0Chapter 1: The Essence of Catholic Morality or Moral Theology

A. Nature of catholic Morality

Moral Theology is sometimes called Christian or theological ethics, moral theology focuses on
the implications of faith for the way of life. As a theological discipline, it is concerned with
God’s revelation of divine love in Jesus and through the Spirit as an invitation calling for
response. It regards the response to the initiative of God’s offer of love as the very soul of moral
life. Moral theology makes clear how faith shapes Christian life, both the lives of individual
Christians and the life of the Church. As Fr. Pasquale Giordano, S.J. in his book, Evangelizing
Presence: Living the Moral Life Today, He said that, “Moral Theology is about making decisions
in life that enable us to become more fully human, to enable us to come to God as our final end.”

Christian moral theology is interested in the implications of Christian faith for the sort of
persons Christians ought to be (ethics of being or character ethics) and the sort of actions
Christians ought to perform (ethics of doing). Both being and doing, character and action are
interdependent concerns that are taken together in the complete project of moral theology.

Sources of Moral Theology

- Divine revelation as interpreted by the Church
- Human reason
- Human experience

According to Vatican 11, these are the characteristics of a Catholic morality:

1. Theocentric- Morality is a response to God’s call out of love.

2. Christocentric- Moral theology explicitly deals with the way of the following from the
Christian’s being-in-Christ. The person of Christ and our being-in-Christ is the center and focus
of moral theology.
3. Ecclesial- Christ is present to us and is setting in us today ion and through the Church. His
salvific work is directed towards building up of his mystical body. Moral theology emphasizes
the communitarian dimension of Christian life.
4. Biblical- The word of God is authoritative in matters of faith and morality. The fundamental
orientation and conception of morality should be derived from scriptures.
5. Sacramental_ Moral theology should develop the sacramental dimension of the Christian life.
Progressive sacramental incorporation into the ecclesial community brings about a gradual
transformation into Christ.
6. Personalistic- Moral theology emphasizes the human person in its totality: body, intellect,
will, conscience, relationship, family, church, and society.
7. Ecumenical- The universality of the Gospel of Christ.

B. The Place of morality in the Catholic faith

Our life as catholic has three parts:

a. How Catholics think—Catholic theology--- Creed---Words---Mind
b. How Catholics live----- Catholic Morality--- Code---Works-- Will
 c. How Catholics pray---- Catholic Worship--- Cult----Worship-Heart

These three come simultaneously. The more prayer, the more virtue; the more virtue, the more
faith.

The three parts are like the three legs of a tripod. If all three legs are not there, it is not a tripod.
A person is not a catholic without belief in the essence of what the Catholic Church teaches as
God’s revealed truth or without sincere effort to obey what the Church teaches as God’s
commandments or without facing God in prayer as the Church does. God alone can know
whether you are a strong or a weak Catholic. But you can know whether you are a Catholic or
not.

These three parts of the Catholic life are three aspects of the same single reality. The reality that
we confess in our creed is the same reality that we obey in the commandments and worship in
prayer. That one reality is the life of Christ.

C. The Centrality of Christ in Catholic Morality.

Luke 10:41-42 “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one
thing is needful.” That ‘one thing’ is Christ Himself.

Christ is not merely a teacher of a moral code but God himself, the One who is the sole source of
all good things (the moral law and our obedience to it). Christian morality is not merely a means
to the end of a better world, peace and Justice, the welfare of the family, or social harmony.
These things are relative to Christ, not Christ relative to them. They are ways of obeying his will.
They are good because they are from him. He is not good because he is for them.

Catholic morality is a love affair with Christ and his people, thought not ‘romantic love’. It has
its laws and rules, as a city has its streets. Streets are essential to a city, but they are not the very
essence of a city. Streets are a means to the end of getting home. Home is where the real living
takes place. Similarly, moral rules are the means to the good life, but they are not the thing itself.
The thing itself is a relationship of love. Though laws are only a means to the greater end of the
good life, laws are essential means. You cannot be a Christian without following the laws of
morality.

So Catholic morality is a way of being; of becoming a new creation, becoming ‘little Christ’ (2
Cor. 5:17). Christians love goodness most of all where we saw it perfectly on earth: in Christ, the
God-man. It looked like a cross: God loving us to death, to the end, no matter what it cost him
and no matter how undeserving we are.

D. The relation between religion and morality

“If God does not exist, everything is permissible”, according to Dostoyevsky. When we destroy
religion, we destroy morality.
Pagan thinkers knew much of the content of the moral law and recognized its binding force
without knowing much of God. St. Paul in Rom. 1:17-21) wrote that all men know God’s moral
law through natural reason and conscience. So there can be true morality without true religion.

If you can live a good moral life without being a Catholic, why be one?

You can live a long and healthy life without knowing or practicing anything about diet or
exercise or medicine. But it is not easy!

Importance of Catholic Morality today

Human civilization has ceased to believe in an objectively real, universally binding moral law
and that civilization used to be called “Christendom”. European countries and in America,
Catholics believed that morality is subjective and relative. So the critical teachings of the Church
today are her moral teachings, her response to the moral crisis both in the Church and in the
world.

PASSIONS

The term "passions" belongs to the Christian patrimony. Feelings or passions are
emotions or movements of the sensitive appetite that incline us to act or not to act in regard to
something felt or imagined to be good or evil.

The passions are natural components of the human psyche; they form the passageway and
ensure the connection between the life of the senses and the life of the mind. Our Lord called
man's heart the source from which the passions spring.40

There are many passions. The most fundamental passion is love, aroused by the attraction
of the good. Love causes a desire for the absent good and the hope of obtaining it; this movement
finds completion in the pleasure and joy of the good possessed. The apprehension of evil causes
hatred, aversion, and fear of the impending evil; this movement ends in sadness at some present
evil, or in the anger that resists it.

“To love is to will the good of another."41 All other affections have their source in this
first movement of the human heart toward the good. Only the good can be loved. 42 Passions "are
evil if love is evil and good if it is good."43

Types of Emotions

First, let us distinguish between knowledge and appetition. Knowledge can be either sensible or
intellectual, but every act of knowledge is followed by an appetition, i.e. a tendency (from Latin
ad-petere= to tend to) either towards or away from the object. From the feeling of the instinct
about the goodness or badness of the object follows a sensitive tendency (also called emotion or
passion) towards or away from the object respectively; and from the judgment of the intelligence
follows the free intellectual tendency of the will.
Sensitive appetition or emotion is therefore the tendency to the sensitive good. There are
two types:
(i) Concupiscible emotion: the tendency to the good as enjoyable;
(ii) Irascible emotion: the tendency to the good as difficult to attain.
( to the good as ( like - dislike
( Sensitive ( enjoyable ( desire - aversion
( (emotion) ( (concupiscible) ( joy – sorrow

( ( to the good as ( hope – despair

Appetition ( ( difficult ( courage- fear
( ( (irascible) ( anger

( Intellectual
( ( the will)

( Sensitive ( External senses ( sight, hearing…

( ( Internal senses ( coordinating

( memory
Knowledge ( ( imagination
( instinct

( Intellectual

There are then eleven sensitive appetites or emotions. Animals also have them, and this
explains their rich psychological life. In fact, the way to understand the nature of the will, as
distinctly human faculty, is to compare it with the emotional life of the animal. On the same
object, the emotion and the will can easily differ: a man may choose (will) not to drink a glass of
whiskey even though emotionally he may be attracted to it. “I like it, but I don’t want it”. This is
very important for moral choices, as we must distinguish between a feeling (and consequent
emotion) and the judgment (and consequent decision): only the latter carries moral
responsibility, since only the latter is “human” as distinct from “animal”.
The object of the intelligence is “being”, as we have seen, while the object of the will is
the “good” as apprehended by the intelligence, not as felt by the senses. This is why the will can
be directed to objects which are not sensible at all, such as power, wisdom, honor, glory and so
forth.
Now, how does the intelligence apprehend the good, as “particular” or as “universal”? let
us recall that concepts (the products of the intelligence) are universal; so, when the intelligence
looks at being in its aspect of goodness or desirability, it does so in a universal sense, i.e. in the
global context of the totality of the reality: In an absolute sense, not in a relative and particular
sense; in short the good as such. This does not mean that the will is moved by “abstract” good. In
fact, it’s the very opposite: the will is attracted only by the concrete real actual being (only real
being is good), but it moves towards it because the intelligence presents it as good in an absolute
sense.
Not only is the will attracted only to the real good (never to a concept as such), but to the
fullness of good, which is the perfection of “good as such”, and therefore the only object that can
truly satisfy the will completely. This explain man’s natural tendency to God. man is never
satisfied with particular goods: he always wants more.
It follows from this also that the will can never want evil in itself, since it is the very opposite of
its object, which is the good. What then is the “inclination to evil”? it is not really an inclination
to evil as such, but to a certain good in a disorderly way, i.e. without relating it to the ultimate
good. All the things that exist are good, because they have been created by God, and “to be” is
always better than “not to be”. Evil, then, is not in wanting them, but in wanting them in a
disorderly way: only human choices can be evil, not the things themselves.

The Moral principles underlying passions

One of the real benefits of modern psychology has been more attention to and
understanding of the emotions, including their role in making moral decisions. Though they are
not free, like the will, they are important for morality because emotions are closely connected
with the will and powerfully help or harm it. Well ordered emotions make moral goodness more
attractive and easier; unnatural, unrealistic, or uncontrolled emotions make it unattractive and
difficult. Thus, good psychological counseling can be a powerful aid good morality (as can good
bodily health habits). Just as a good instrument helps a musician makes a good music, good
emotions help us to live good moral lives.

In themselves passions are neither good nor evil. They are morally qualified only to the
extent that they effectively engage reason and will. Passions are said to be voluntary, "either
because they are commanded by the will or because the will does not place obstacles in their
way."44 It belongs to the perfection of the moral or human good that the passions be governed by
reason.45

Strong feelings are not decisive for the morality or the holiness of persons; they are
simply the inexhaustible reservoir of images and affections in which the moral life is expressed.
But this expression is a part of human perfection: “The perfection of the moral good consists in
man’s being moved to the good not only by his will but also by his heart (emotions)” (CCC
1775).

Emotions are part of God’s design for human nature. Even emotions we find hard to
control, like sexual desire, anger, and fear, are not evil but good in themselves and play a
necessary role; without them we are not completely human. Christ did not ignore or suppress his
emotions but accepted and used them rightly, including “negative” ones like sadness (see Mt.
14:4, Jn. 11:33-36) and anger (Jn. 2:13-17).

It belongs to the perfection of … human good that the passions be governed by reason
(CCC 1767). Emotions are like horses. Some are tame, some are wild, all need to be cared for
and ruled by prudence (practical wisdom), fortitude (courage), temperance (slf-control), and
justice ( fairness), as a horse needs to be ruled by a rider. The horse should not lead the rider, nor
should the rider lock the horse up in the stable all the time. Wise governance is good for the
horse as as for the rider; and wise governance of the emotions is good for the emotions as well as
for the mind and will that govern them.
 In the Christian life, the Holy Spirit himself accomplishes his work by mobilizing the
whole being, with all its sorrows, fears and sadness, as is visible in the Lord's agony and passion.
In Christ human feelings are able to reach their consummation in charity and divine beatitude.

Moral perfection consists in man's being moved to the good not by his will alone, but also by his
sensitive appetite, as in the words of the psalm: "My heart and flesh sing for joy to the living
God."

Love

This point is especially important when it comes to love. The essence of love in the biblical sense
(agape) is not an emotion or feeling: the essence of love is a choice of the will, good will, the
willing of the other’s good, the choosing of what is really best for the other. This is the
unspectacular, unemotional essence of love. The exciting feelings are additions to the essence.

We can love someone even when we do not feel loving toward them. We can will someone’s
good even when we feel aversion or embarrassment toward them. For we often do this to
ourselves, we do not always “feel good about ourselves”, but we always will good to ourselves,
we always seek our own welfare and happiness. When we feel sick, we seek healing; when we
feel stupid, we seek to be wise; when we feel evil and guilty, we seek to become better persons.

Christ commands us to love our neighbor “as ourselves”, that is, as we already do love ourselves.
This love cannot be a feeling because feelings cannot be commanded: only free choices of the
will can. Therefore love- the love Christ commands- is essentially a free choice of the will rather
than a feeling.

This point becomes extremely practical when applied to questions like homosexuality.
Homosexual feelings are not sins, since they are not freely chosen. Homosexual acts are sinful
insofar as they are freely chosen acts of disobedience to God’s known will and law. Homosexual
desires, feelings, and emotions are disordered; they are troubles, but not sins, unless freely
chosen by the will.

Human Freedom

St. Ireneaus, “Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master
over his acts.

In the first place, freedom is not “the power do to whatever we like”, since man is simply
incapable of doing always what he likes. There are many things which man would like to do but
he cannot, because his power is always limited. He would like to live forever, not to have any
illness, to be always young, to know everything… but it is evident that he “cannot have his cake
and eat it”.

How can we think of freedom as the power to do what we like, when we know that this is not
possible? This mirage is the product of a transposition of a divine attribute to the creature: it is
the illusion of man who wants to be like God. Only God has “omnipotence”, i.e. the power to do
what he wants: divine freedom is infinitely greater than created freedom (the latter is participated
only).

Nevertheless, in spite of his limitations, it is true that man is free in his choices. Where is then
the freedom of man exactly? In the fact that when he chooses something, he does so by himself,
and there is no power whatsoever that can force his choice (this is the dignity of man). He can be
induced or persuaded or attracted, but never force. This free choice on the part of man, however,
relates not to the end of man in the sense that man would be free to make his own real end, but
only in the sense that man is free to determine himself towards that end, as well as to the means
to reach it.

St. Thomas defines human freedom as “that property of the human will whereby man determines
himself in his acts towards the end”. Obviously, this freedom is limited, and so it is not
omnipotence. It is simply that man determines himself, and there is no force from outside
himself that can determine him in his choice. What does the intelligence do to the will? It
specifies the choice, but it does not determine it. It presents things to the will, the will chooses. It
is true that the will cannot operate without the intelligence. How can I want something I do not
know? In order to will, I must know: There is no intellectual appetite without previous
intellectual knowledge. But still, the intelligence does not determine the will: it acts as a final
cause, or even formal cause, but never as the efficient cause of the will.

St. Thomas also observes that on the will depends “to will” or “not to will”, i.e. the will has the
power to move itself, as we have explained. This means that creatures with will, i.e. spiritual
creatures, order themselves towards the end, unlike other creatures, which are already ordered to
their end by the fact that they exist.

Inner freedom and exterior freedom

So far, we have been talking about the inner freedom of the will, namely the freedom (i) to want
or not to want (freedom of exercise), or (ii) to want this or that (“freedom of specification).

But there is also an exterior freedom to perform operations externally, which can be curtailed by
forces outside man. If a man is put in jail, he has lost his exterior freedom; but no one can take
away from him or his inner freedom: it is something inalienable, i.e. it cannot be lost or taken
away from anybody. Political freedom, professional freedom, academic freedom are exterior
freedoms.

This freedom of the will is also a proof of the spirituality of the act of the will, because purely
material acts are always necessary, in such a way that they are directed to the end without any
choice. On the other hand, the act of the will is directed to the end in such a way that there is an
alternative.

Freedom means the power to act and not to act

 - it is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness
- as long as freedom is not bound itself definitely to its ultimate good which is god,
then, there is a possibility of choosing between Good and Evil.
- The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom
except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an
abuse of freedom and leads to the slavery of sin. ( Rom.6:17)
- freedom makes man responsible for his acts to the extent that they are voluntary.
- Progress in Virtue , Knowledge of the good, and ascesis enhances the mastery of the
will over his acts
- action directly willed is imputable to the actor
examples: Gen. 3:13; Gen.4:10; 2 sam. 12:7-15

- responsibility can be diminished or even nullified.

a. Ignorance
Example: accident arises due to ignorance of the traffic laws.
b. PASSION
Positive- if it is toward desirable objects
Negative- if it is away from undesirable things.

Other factors: inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments

and other psychological or social factors.

- Freedom is exercise in relationship between human being. All owe to each the duty to
respect the right to the exercise of freedom, especially in moral and in religious
matter is an alienable requirement of the dignity of a human person.

Freedom of choice: determinism

It has been said that man has no freedom of choice that he chooses as necessarily as anything
else. This is called determinism, and there are many types of it, depending on what they think
determine the will, e.g.:

(i) Physiological determinism: the will is determined by the biochemistry of the body, by
the so-called gut feeling.
(ii) Sociological determinism: man is determined by the cultural values he has inherited.
(iii) Economic determinism: man’s choice is determined by the economic infrastructure.
(Marxism)
(iv) Fatalistic determinism: the choice is determined by fate (good or bad luck).
(v) Theological determinism: God determines the choice of man. (Calvinism)
(vi) Psycho-analytical determinism: choices are determined by the basic “complexes” of
man, a combination of “libido” (Freud) and all the accumulated experiences of the
past (Jung).
The logical consequence of determinism (and we can see that all these types are largely
materialistic in inspiration) is that man is stripped of his moral responsibility: his guilt is
“transferred” to some other sources. Thus, in the last analysis they are all forms of escapism.

The existence of freedom of choice in the human will(and consequently moral responsibility) is
shown by appealing to two types of evidence.

(i) The evidence of self-consciousness, whereby any man can verify within himself that
when he chooses, he could perfectly well have chosen the opposite if he only wanted
to.
(ii) The evident fact of a universal acceptance of a moral code and of legal responsibility,
which would be unwarranted if man were not responsible for his actions. What would
be the point of a legal system, judges and courts? If man is determined in his choices,
no one can attribute any responsibility to his acts: he would always be like an
irresponsible minor, who cannot be tried by any court.

Those who deny human freedom of choice live in a society which does not accept
such a denial. Since the moral order and the social order are built on the assumption
that man is free, and thereby responsible, the acceptance of determinism would spell
the collapse society.

The root of the freedom of man

Why man is free and not necessitated in his choices? What is the metaphysical root of this
freedom? It lies in the object of the will, namely the good “in a universal sense. Let us recall that
this is why the will is directed to the fullness of real good. And this is where man’s self-
determination lies, since in this life, man can never be confronted with the fullness of the good,
(i) because no created good is the fullness of the good, and (ii) because even God, in this life, is
only known by man imperfectly, and therefore this knowledge is not the fullness of good either.

Therefore, since no good in this life is the fullness of good, none of them can determine the will
of man necessarily. They can attract the human will, but not determine it necessarily. This is why
the human will is free, and not necessitated: no outside force can overcome it or coerce it, as long
as man is in possession of his faculties.

Freedom and the good

Man sometimes chooses evil things. What is the relationship between freedom and the good? We
have said that the object of the will is good as such. The freedom of choice with regard to created
things is pointless if it is separated from the love of God, who is the total good.

Now human choices with regard to created goods condition our lives to concrete situations which
exclude other situations. If I choose to travel to a certain town, I cannot at the same time go to
another town. When I make a choice, I condition my life: freedom of choice is conditioned.
Nevertheless, in every concrete situation man can and should love God and give glory to Him by
relating all his choices to the last end, and thus increasing his freedom.

Man’s freedom in the plan of Salvation

- Mans freedom is limited and fallible

- The exercise of freedom does not imply a right to say or do everything
- Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is Freedom.
- The more docile we are to the prompting of grace, the more we grow in inner
freedom and confidence living trials.