BENEDICT XVI - 2

Pope Benedict XVI

A MAMMOTH TASK  -  2

Stand and Teach

            At the heart of the Catholic Church’s moral teaching is the vision of the family, of husband and wife living in life-long mutual fidelity, and having as many children as they responsibly can. This is a never-to-be flouted precious value, but sadly vast numbers of people are either divorced or remarried, or living with partners, many in gay relationships, or practising contraception. Either they feel excluded from the Church or are nagged by guilt if they want to belong, or they have mentally shut out this part of the Church’s teaching. If the Church does not stand by her teaching, she will be seen as surrendering to “the dictatorship of relativism” (Pope Benedict XVI). The late Cardinal Basil Hume of Westminster clearly declared: “I want to die in a Church that has not deviated from this teaching.” If we believe in our moral teaching, we must stand and teach it. Some priests have a high tolerance for the “middle way” – proclaiming the teaching but privately permitting the reception of Holy Communion. They label it “the pastoral solution.” But this simply smacks of dishonesty. At the centre of Christianity is community; we are gathered by the Lord around the altar. How can we attract people to belong if we practise double standards?

The Virtues

If we do not like to be told what to do and what not to, then we need to return to the maturer vision of thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas who saw morality as basically a journey towards God and happiness. To Aquinas what was central was not the commandments but the virtues. The virtues help one to be a pilgrim. The virtues help persons to do their tasks in justice and charity with a certain habitual facility-felicity. “Virtue” means literally “strength”. The cardinal virtues  -  Prudence, Courage, Temperance and Justice  -  provide the internal resources for the journey.  Faith, Hope and Charity are virtues that give us a glimpse of the END of the journey, namely, life with God or, rather, community in God. Virtues, therefore, form us for happiness with God. Fergus Kerr OP wrote, “Thomas Aquinas offers a moral theology, Christian ethics, centred on one’s becoming the kind of person who would be fulfilled only in the promised bliss of face-to-face vision of God.”

            Be it noted that Faith, Hope and Love are supernatural virtues, that is to say, they begin with God and end in him. It is God who originally puts his faith in man, who has hopes for his future, and who first loved him. What we humans commonly call faith, hope and charity are only responses to God’s original virtues as noted here. We can only hope that through the virtues we shall recover the commandments and desire ardently to become partners once again in the liturgy. Sunday Mass will nourish the virtues, and the virtues will present the best dispositions for sharing in the mysteries.

            Thus, becoming good is not about submission to rules but about becoming a moral agent who knows how to struggle with hard decisions and decide which paths to take, every decision worked out with reference to the Holy Spirit. If one thinks that being good is fundamentally about obeying rules, he will focus on individual acts. But virtue ethics looks at the shape and unity of the whole of human life, as we make our way to God and happiness in him. Rules certainly exist, but they only exist to remind us of the hidden desires of our heart. As Herbert McCabe OP wrote, “Ethics is entirely concerned with doing what you want, that is to say, with being free. Most of the difficulties arise from the difficulty of recognising what we want.” We live in a free world and do not know how to be happy with our freedom. Freedom is understood in very limited terms, as the freedom to choose between alternatives, the freedom of the marketplace. Pepsi or Coke? But this freedom is usually experienced as vacuous.

            People should look at Christians and ask themselves, “What is the secret of their astonishing freedom?” But they do not. To make that contribution to the future we Christians must ourselves be liberated. So we must work to make our Church more obviously a place where we enjoy the freedom of the children of God.

            We look forward in Faith, Hope and Love to the leading of our dear Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI.

(concluded)