Morality: How to Live it Today is written by Reverend Leonard F. Badia and Ronald Sarno and was published in 1979. This book is divided into three parts: Doctrinal Background, Catholic Morality, and Contemporary Moral Issues. Part One consists of the Ethics of Jesus, A Brief History of the Catholic Church, and the Purpose of the Church. Part Two is made up of Value Systems with its various views, Conscience with the meaning of informed conscience, and The Sources of Morality. Part Three talks about the Worth of the Individual, Marriage, Contemporary Sexual Conduct, The Issues of Life and Death, The Mass Media as the Modern Bible, Freedom and Authority, and the Summary.
The author in his introduction talked about the contemporary landscape of American Catholicism. It is written “to give more than ‘something’… with the hope that it will fill a real need in the classroom. So many teachers and students have asked for a book which would give the basics of Catholic teaching.” It considers the fact that “most Catholic children know little about their own Church’s history…. not been taught how the Church’s doctrine is the foundation for her moral teaching.” So, this book gives an overview on the basic moral teachings on the Church on some of the controversial moral issues of today. It hopes to introduce the reader to the Church, then to morality, and finally to the controversies.
The first three chapters outline the traditional Catholic doctrine. It treats first on the ethics of Jesus of Nazareth, the history of the Church, and the purpose of the Church. This gives a simple explanation on the reason for the existence of the Catholic Church in today’s world and the continuation of the ethical tradition founded by Jesus Christ.
The first chapter opens up with definitions of ethics: a branch of philosophy that is concerned with what is morally good and bad, right and wrong; a code of rules for moral behavior; or a system of moral principles. In all these, moral and ethical can be interchanged. With these, the authors pose questions, which the authors gave answers: Does ethics make a difference? Do I or my friends have a code of ethics? or What difference does it make if I have a good code of ethics? In the second and third part of the chapter, it talked about the person of Jesus and His message, the geographical area of His birth and the world that He grew up with. Central to the message of Jesus is the compression of the commandment of God given to Moses to two: the Love of God and the Love of Neighbor. Scriptural bases (Matthew 22, Mark 12, and Luke 10) have been given to show the focal point on Jesus’ ministry. Here, the authors gave three important questions for the reader to ponder: Who is God, Who is the Neighbor, and What is Love. “Therefore, we can say that Jesus’ teaching on ethics is based on the love of God and the love of neighbor. This love is specified in the famous speech of Jesus which has been called the Sermon on the Mount.” The chapter ends with the authors’ comments on the fundamental basis of Christian Ethics, and how in difficult ways to do it. It says in threes ways: By falling in love with themselves and others, by an inner turning to God, and by conversion.
The second chapter turns its attention on the history of the Church, which becomes the vehicle of the teaching, thus the ethical tradition, of the Lord Jesus Christ. This describes the different councils and doctrinal growth that have developed within the two-thousand-year history of Catholicism, and how the Church arrived at Her positions on different formidable issues of the present. The singular reason for the continuation on the Church is the belief of the community on Jesus as the Lord. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, “the Church wrote the Scriptures, preached the Word of God, and worshipped the Father”. Since the She belongs in history, “the influence of politics and society have deeply affected your Church …. the Church has had a profound influence on politics and society.” As the Father of the Second Vatican Council taught: “For God’s word, by whom all this were made, was Himself made flesh so that as perfect man He might save all men and sum up all things in Himself. The Lord is the goal of human history, the focal point of the longings of history and of civilization, the center of the human race, the joy of every heart, and the answer to all its yearnings”.
Here, the authors listed the different periods of the Church in Her long history: The Ancient Church (1 – 600 AD), The Early Medieval Church (600 – 1054 AD), The Later Medieval Church (1054 – 1500 AD), The Early Modern Church (1500 – 1789 AD), The Modern Church (1789 – Present), A Summary of Moral Doctrine from the Ancient Church to the Present, The Modern Church’s Teachings: The Documents of Vatican II, and the Bibliography. Sections I – V give the historical outlines and significant popes, the ecumenical councils, the survey of moral doctrines, a summary statement, and the discussion questions. Section VI presented the Moral Teachings of the Ancient to Modern Church with comments and questions. Section VII shows an introduction before giving the sixteen documents of the 21st Ecumenical Council of the Church with summary statements and discussion questions. The last is the bibliography with historical survey, councils, moral theology, and Vatican II. This chapter devotes so much attention on the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, which has become the watershed for sweeping reforms within the Church, notwithstanding Her moral teachings.
The General Council formally opened on October 11, 1962 presented several reasons for Christianity and the world: to revitalize the Roman Catholic Church against today’s deteriorating moral standards and militant atheism, the heal the wounds of schism and heresy among our non-Catholic brothers, to revise the seven sacraments so that they would be more meaningful, to restore the vernacular language to the Mass, to abolish certain excommunications which were important for their time, to portray the Church as the servant not the master of humanity, to reexamine old disciplines and regulations, to give lay people more responsibility in the Church, to utilize modern media, to decentralize Roman bureaucracy, and to restore more authority to the local bishops.
When the council ended its fourth session on December 8, 1965, it produced sixteen (16) legislations: Four Constitutions (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, and The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), Nine Decrees (The Decree on the Bishops’ Pastoral Office in the Church, The Decree on Ecumenism, The Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches, The Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, The Decree on the Priestly Formation, The Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Life, The Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity, The Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, and The Decree on the Instruments of Social Communication), and Three Declarations (The Declaration of Religious Freedom, The Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Religious, and The Declaration on Christian Education). In each of these documents, the authors gave characteristics and descriptions.
In the comments that followed, it wrote that the Church was powerless against the forces of evil. Christianity had not become the way of life, which gave these forces occasion to grow. The council “reexamined old positions and reform what had to be done, embarked on new path in this new world of advanced technology and science, and showed that the message of Jesus is as relevant today as it was the first century”. The Church should be a leader in the world and should become the sunshine, “no longer would it live in the shadows of hallways”. The chapter closed with the greatest achievements of the council: a closer relationship with Orthodox and Protestant Christians, Jews and others; shared responsibility with the laity; internationalized the Roman offices; respected the right of all men to follow their consciences; restored the local language to the Mass and the Sacraments; recognized the value of sciences such as psychology and sociology; used the latest means of communication to promote the Gospel message; realized that it is a Pilgrim Church; and changed the attitude of the Church from a legal approach to a more human one.
Chapter three presents the purpose of the Church. It started with a discussion about group, its definition, and its relation to the reality of the Church as a spiritual group. It says “the Church is a group of people who share … same beliefs, hopes, and they have the same purpose”. The more important purposes of the Church are as follows: continuation of Jesus’ presence in the world and to bring his ethical teaching into every day and every event, spiritual support and comfort, helps its members to reach God through teaching, prayer, and worship, to improve the world in both spiritual and material, offers worship, aids its members towards its destiny (heaven), mutual encouragement, to change social structure, usage of certain tools in achieving its purpose (prayer, liturgy, the sacraments, the Scripture, Tradition, Doctrine, etc.), the body of Christ, a sacrament, and its description of itself as the People of God. In short, “the mutual purpose of the Church is to imitate Christ by doing what is God and fighting against what is evil”.
Next, the chapter discussed on different types of membership that the Church has. It mentions the organization person, the group-oriented person, the person-oriented individual, and the individualist. The authors have discussed each in a lengthier detail to give a picture on the different persons belonging to a spiritual society. Examples of different essays taken from books of the following people devoted to the Church have been given: Jacques Maritain, a French Catholic philosopher; Hans Kung, a German theologian; Mr. Steve Clark, a convert to Catholicism and a leader of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal; and Fr. Andrew Greeley, a priest-sociologist. In each of the authors, they presented their views regarding their dissatisfaction on the present plight of the Church as they see it.
The next three chapters will present the different value systems that exist in the contemporary world, the meaning of the informed conscience, and the different sources of morality.
The fourth chapter deals on the questions about values. The first of these is the meaning of the word value. It presented meanings from different quoted sources; however, it dwells on this meaning: “a value is something or someone who is considered good or worthy and is desirable or useful”. There are many different types of values. These can be personal, political, religious, moral, economic, and human values. Human values are divided into two: self-realization and self-determination. Self-realization means that a person recognizes within himself three areas: existentialism (he exists with other human beings in time and space), personalism (he is a corporal-spiritual being), and humanism (he recognizes that he is limited by physiological, biological, biochemical, psychological, sociological, educational, and religious factors. Moreover, self-determination means “a conscious and knowledgeable direction of his life”.
The second question about value formation is a lifelong process of growing which gets its strength from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. And, values also depend on two factors: influence and experiences. In here, the authors gave a detailed discussion on both factors.
The third question asked is on a difficult task: the value clarification. This question is further explicated by secondary questions on the meaning of choice, value, and action.
The last question is on the need of values.
The Church recognizes that there are values aside from the spiritual ones. However, it is hoped that from the material values, people will move over to the spiritual realm of values, which Jesus Christ gave to the Church as her foundation. “From these values we can learn that God is our Father, Jesus is our brother and all men and women are our brothers and sisters.” The authors gave a final point to further stress the relationship: “values shape motives, motives shape decisions, decisions make a person responsible for action”.
The fifth chapter concerns on the meaning of informed conscience. Several people have called it “the unwritten law” and the “still small voice”. It is understood that it signifies man’s ability to judge right from wrong. Two traditional distinctions have emerged from situations that poke man’s conscience: sins of commission and sins of omission.
The authors have given in great detail the difference between the super ego and conscience: “the super-ego is not conscience. Super-ego is an unconscious part of the mind, the storehouse of all the things we were forbidden to do in our childhood. Oppositely, moral conscience is conscious, spiritual, human power. This makes a person aware of what is right and wrong. It depends for its power on the spiritual ability of a human person to understand, create, and sustain personal and community relationship.
Scriptural support has been given to show the biblical foundation of its existence in the Judeo-Christian tradition in the Book of the Proverbs. “Moral conscience reminds us that we do certain conscious actions, for which we are personally responsible. If it causes guilt feelings, it arises from something that is specific. Unlike the super-ego, it is never vague and uncertain, but clear and distinct.” As with Judaism, Christianity considers the Ten Commandments as an excellent guide to moral behavior because “they proclaimed the universal moral law”. And, what differentiates Christian conscience is its being rooted in the person of Jesus Christ. “To choose to do good is to follow the teachings of Jesus. To choose to do good, for the Christian, nourishes and sustains his personal relationship with his savior.” To do otherwise is to break it. In summary, the difference of Christian conscience lies in the following: it accepts the Ten Commandments as a basic moral guide, believes in following ethical teachings in the Bible, believes in the personal relationship with Jesus Christ, accepts the ethical teachings of Jesus as its ideals, believes that Jesus Christ is judging our choices now, and believes that He will be the final Judge of its destiny in the next world.” The chapter ends with the famous biblical story of the Prodigal Son and a modern version of that in the person of Susan Atkins.
The source of morality, as described in the sixth chapter, “is either a person or a group which guides our activity by establishing certain values as norms for behavior”. There are different sources of morality: it can be the weak or the powerful, the group or the individual, or the small or the large. The whole life of the person is an interchange between an individual and the outside world. In the end, the different sources of values can become your own, not just from the outside but from within the heart. These sources are personal, familial, social, spiritual, political, and cultural.
The personal source can be the self or other person you have engaged with. Familial is the parents themselves which is the “primary environment for the teaching of values”. The familial is the greatest in shaping the values of a person because of its obvious reason. Any group can be a social source of values, while the Church is a specific exampled of Spiritual source. Culture is a source o morality whose powerful example is the media.
Morality has both sources and means. The means are different ethical tools that encourage us to do good and avoid evil. In each source are different means. One such example for personal source of morality is imitation, which uses another person as a model of behavior. In the Spiritual source, the Church uses the lives of the saints as moral guide or compasses, its regular teaching authority, and the contemporary community of faith, which creates the moral climate of a person. In the political source, it can be the heroes lives, the criminal and civil law, and the active citizenship of the people.
The next chapters will explore specific moral issues. In chapter 7, the book focuses on the worth of the individual. Christian tradition always teaches that “each individual is responsible for his own moral actions and must make a free and independent moral choice on whether to do good or to do evil”.
Here, the book listed individuals whose moral consciences have either contradicted the state or the Church. The list features the Lord Jesus, Joan of Arc, Thomas More, Galileo Galilei, and John Deedy. There are also examples of freedom in civic society who stood on their principles against totalitarian and unfair democratic regimes: Solzhenitsyn of Russia, Mahatma Gandhi of British India, and Henry Thoreau and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of US.
These individuals gave distinction on standing for what they believe is truth. And, they effected change at the cost of their lives. The purpose of the State and Church as institutions is to preserve moral order. However, there are times that these institutions neglected their duties that it takes heroic people to remind them. “The Catholic Church teaches that individual moral conscience informed by the traditional teaching of the Church and inspired by the Holy Spirit, is the supreme judge of all moral actions.
Chapter Eight is on marriage, remarriage, divorce, and open marriage. In 1979, eighty percent of the marriages were permanent and successful, while the other twenty failed. The reasons given are “the unwillingness or inability to love one another maturely, selflessly and completely; a breakdown of social supports for all permanent commitments; a misuse of personal freedom; a misconstrued version of women’s liberation that stresses a freedom based on power rather than self giving; an unwillingness on the part of some husbands to allow their wives to reach their potential as adults; a hedonistic approach to sex; the sensationalism of the media that undermines traditional marital values”.
The authors explored five questions on the nature of Catholic Marriage, the qualities for a stable, loving relationship in Catholic Marriages, the Rite of Catholic Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the Catholic Church, and the Open Marriages as a substitute for Traditional Marriages. Each question has been explicated in great detail with support from the documents of the Vatican II and scripture. In the issue concerning divorce, the Church has always opposed on dissolving and terminating existing marriages. “The Catholic Church does not recognize the right of the state to dissolve a valid, sacramental marriage.” On remarriage, the Church grants annulment, which means that “the marriage was invalid” for several reasons: intentional withholding the right to have children from the other, insanity, grave emotional disturbance, intention of not being faithful, lack of conjugal love, psychopathic or sociopathic personality and serious immaturity. The morality of open marriage has always confronted Christians, but the Church rejects this because of the following reasons given:
It minimizes the primary of a permanent commitment.
It minimizes self giving.
It minimizes exclusive fidelity.
It encourages “instant” happiness.
It emphasizes personal fulfillment as opposed to couple fulfillment.
In the chapter concerning Contemporary Sexual Conduct with Pre-Marital Sex, Group Sex, Homosexuality, Birth Control, and Sterilization, it explains in great length the position of the Church. Most Catholic moralists have always considered sins of human sexuality grave. “The human body – male and female – and human sexuality, that is the joining of a man and woman in physical union, is meant to be a beautiful thing. IT is not dirty or immoral. It is man and woman sharing in the creative love of God. The most correct attitude of a Catholic toward human sexuality is one of gratitude to the Heavenly Father for allowing us to share in His creative love.” It has been accepted as Catholic teaching that “acts of human sexuality belong within a marriage between a man and a woman”. “The Church has taught in Vatican II that there is a dual purpose in marriage: mutual enrichment of the two spouses and the other, which can never be separate from the first, is the bringing of children into the world. The Church has always taught that acts of human sexuality outside of marriage are morally wrong.”
The reasons that have given free rein to sexual freedom are “the invention and wide distribution of the birth control pill; the emergence of Women’s Liberation; the new philosophy of personalism; the greater interest in self-fulfillment as opposed to self-sacrifice; the examples of media celebrities who often expound a viewpoint of sexual permissiveness; and today’s prolonged adolescence in which young people reach physical maturity at a very early age, but are unable to financially raise a family until much later in life”. Quoted for this issue are works of Fr. Andrew Greeley and William Reel. Each has an opposing view on the present circumstance regarding Church’s teaching on sexuality.
There are five moral issues that the authors raised, each with definition and Church’s position: Premarital Sex (sexual intercourse between a couple before they are married), Extra-marital Sex (sexual intercourse outside of marriage by one or two spouses who are married and committed to a different person), Group Sex (a group of people that have sexual intercourse among all the members of the group), Homosexuality (sexual love between two persons of the same sex), Bi-Sexuality (individuals who engage in both heterosexual and homosexual activity), Sterilization (a method which prevents either a man from fathering a child or a woman from conceiving a child), and Birth Control (referred to as “temporary sterilization”, this means that a person can prevent conception by using artificial means such as hormonal chemicals or certain devices). In all these, the Church has condemned as immoral since they do not reconcile with the magisterium, tradition, and scripture.
In the 10th Chapter, this section is divided into two parts: The Abortion Issue and the Dilemma of Euthanasia. In the first section about abortion, the authors have divided their treatment of the problem into three: The Dilemma Crisis and Controversy of Abortion (with Terminology, Time, Definitions, and Methods under), Abortion and Medicine, Abortion and the Law, Abortion and the Church, and Abortion and Morality. In the second section, euthanasia is defined and given explicit presentation thereafter. In all these, the Church presented Her arguments against taking the life of anyone, be it a fetus in the womb or an adult person lying on the bed unconscious and unresponsive.
Chapter 11 talks about the role of mass media in morality. This has been given a special place in the book because of its importance in influencing the minds of the Christians in today’s world. Let us consider that instruments of communication are getting too sophisticated and broad in its reach. So much so that the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council issued a Decree of Social Communications to address the problem posed by consumerism in mass media. The book underlines the “Confidence Game” that media plays. It describes the vicious cycle of “baiting” by producers on consumers through the television. “The overall effect, then, of the barrage of mass media in the contemporary world is to create a population which is too benumbed and hypnotized by the constant extension of so many of their senses to think clearly.” According to an author by the name of Marshall McLuhan, “modern media extend mankind’s powers of perception to such an extent that they put a strain on his ability to assimilate all of the input”. To put the issue in contrast, the authors of the book made a comparison between the Modern World of Mass Media and the Medieval World of the Holy Scripture. Even modern Christians in whatever tradition and leaning have always stressed that “Christians should form a ‘counter culture’ to the present economic system which they believe is intrinsically immoral”.
The danger of a society under the weight of mass media is its effect that is so pervasive that most of us are unconscious of its power. “Therefore, we make many decisions, not as free moral individuals, but as part of a mass society which takes its values and its activities from the direction of the Mass Media. Modern Mass Media urge us to be consumers, indifferent to moral questions.” One of the problems raised by the book is about propaganda, circulated by governments or groups of people with interests, at the instrument of mass media. In history, this has been abused and exhausted to the detriment of persons and advantage of people in power. Two problems are mentioned: one on the danger posed by concentrating too much power on one person, which has commonly been the real situation in big television companies and which can also pose problems, and the difficulty of the modern world to think what is true and what is false because of the proliferation of different information over any means of communication.
In the decree mentioned about, the Fathers of Vatican II stressed the importance of mass media and the roles of its protagonists have in influencing society. They have to remind the people behind the institutions of communications of their responsibility in following the moral law and the common good that each has to serve with. Here, they could stress no further the function of the government against freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
The last chapter deals with the concepts of authority and freedom. It is acknowledged that man always seeks his freedom in his actions and thinking. However, man is afraid of curtailing this freedom as embodied in authority. Thus, authority is symbolized as restriction of his action and thoughts. The opposition between freedom and authority is exemplified in the philosophies of Jean Paul Sartre and Thomas Hobbes. The former advocates a total freedom of man, where institutions serve his interest, while the latter is a proponent of the supremacy of the law, where there is no law, chaos reigns. However, Christianity situates itself as the balance of the two, where law of love tempers both the excesses of the absoluteness of freedom and absoluteness of law. This law of love became the essence of Christian Europe’s political systems in the middle ages. Freedom according to the authors should be nurtured and developed.
In the words of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council in its Declaration of Religious Freedom:
“It is in accordance with their dignity as persons, that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility, that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to see the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth, once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth.”
There are four types of freedom. It can be Physical freedom, Psychological freedom, Moral freedom, and Religious freedom. Along with the four types are also the problems of freedom. These are force, fear, passion, ignorance, drugs, and mass suggestion.
To many secular eyes, the Catholic Church has always been depicted as impediment of freedom; the authors strongly opposed this view, since in many ways, the Church has been a great protector of the principle of emancipation. This has been crystallized in its teaching on the Declaration of Religious Freedom.
“This Vatican Synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in which wise that in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs. Nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.”
As regards authority, the book is sensitive to the general sentiment about the restrictive nature of authority, and “man’s continual struggle between freedom and authority”. Cornelius Van de Poel has said, “the primary task of authority is not to impose values or regulations; rather its primary task is to be the central organism in the common search for human values … authority in its proper sense is possible only in relation to free human beings … authority is the means to define the undefined possibilities of the human being”. In another, it is defined as “primarily as the service of guiding persons in their efforts to reach personal fulfillment for authenticity. It takes on a negative or prohibitive form only in those situations in which individuals refuse to respect the rights of others.”
There are different types of authority. There is the Natural Law. “Nature is what man discovers in the world before he changes it. It demands respect and responsibility. While man is the keeper, developer and discoverer of nature, he does not have the right to violate or destroy it.”
There is Civil Law. “Civil laws come from society which means fellowship. Society is, therefore, a group of people who live together with common needs, desires, and values. Each society has rules and regulations.”
There is also Divine Law. “This law comes from God’s revelation. For Christians, it has been revealed in three stages: Abraham the father of the Hebrew people; Moses the father of the Mosaic Law; and Jesus who gave us the law of love for God and neighbor. Christians are obliged to obey the Divine law because of their special relationship with God and His Son, Jesus. The Ten Commandments are applications of Jesus’ law of love.”
The fourth and the last is the Church Law. This is composed of the Infallible Teachings, the Non-Infallible Teachings, the Private Teachings, and the Disciplinary Rules.
People and institutions are the source of problems for authority.
The author in his introduction talked about the contemporary landscape of American Catholicism. It is written “to give more than ‘something’… with the hope that it will fill a real need in the classroom. So many teachers and students have asked for a book which would give the basics of Catholic teaching.” It considers the fact that “most Catholic children know little about their own Church’s history…. not been taught how the Church’s doctrine is the foundation for her moral teaching.” So, this book gives an overview on the basic moral teachings on the Church on some of the controversial moral issues of today. It hopes to introduce the reader to the Church, then to morality, and finally to the controversies.
The first three chapters outline the traditional Catholic doctrine. It treats first on the ethics of Jesus of Nazareth, the history of the Church, and the purpose of the Church. This gives a simple explanation on the reason for the existence of the Catholic Church in today’s world and the continuation of the ethical tradition founded by Jesus Christ.
The first chapter opens up with definitions of ethics: a branch of philosophy that is concerned with what is morally good and bad, right and wrong; a code of rules for moral behavior; or a system of moral principles. In all these, moral and ethical can be interchanged. With these, the authors pose questions, which the authors gave answers: Does ethics make a difference? Do I or my friends have a code of ethics? or What difference does it make if I have a good code of ethics? In the second and third part of the chapter, it talked about the person of Jesus and His message, the geographical area of His birth and the world that He grew up with. Central to the message of Jesus is the compression of the commandment of God given to Moses to two: the Love of God and the Love of Neighbor. Scriptural bases (Matthew 22, Mark 12, and Luke 10) have been given to show the focal point on Jesus’ ministry. Here, the authors gave three important questions for the reader to ponder: Who is God, Who is the Neighbor, and What is Love. “Therefore, we can say that Jesus’ teaching on ethics is based on the love of God and the love of neighbor. This love is specified in the famous speech of Jesus which has been called the Sermon on the Mount.” The chapter ends with the authors’ comments on the fundamental basis of Christian Ethics, and how in difficult ways to do it. It says in threes ways: By falling in love with themselves and others, by an inner turning to God, and by conversion.
The second chapter turns its attention on the history of the Church, which becomes the vehicle of the teaching, thus the ethical tradition, of the Lord Jesus Christ. This describes the different councils and doctrinal growth that have developed within the two-thousand-year history of Catholicism, and how the Church arrived at Her positions on different formidable issues of the present. The singular reason for the continuation on the Church is the belief of the community on Jesus as the Lord. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, “the Church wrote the Scriptures, preached the Word of God, and worshipped the Father”. Since the She belongs in history, “the influence of politics and society have deeply affected your Church …. the Church has had a profound influence on politics and society.” As the Father of the Second Vatican Council taught: “For God’s word, by whom all this were made, was Himself made flesh so that as perfect man He might save all men and sum up all things in Himself. The Lord is the goal of human history, the focal point of the longings of history and of civilization, the center of the human race, the joy of every heart, and the answer to all its yearnings”.
Here, the authors listed the different periods of the Church in Her long history: The Ancient Church (1 – 600 AD), The Early Medieval Church (600 – 1054 AD), The Later Medieval Church (1054 – 1500 AD), The Early Modern Church (1500 – 1789 AD), The Modern Church (1789 – Present), A Summary of Moral Doctrine from the Ancient Church to the Present, The Modern Church’s Teachings: The Documents of Vatican II, and the Bibliography. Sections I – V give the historical outlines and significant popes, the ecumenical councils, the survey of moral doctrines, a summary statement, and the discussion questions. Section VI presented the Moral Teachings of the Ancient to Modern Church with comments and questions. Section VII shows an introduction before giving the sixteen documents of the 21st Ecumenical Council of the Church with summary statements and discussion questions. The last is the bibliography with historical survey, councils, moral theology, and Vatican II. This chapter devotes so much attention on the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, which has become the watershed for sweeping reforms within the Church, notwithstanding Her moral teachings.
The General Council formally opened on October 11, 1962 presented several reasons for Christianity and the world: to revitalize the Roman Catholic Church against today’s deteriorating moral standards and militant atheism, the heal the wounds of schism and heresy among our non-Catholic brothers, to revise the seven sacraments so that they would be more meaningful, to restore the vernacular language to the Mass, to abolish certain excommunications which were important for their time, to portray the Church as the servant not the master of humanity, to reexamine old disciplines and regulations, to give lay people more responsibility in the Church, to utilize modern media, to decentralize Roman bureaucracy, and to restore more authority to the local bishops.
When the council ended its fourth session on December 8, 1965, it produced sixteen (16) legislations: Four Constitutions (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, and The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), Nine Decrees (The Decree on the Bishops’ Pastoral Office in the Church, The Decree on Ecumenism, The Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches, The Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, The Decree on the Priestly Formation, The Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Life, The Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity, The Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, and The Decree on the Instruments of Social Communication), and Three Declarations (The Declaration of Religious Freedom, The Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Religious, and The Declaration on Christian Education). In each of these documents, the authors gave characteristics and descriptions.
In the comments that followed, it wrote that the Church was powerless against the forces of evil. Christianity had not become the way of life, which gave these forces occasion to grow. The council “reexamined old positions and reform what had to be done, embarked on new path in this new world of advanced technology and science, and showed that the message of Jesus is as relevant today as it was the first century”. The Church should be a leader in the world and should become the sunshine, “no longer would it live in the shadows of hallways”. The chapter closed with the greatest achievements of the council: a closer relationship with Orthodox and Protestant Christians, Jews and others; shared responsibility with the laity; internationalized the Roman offices; respected the right of all men to follow their consciences; restored the local language to the Mass and the Sacraments; recognized the value of sciences such as psychology and sociology; used the latest means of communication to promote the Gospel message; realized that it is a Pilgrim Church; and changed the attitude of the Church from a legal approach to a more human one.
Chapter three presents the purpose of the Church. It started with a discussion about group, its definition, and its relation to the reality of the Church as a spiritual group. It says “the Church is a group of people who share … same beliefs, hopes, and they have the same purpose”. The more important purposes of the Church are as follows: continuation of Jesus’ presence in the world and to bring his ethical teaching into every day and every event, spiritual support and comfort, helps its members to reach God through teaching, prayer, and worship, to improve the world in both spiritual and material, offers worship, aids its members towards its destiny (heaven), mutual encouragement, to change social structure, usage of certain tools in achieving its purpose (prayer, liturgy, the sacraments, the Scripture, Tradition, Doctrine, etc.), the body of Christ, a sacrament, and its description of itself as the People of God. In short, “the mutual purpose of the Church is to imitate Christ by doing what is God and fighting against what is evil”.
Next, the chapter discussed on different types of membership that the Church has. It mentions the organization person, the group-oriented person, the person-oriented individual, and the individualist. The authors have discussed each in a lengthier detail to give a picture on the different persons belonging to a spiritual society. Examples of different essays taken from books of the following people devoted to the Church have been given: Jacques Maritain, a French Catholic philosopher; Hans Kung, a German theologian; Mr. Steve Clark, a convert to Catholicism and a leader of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal; and Fr. Andrew Greeley, a priest-sociologist. In each of the authors, they presented their views regarding their dissatisfaction on the present plight of the Church as they see it.
The next three chapters will present the different value systems that exist in the contemporary world, the meaning of the informed conscience, and the different sources of morality.
The fourth chapter deals on the questions about values. The first of these is the meaning of the word value. It presented meanings from different quoted sources; however, it dwells on this meaning: “a value is something or someone who is considered good or worthy and is desirable or useful”. There are many different types of values. These can be personal, political, religious, moral, economic, and human values. Human values are divided into two: self-realization and self-determination. Self-realization means that a person recognizes within himself three areas: existentialism (he exists with other human beings in time and space), personalism (he is a corporal-spiritual being), and humanism (he recognizes that he is limited by physiological, biological, biochemical, psychological, sociological, educational, and religious factors. Moreover, self-determination means “a conscious and knowledgeable direction of his life”.
The second question about value formation is a lifelong process of growing which gets its strength from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. And, values also depend on two factors: influence and experiences. In here, the authors gave a detailed discussion on both factors.
The third question asked is on a difficult task: the value clarification. This question is further explicated by secondary questions on the meaning of choice, value, and action.
The last question is on the need of values.
The Church recognizes that there are values aside from the spiritual ones. However, it is hoped that from the material values, people will move over to the spiritual realm of values, which Jesus Christ gave to the Church as her foundation. “From these values we can learn that God is our Father, Jesus is our brother and all men and women are our brothers and sisters.” The authors gave a final point to further stress the relationship: “values shape motives, motives shape decisions, decisions make a person responsible for action”.
The fifth chapter concerns on the meaning of informed conscience. Several people have called it “the unwritten law” and the “still small voice”. It is understood that it signifies man’s ability to judge right from wrong. Two traditional distinctions have emerged from situations that poke man’s conscience: sins of commission and sins of omission.
The authors have given in great detail the difference between the super ego and conscience: “the super-ego is not conscience. Super-ego is an unconscious part of the mind, the storehouse of all the things we were forbidden to do in our childhood. Oppositely, moral conscience is conscious, spiritual, human power. This makes a person aware of what is right and wrong. It depends for its power on the spiritual ability of a human person to understand, create, and sustain personal and community relationship.
Scriptural support has been given to show the biblical foundation of its existence in the Judeo-Christian tradition in the Book of the Proverbs. “Moral conscience reminds us that we do certain conscious actions, for which we are personally responsible. If it causes guilt feelings, it arises from something that is specific. Unlike the super-ego, it is never vague and uncertain, but clear and distinct.” As with Judaism, Christianity considers the Ten Commandments as an excellent guide to moral behavior because “they proclaimed the universal moral law”. And, what differentiates Christian conscience is its being rooted in the person of Jesus Christ. “To choose to do good is to follow the teachings of Jesus. To choose to do good, for the Christian, nourishes and sustains his personal relationship with his savior.” To do otherwise is to break it. In summary, the difference of Christian conscience lies in the following: it accepts the Ten Commandments as a basic moral guide, believes in following ethical teachings in the Bible, believes in the personal relationship with Jesus Christ, accepts the ethical teachings of Jesus as its ideals, believes that Jesus Christ is judging our choices now, and believes that He will be the final Judge of its destiny in the next world.” The chapter ends with the famous biblical story of the Prodigal Son and a modern version of that in the person of Susan Atkins.
The source of morality, as described in the sixth chapter, “is either a person or a group which guides our activity by establishing certain values as norms for behavior”. There are different sources of morality: it can be the weak or the powerful, the group or the individual, or the small or the large. The whole life of the person is an interchange between an individual and the outside world. In the end, the different sources of values can become your own, not just from the outside but from within the heart. These sources are personal, familial, social, spiritual, political, and cultural.
The personal source can be the self or other person you have engaged with. Familial is the parents themselves which is the “primary environment for the teaching of values”. The familial is the greatest in shaping the values of a person because of its obvious reason. Any group can be a social source of values, while the Church is a specific exampled of Spiritual source. Culture is a source o morality whose powerful example is the media.
Morality has both sources and means. The means are different ethical tools that encourage us to do good and avoid evil. In each source are different means. One such example for personal source of morality is imitation, which uses another person as a model of behavior. In the Spiritual source, the Church uses the lives of the saints as moral guide or compasses, its regular teaching authority, and the contemporary community of faith, which creates the moral climate of a person. In the political source, it can be the heroes lives, the criminal and civil law, and the active citizenship of the people.
The next chapters will explore specific moral issues. In chapter 7, the book focuses on the worth of the individual. Christian tradition always teaches that “each individual is responsible for his own moral actions and must make a free and independent moral choice on whether to do good or to do evil”.
Here, the book listed individuals whose moral consciences have either contradicted the state or the Church. The list features the Lord Jesus, Joan of Arc, Thomas More, Galileo Galilei, and John Deedy. There are also examples of freedom in civic society who stood on their principles against totalitarian and unfair democratic regimes: Solzhenitsyn of Russia, Mahatma Gandhi of British India, and Henry Thoreau and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of US.
These individuals gave distinction on standing for what they believe is truth. And, they effected change at the cost of their lives. The purpose of the State and Church as institutions is to preserve moral order. However, there are times that these institutions neglected their duties that it takes heroic people to remind them. “The Catholic Church teaches that individual moral conscience informed by the traditional teaching of the Church and inspired by the Holy Spirit, is the supreme judge of all moral actions.
Chapter Eight is on marriage, remarriage, divorce, and open marriage. In 1979, eighty percent of the marriages were permanent and successful, while the other twenty failed. The reasons given are “the unwillingness or inability to love one another maturely, selflessly and completely; a breakdown of social supports for all permanent commitments; a misuse of personal freedom; a misconstrued version of women’s liberation that stresses a freedom based on power rather than self giving; an unwillingness on the part of some husbands to allow their wives to reach their potential as adults; a hedonistic approach to sex; the sensationalism of the media that undermines traditional marital values”.
The authors explored five questions on the nature of Catholic Marriage, the qualities for a stable, loving relationship in Catholic Marriages, the Rite of Catholic Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the Catholic Church, and the Open Marriages as a substitute for Traditional Marriages. Each question has been explicated in great detail with support from the documents of the Vatican II and scripture. In the issue concerning divorce, the Church has always opposed on dissolving and terminating existing marriages. “The Catholic Church does not recognize the right of the state to dissolve a valid, sacramental marriage.” On remarriage, the Church grants annulment, which means that “the marriage was invalid” for several reasons: intentional withholding the right to have children from the other, insanity, grave emotional disturbance, intention of not being faithful, lack of conjugal love, psychopathic or sociopathic personality and serious immaturity. The morality of open marriage has always confronted Christians, but the Church rejects this because of the following reasons given:
It minimizes the primary of a permanent commitment.
It minimizes self giving.
It minimizes exclusive fidelity.
It encourages “instant” happiness.
It emphasizes personal fulfillment as opposed to couple fulfillment.
In the chapter concerning Contemporary Sexual Conduct with Pre-Marital Sex, Group Sex, Homosexuality, Birth Control, and Sterilization, it explains in great length the position of the Church. Most Catholic moralists have always considered sins of human sexuality grave. “The human body – male and female – and human sexuality, that is the joining of a man and woman in physical union, is meant to be a beautiful thing. IT is not dirty or immoral. It is man and woman sharing in the creative love of God. The most correct attitude of a Catholic toward human sexuality is one of gratitude to the Heavenly Father for allowing us to share in His creative love.” It has been accepted as Catholic teaching that “acts of human sexuality belong within a marriage between a man and a woman”. “The Church has taught in Vatican II that there is a dual purpose in marriage: mutual enrichment of the two spouses and the other, which can never be separate from the first, is the bringing of children into the world. The Church has always taught that acts of human sexuality outside of marriage are morally wrong.”
The reasons that have given free rein to sexual freedom are “the invention and wide distribution of the birth control pill; the emergence of Women’s Liberation; the new philosophy of personalism; the greater interest in self-fulfillment as opposed to self-sacrifice; the examples of media celebrities who often expound a viewpoint of sexual permissiveness; and today’s prolonged adolescence in which young people reach physical maturity at a very early age, but are unable to financially raise a family until much later in life”. Quoted for this issue are works of Fr. Andrew Greeley and William Reel. Each has an opposing view on the present circumstance regarding Church’s teaching on sexuality.
There are five moral issues that the authors raised, each with definition and Church’s position: Premarital Sex (sexual intercourse between a couple before they are married), Extra-marital Sex (sexual intercourse outside of marriage by one or two spouses who are married and committed to a different person), Group Sex (a group of people that have sexual intercourse among all the members of the group), Homosexuality (sexual love between two persons of the same sex), Bi-Sexuality (individuals who engage in both heterosexual and homosexual activity), Sterilization (a method which prevents either a man from fathering a child or a woman from conceiving a child), and Birth Control (referred to as “temporary sterilization”, this means that a person can prevent conception by using artificial means such as hormonal chemicals or certain devices). In all these, the Church has condemned as immoral since they do not reconcile with the magisterium, tradition, and scripture.
In the 10th Chapter, this section is divided into two parts: The Abortion Issue and the Dilemma of Euthanasia. In the first section about abortion, the authors have divided their treatment of the problem into three: The Dilemma Crisis and Controversy of Abortion (with Terminology, Time, Definitions, and Methods under), Abortion and Medicine, Abortion and the Law, Abortion and the Church, and Abortion and Morality. In the second section, euthanasia is defined and given explicit presentation thereafter. In all these, the Church presented Her arguments against taking the life of anyone, be it a fetus in the womb or an adult person lying on the bed unconscious and unresponsive.
Chapter 11 talks about the role of mass media in morality. This has been given a special place in the book because of its importance in influencing the minds of the Christians in today’s world. Let us consider that instruments of communication are getting too sophisticated and broad in its reach. So much so that the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council issued a Decree of Social Communications to address the problem posed by consumerism in mass media. The book underlines the “Confidence Game” that media plays. It describes the vicious cycle of “baiting” by producers on consumers through the television. “The overall effect, then, of the barrage of mass media in the contemporary world is to create a population which is too benumbed and hypnotized by the constant extension of so many of their senses to think clearly.” According to an author by the name of Marshall McLuhan, “modern media extend mankind’s powers of perception to such an extent that they put a strain on his ability to assimilate all of the input”. To put the issue in contrast, the authors of the book made a comparison between the Modern World of Mass Media and the Medieval World of the Holy Scripture. Even modern Christians in whatever tradition and leaning have always stressed that “Christians should form a ‘counter culture’ to the present economic system which they believe is intrinsically immoral”.
The danger of a society under the weight of mass media is its effect that is so pervasive that most of us are unconscious of its power. “Therefore, we make many decisions, not as free moral individuals, but as part of a mass society which takes its values and its activities from the direction of the Mass Media. Modern Mass Media urge us to be consumers, indifferent to moral questions.” One of the problems raised by the book is about propaganda, circulated by governments or groups of people with interests, at the instrument of mass media. In history, this has been abused and exhausted to the detriment of persons and advantage of people in power. Two problems are mentioned: one on the danger posed by concentrating too much power on one person, which has commonly been the real situation in big television companies and which can also pose problems, and the difficulty of the modern world to think what is true and what is false because of the proliferation of different information over any means of communication.
In the decree mentioned about, the Fathers of Vatican II stressed the importance of mass media and the roles of its protagonists have in influencing society. They have to remind the people behind the institutions of communications of their responsibility in following the moral law and the common good that each has to serve with. Here, they could stress no further the function of the government against freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
The last chapter deals with the concepts of authority and freedom. It is acknowledged that man always seeks his freedom in his actions and thinking. However, man is afraid of curtailing this freedom as embodied in authority. Thus, authority is symbolized as restriction of his action and thoughts. The opposition between freedom and authority is exemplified in the philosophies of Jean Paul Sartre and Thomas Hobbes. The former advocates a total freedom of man, where institutions serve his interest, while the latter is a proponent of the supremacy of the law, where there is no law, chaos reigns. However, Christianity situates itself as the balance of the two, where law of love tempers both the excesses of the absoluteness of freedom and absoluteness of law. This law of love became the essence of Christian Europe’s political systems in the middle ages. Freedom according to the authors should be nurtured and developed.
In the words of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council in its Declaration of Religious Freedom:
“It is in accordance with their dignity as persons, that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility, that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to see the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth, once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth.”
There are four types of freedom. It can be Physical freedom, Psychological freedom, Moral freedom, and Religious freedom. Along with the four types are also the problems of freedom. These are force, fear, passion, ignorance, drugs, and mass suggestion.
To many secular eyes, the Catholic Church has always been depicted as impediment of freedom; the authors strongly opposed this view, since in many ways, the Church has been a great protector of the principle of emancipation. This has been crystallized in its teaching on the Declaration of Religious Freedom.
“This Vatican Synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in which wise that in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs. Nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.”
As regards authority, the book is sensitive to the general sentiment about the restrictive nature of authority, and “man’s continual struggle between freedom and authority”. Cornelius Van de Poel has said, “the primary task of authority is not to impose values or regulations; rather its primary task is to be the central organism in the common search for human values … authority in its proper sense is possible only in relation to free human beings … authority is the means to define the undefined possibilities of the human being”. In another, it is defined as “primarily as the service of guiding persons in their efforts to reach personal fulfillment for authenticity. It takes on a negative or prohibitive form only in those situations in which individuals refuse to respect the rights of others.”
There are different types of authority. There is the Natural Law. “Nature is what man discovers in the world before he changes it. It demands respect and responsibility. While man is the keeper, developer and discoverer of nature, he does not have the right to violate or destroy it.”
There is Civil Law. “Civil laws come from society which means fellowship. Society is, therefore, a group of people who live together with common needs, desires, and values. Each society has rules and regulations.”
There is also Divine Law. “This law comes from God’s revelation. For Christians, it has been revealed in three stages: Abraham the father of the Hebrew people; Moses the father of the Mosaic Law; and Jesus who gave us the law of love for God and neighbor. Christians are obliged to obey the Divine law because of their special relationship with God and His Son, Jesus. The Ten Commandments are applications of Jesus’ law of love.”
The fourth and the last is the Church Law. This is composed of the Infallible Teachings, the Non-Infallible Teachings, the Private Teachings, and the Disciplinary Rules.
People and institutions are the source of problems for authority.
Postscript:
The book is caught, in the hindsight of 2008, in the morass of confusion. It is evident in the way it presents the Catholic Church stands on issues. The book also gives the different perspectives of some personages, who identify themselves as catholics. When an issue is tackled in the Church, it is clear. It has never been one in many. Issues like abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and the like do not dwell on opinions of this or that; it is always where the Church stand on this and that. What the authors have given are to present the problem, then the Church's teaching, then the view points of any author who may disagree on this or that issue.
