The Law of Christ

I have talked a great deal over the last few Monday posts about Father Bernard Haring and his impact upon the science of moral theology in the Roman Catholic tradition. So much so that it seemed only fair to zoom in on his 1954 work that changed our thinking about sin and penitential practice, The Law of Christ. The first English translations appeared in the United States in the early 1960’s, but the essence and principles of LC were integrated immediately into European university curriculums, and thus absorbed by the many American priests and religious obtaining doctorates overseas. By the time I entered college in 1966 Haring’s thought was a staple of my textbooks and lectures. Angelo Roncalli, the future John XXIII, read LC prior to his election in 1958 and would bring Haring into the writing of several Vatican II schemas, including Optotam Totius on seminary training and more famously Gaudium et Spes on the Church’s place in the world.
 
What was different about The Law of Christ? For starters, it was not a manual.  James Keenan’s A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century devotes considerable attention to Haring’s forerunners, moralists who were breaking away from the catalogue method of discussing sin toward some form of incorporation of the imitation of Christ, or who used the Ten Commandments as an organizational framework (as the Catechism of the Catholic Church continues to do.) Keenan gives credit to Haring for two breakthroughs. First, Haring summarized the discontent of many moralists with the legal or casuist approach to morality. Second, Haring approached moral theology in the context of the full theological enterprise of Catholic academics: foundational principles, Christian anthropology, Scripture, Liturgy, and history.
 
The Law of Christ begins with a history of the discipline and established in a foundational sense what the “tools” of the moralists are: responsibility, fellowship, and the imitatio Christi. (Keenan, p.91) The introduction of responsibility takes him naturally to a discussion of Christian anthropology, i.e., what is the identity and capacity of a human, and a baptized human? His answer is the call to follow Christ; this is what we have been created to do. Haring emphasizes the unity of the body and soul: behavior is motivated by affect for God in his visible reality, Jesus. {“Phillip, he who sees me sees him who sent me.”)
 
Haring goes on to define the human as one who lives in community and in history. This was certainly true of Jesus, who came “not to be served but to serve,” and who played out the Redemptive drama in a real time (“for our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate”). The Christian likewise serves the community of his time and place. Haring is certainly assisted here by the renewed Catholic Scripture study of time which had rediscovered the idea of God working through history in the narrative of the Israelite people and continuing, through the Pentecost event, to play out in the assembly of the followers of Jesus.  Haring writes that the human history is marked by sin but always called to restoration. The “way home” in his thought is the sacraments, and his expansion of the role of liturgy in moral theology is a marked departure from the manualist tradition’s emphasis upon juridical confession. An aside: my students are always surprised when I tell them the penitential rite of the Mass does forgive sin.  
 
Another of Haring’s strengths is his understanding of the emerging Catholic philosophical and theological thinking taking place around him, in the works of Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, and many others who would ultimately serve as periti or advisors at Vatican II. From his theological peers Haring developed at considerable length his concept of human freedom. Remember that the prevalent mood of Post-War Europe was one of pessimism, and that the philosophy of the time was notably existentialist​—the influence of Kierkegaard and Sartre, for example. Catholic thinkers addressing this new environment had to take account that human thought was built around a basic freedom of choice, a freedom so deep that Catholic theologians looked to both Biblical and psychological referents to describe it.
 
By the time I reached graduate studies the term for Christian freedom was “fundamental option,” or the most basic choice for or against the invitation of God to embrace the life of his Son. As it turned out, my graduate comprehensive examinations—spread out over several days—included my three-hour elucidation of this term, which mercifully will not be repeated here. Haring believed that the ability to arrive at and articulate one’s fundamental option—the heart of one’s faith and, by extension, moral decision making—rested upon one’s knowledge of God, the development of one’s conscience, and the realization through action of our call to responsibility. Sixty years of subsequent scholarship and experience have naturally adapted and in some cases reassessed the notions of Christian freedom, but the enduring legacy is a turn from sole consideration of sinful acts to the attitude and faith of the human believer.
 
Parts three and four of The Law of Christ turn to practical considerations of embracing and living the Law of Christ—specifically, of course, identifying what it might look like in the everyday world. The drawback of any law system is the inability of the lawgiver to envision every possible circumstance; hence the importance of the Supreme Court of the United States, for example. Haring never dismissed the ultimate authority of the teaching Church, but he and moralists to follow would be more inclined to respect the human conscience as competent to judge individual moral circumstances, based on the three principles enumerated in the preceding paragraph.
 
Part five of LC is devoted to the process of conversion with discussion of contrition, confession, penance, satisfaction and atonement. The sixth part focuses on life after conversion in pursuit of the perfection of the virtues. This final part corresponds to the fourth quadrant of today’s Catechism. In summary, Keenan writes that “Notably different from his predecessors, Haring privileges human freedom as foundational to moral goodness. For Haring, freedom is the possibility of responding to God’s call 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.” (p. 92)
 
Haring’s work would open a great many doors to the pastoral dimensions of morality in the Vatican II era and beyond. It would also come under considerable scrutiny when the idea of freedom of conscience encountered its first true crucible, the formal teaching of Pope Paul VI in 1968 against the use of artificial birth control. But that is a story for a later day.