainly no stranger to the evils men do, attempted to provide an explanation for the evil tendencies of mankind with a language reflected in the Catechism here, that the divine image has been disfigured in man by the first sin [of Adam and Eve.] Augustine’s metaphysical/biological analysis of the root of sin and evil is admittedly not emotionally satisfying in attempting to explain the actions of shooters Devin Patrick Kelley [Texas] or Stephen Paddock [Las Vegas], nor does it get to the core of why some individuals sin more egregiously than others. The ”Me too” movement is probably the better focal point of moral discussion, for it moves our attention from the dramatic and radical behaviors of the few to the more pervasive sins of the many—the commonplace exercise of abuse of power by males in relationships with girls and women. This form of abuse is so prevalent that I have included it in my psychosocial patient histories for years. We are talking about a wide range of behaviors here—child abuse, as in the case of Diana Nyad, to work site harassment, coercion, or indecency—where power motivates sexual words or actions. I have always carried some knowledge of the uphill battle faced by all women; I am married to a brilliant Ivy League doctoral graduate who has been tossed under the bus from time to time in her professional life by the male brotherhood. It is rare indeed to hear any woman report that she had no instances in her life where her sex did not, at the very least, put her in an anxious or very uncomfortable predicament. Given the almost universal scope of the problem, it is fair to say that as men, our sensitivity on this matter is sorely lacking. Some people we have known, trusted, done business with, worshipped with, or even trusted our children with, do live double lives, and apparently in large numbers. Catholics have come to public knowledge of this since the 2002 Boston Globe investigation into the actual numbers of abusing clergy. The troubling issue for a man of conscience is coping with the prevalence of sin. It is troubling to me, for example, that I missed a good number of cues in my earlier life, that when a parishioner, student, or client, reported a past or present struggle with the predatory behavior of a man or a workplace, my solutions were round-a-bout. Mandated reporting laws in Florida did not come into play until the late 1980’s. As a priest and therapist, I have reported several cases to authorities, and I was subpoenaed to testify in several child abuse cases, not a pleasant experience. When you immerse yourself in such matters, there is a depressing sensation that the world is a much more sinful [and dangerous] place than we like to think. But this despondency is the beginning of wisdom. Words like “salvation” and “redemption” begin to assume the power God intended them to have. In reflecting upon grave sin, and the reality of hell, it has occurred to me that God, in the very way we are created, has empowered us to choose eternal life. Similarly, God has empowered us to make the decision to damn ourselves as well. It is a terrifying thought, really, and it is one that we suppress—the power God has given us. For this reason, we downplay the many sins of our culture—including the abuse of power and a reluctance to enter the experience of women. Morality makes sense only when we understand the high stakes of being the creatures of God, in his image and likeness. If we despair of our divine gifts at the cost of our depravity, great as it may be, we have admitted defeat. Hope is not called a virtue for nothing. I have been carrying around in my mailbox several news accounts involving a June 12 letter addressed to pastors, clergy and administrators of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois. Bishop Thomas Paprocki outlined his expectations of his clergy in their public and sacramental ministrations to those in same sex marriages. I am linking here to the Washington Post story as well as to the document itself. The policy has drawn considerable reaction in both the religious and secular media, and I doubt that it would serve much useful pastoral purpose. On the contrary, as thousands of Catholic leaders gather here in Orlando this week to map strategy for evangelization, the bishop’s statement is probably as good an example as any of why Catholics leave the Church. The essential point: while the bishop’s statement is technically compliant with a literal reading of the Catechism, it is pastorally deficient at the least, and in some ways positively harmful to the Church. My first reading led me to conclude that the policies are unjust and worse, discriminatory; an excellent example of how something might be right but not good. 1700 The dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God (article 1); it is fulfilled in his vocation to divine beatitude (article 2). It is essential to a human being freely to direct himself to this fulfillment (article 3). By his deliberate actions (article 4), the human person does, or does not, conform to the good promised by God and attested by moral conscience (article 5). Human beings make their own contribution to their interior growth; they make their whole sentient and spiritual lives into means of this growth (article 6). With the help of grace they grow in virtue (article 7), avoid sin, and if they sin they entrust themselves as did the prodigal son1 to the mercy of our Father in heaven (article 8). In this way they attain to the perfection of charity.
Paragraph 1700 is a summary statement of the human moral life, providing the organization of principles the Catechism will employ in laying out the Church’s teaching. Since each of these articles will be treated in detail in future parts of the Catechism, I will not go into specific commentary of each point just yet. Rather, I would like to step back and look at the moral project as a whole. Catholic moral teaching is a culture unto itself. It presupposes the existence of God and the reality of a metaphysical world beyond the obvious. Catholic morality was not designed for utilitarian or practical living, but as the embodiment of a relationship to the divine and a world beyond this one. If you are an adult Catholic taking stock of your “moral standing,” the quest begins with your conception of God. Today’s theologians criticize—in a reverential way—the efforts of the medievalists St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas to prove propositionally the existence of God. In high school I thought I had grasped at least one of Thomas’s “proofs”, that being the chain of causality to a first creator, but later I discovered that Thomas had developed this method from Aristotle,” who is famous for his projection of a “First Mover.” In either case, these “proofs” thrived primarily in the universe of mathematicians and logicians—and later in a Church structure seeking impregnable certainty against its enemies. The propositional method of finding God had little use for experiential searching, notably mysticism. That Martin Luther was a critic of scholastic/propositional theology and very much a mystic will feature in our later discussion of the Reformation. If someone is not moved to belief in God by logical proof or dialectic persuasion, what other channels are there? I can think of two: mysticism and human interaction. I can state unequivocally that I am not a mystic in the sense of Thomas Merton or those mysterious communities of late medieval times, the Rhineland Mystics, who influenced Luther. “Mystics” are those fortunate individuals who experience life on a different plane of experience, much like a poet. The sources of their knowledge are internal, as they intentionally remove themselves from the world’s many distractions. Mysticism has always been a challenge to the Church, as its most profound adherents have claimed their ground of spiritual life from internal communion with God as much as from structured Church worship and devotion. I have known very few true mystics in my life, but I have known many individuals who have joined Catholic religious orders, communities, or faith groups built around a regimen of intense prayer and contemplation/meditation. I have little doubt that dedication to a life of prayer produces a sense of the holy that few of us will ever know, an “experience beyond experience.” The fact that such individuals live and worship within the parameters of the Catholic family is an assurance to them that their religious experiences are not “off the reservation” of Revelation and sanity. In and out of my office I have encountered “mystics” whose actual experiences may have generated from psychosis, based on other clinical cues; therefore, the Church is very slow to accept claims of visions and “messages from God.” The best description of contemporary mystical life probably comes from Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1949). Curiously, Merton himself was a poet and English professor at St. Bonaventure University (we both drew paychecks from the same school, though SBU got much more for the money with Merton.) Merton’s autobiography describes a man searching for meaning, a quest which led him to the monastery of Gethsemane in Kentucky. Merton undercut the old belief that prayer and mysticism guaranteed tranquility; his monastic life opened his eyes to his own sins, to be sure, but also to the “sin of the world;” American racism and militarism galvanized his final years. He died in 1968, as the United States involvement in Viet Nam. Merton was a voracious letter-writer, a remarkable achievement for a cloistered monk whose highly structured community responsibilities included property reforestation, and he maintained many close friendships for a man who had left the world. One of his early works No Man Is an Island (1962, 2010) gives a hint of a third experience of God, encounter with people who inspire us to go beyond where we are. I would formerly use the word “community” to express this divine possibility, but the word has been stretched like taffy to cover so many dimensions of life that its coinage has been significantly diminished. The better word for our purposes here might be “intimacy,” in the sense of knowing and observing another person’s goodness well enough that we cannot help but be prompted to look for something better. In discussions at AA meetings on the choice of a sponsor, newbies are told to look around the group and find someone “who has what they want.” This is not exactly a new idea on my part. Para. 1700 says next to nothing on the interaction of peoples in the quest for grace; in the text given here, everyone is a sole islander in a quest for the ways of a God who is profoundly mysterious. Yet, since the fourth century the Church has sanctioned communities of believers who have left the world in a common search for an invisible God. Perhaps more to the point for most of us, we have entered our own religious communities with a life-long partner, and in our search for God we do tend to overlook the most influential help-mate and fellow traveler. Marriage was not called a sacrament till after the first millennium, when early medieval theologians began to plumb the full nature of the relationship of a man and a woman, and when European culture developed chivalry, romantic poetry, and Marian devotion. The teaching of Jesus that the “two become one flesh” was better understood, and Vatican II formalized the dual relationship in marriage as both procreative and unitive in the document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope). The mutual selection of a spouse is life’s most important decision; modern day sacramental theology explains that marriage is the only sacrament conferred by partners upon each other, with each making a pledge to redeem and cherish the best of the other. I am a better man because of my wife; she is an energized Christian with a boundless capacity good works—organized and spontaneous, disciplined, and devoted to professional excellence. Her concern for me is a hint of what a higher power must feel for me, or at least how I hope my God feels about me. In my existential quest for God, I would be foolish to overlook the clues of a loving God in my own household. Deep committed friendships, of the sort we are lucky to find a few times in a lifetime, are similar in their power to signal something greater in this universe. It is true, of course, that marriages and friendships must navigate periods of difficulty, but mystics sometimes admit to the same thing; both St. Teresa of Avila and Mother Teresa have left us with accounts of feeling totally isolated from God. St. John of the Cross talks of the Dark Night of the Soul. And even the medieval masters of logic and proposition doubted themselves. Aquinas reported waved his hand over his entire literary output and declared it to be “all straw.” Philosophers, Mystics, Lovers: Merton was right that in the search for the absolute of being, no one is ever an island of absolute certainty. Our doubts, and perhaps more to the point, our worry about our inability to find God, is the proof that God exists and that the moral life is worth the anguish. |
MORALITYArchives
February 2024
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