Fall 1968

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CIVITAS DEI

FOUNDATION

Episcopal Patroru The Most Reverend Cletus F. O'Donnell, J.C.D. The Most Reverend Raymond P. Billinger, D.D. The Most Reverend Aloysius ]. Wycislo, D.D. Trustees

Rt. Rev. Msgr. John D. Fitzgerald Rt. Rev. Msgr. J. Gerald Kealy Rt. Rev. Msgr. Arthur F. Terlecke Rev. Stanley C. Stoga Fournlen Rt. Rev. Magr. Thomas }. Burke Rt. Rev. Msgr. D. F. Cunningham Rt. Rev. Msgr. Francis }. Dolan Rt. Rev. Msgr. John B. Ferring Rt. Rev. Msgr. James D. Gleeson Rt. Rev. Msgr. Patrick J. Gleeson Rt. Rev. Msgr. James C. Hardiman Rt. Rev. Msgr. Michael J. Kilbride Rt. Rev. Magr. Francis I. Lavin Rt. Rev. Msgr. John A. McMahon Rev. Raymond J. Ackerman Rev. Anthony Chisek Rev. Francis M. Coyle Rev. William R. Doran Rev. Arthur E. Douaire Rev. Francis D. Hayes Rev. Edward M. Hosty Rev. Claude E. Klarkowski

Rt. Rev. Msgr. Eugene V. Mulcahey Rt. Rev. Msgr. James V. Murphy Rt. Rev. Msgr. Gerard C. Picard Rt. Rev. Msgr. Stanley J. Piwowar Rt. Rev. Msgr. Edward J. Smaza Rt. Rev. Msgr. James A. Walsh Rt. Rev. Msgr. Richard F. Wolfe Rt. Rev. Msgr. Raymond J. Zock Rev. Francis R. Krakowski Rev. Edward T. Kush Rev. Joseph J. Mackowiak Rev. Francis C. Murphy Rev. Harry C. Rynard Rev. Stanley L. Ryzner Rev. Joseph I. Schmeier Rev. Harold H. Sieger Rev. Andrew T. Valcicak

Charter Member ACTA

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Rev. Walter F. Somerville

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CHICAGO

STUDIES

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VOLUME

7

FALL,

NUMBER 3

1968

Contentd Articles UNDERSTANDING THE VOICE OF THE VICAR OF CHRIST

Humanae Vitae

MISCELLANY

THE SPIRIT OF COMMON LAW AND THE REFORM OF CANON LAw

227

}ostrph T. Mangan, S.J.

242

George K. Malone

251

Ladiskis M. Orsy, S./.

PHILOSOPHY, THE PERSON

AND CHRISTIANITY A PERSONALIST VIEW OF GRACE: · THE GHOST OF GALILEO CHRISTIAN

HoPE

269 Gerald F. Kreyche

283 Charle. R. Meyer

AND THE

DAWNING REIGN OF Goo

303 Daniel P. O'ConneU

THE ACADEMIC ExPRESS

317 George}. Dyer

The Forum EIGHT MEN: FIFTY SIX DAYS IN A HOSPITAL

325

INDEX

333

CovER: Madonna and Child; York, N.Y. 10011.

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Rambusch,

40 W. 13th St., New

"Sons of Israel, listen to the word of Yahweh" (Os 4:1).

Hosea in Old Testament times thus indicated the fact that God had commissioned the prophets to voice the word of Yahweh to his peo· ple. Jeremiah did the same saying, "Then Yahweh put out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me: 'There! I am putting my words into your mouth' " Lommen far'!

(Jer 1:9).

Comparably Christ in the on ...J.jumanae New Testament also commis· sioned men with a special calling m his Church to speak his word and the What pastoral considerations Word of his Heavenly Fa· ther to the People of God. "I guide the priest in speaking will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; what· of Humanae Vitae? ever you bind on earth shall + be bound in heaven; what· ever you loose on earth shall JOSEPH T. MANGAN, S.J. be loosed in heaven" (Mt + 16:19, 20), was the way he expressed the commission to Peter, the Prince of the Apostles and to Peter's successors. After his Resurrection he commis· sioned all of His Apostles, and through them their successors.

"As the Father sent me, so am I sending you" (Jn 20:21), he told them. And again, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations; . . . teach them to observe all the commands

Utae

227

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CHICAGO STUDIES

I gave you. And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time" (Mt 28:18-20).

Today the successors of Peter and the other Apostles exercise this commission through what is called "ordinary teaching" which may or may not be infallible and "extraordinary teaching" which also may or may not be infallible. Throughout the centuries of the Church's existence the Popes and Bishops under the guidance of the Holy Spirit have usually exercised this commission through ordinary non-infallible teaching. But no matter which way these men choose to exercise their commission, in a special way they are speaking Christ's word and the word of Our Heavenly Father to us.

When, therefore, the Council Fathers of Vatican II. spoke in union with the Pope to the People of God, lhey in a special way spoke the word of God to us. And when Pope Paul VI speaks to all the People of God and to all men of good will as formally and as solemnly as he does in the Eycyclical, Humanae Vitae, he is speaking not as a private theologian but as the successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, and the supreme teacher of the Universal Church. Speaking thus within his competency, Pope Paul in a special way is speaking God's word to us.

He even promised two years ago, on February 12, 1966, in an address on "Marriage, Family and Children," that he would propose moral norms on marital morality only if he were conscientiously certain that he was interpreting the cer¡ tain will of God to us. "The Magisterium of the Church," he said, "cannot propose moral norms until it is certain of interpreting the will of God. And to reach this certainty. the Church is not dispensed from research and from examining the many questions proposed for her consideration from every part of the world."

That Pope Paul has this most important responsibility so to teach, whether by infallible or non-infallible doctrinal statements, is confirmed by traditional Calholic doctrine and especially by Vatican II in article 25 of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.

HUMANAE VITAE

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"In matters of faith and morals, the Bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and ·adhere to it with a religious assent of soul. This religious submission of will and mind must be shown in a special way to the authentic authority of the Roman Pontiff even . when he is not speaking ex cathedra. That is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, and the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will". (em· phasis added).

The more to insure that his teaching would come under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Pope Paul made a thorough scientific, historical, sociological and doctrinal study. .He sought the help of the People of God of all states of life and of all relevant scientific disciplines. Especially he consulted the Bishops of the Church, and during the Vatican Council he asked them to submit in writing whatever views they .had on questions of marital morality.

He proceeded with tantalizing slow deliberation. He did not want to speak prematurely. He did not want to speak in too legalistic a manner. He was acutely and compassionately aware that if he had to reaffirm in substance the traditional teaching of the Church on marriage morality, this would mean Our Heavenly Father is asking many sacrifices, even heroic sacrifices, of many married couples, especially of the poor, and contrary to the concrete hopes some had been led to conceive and rely on in recent years. He was aware that this interpretation of the divine law would not be received easily hy all and that to many it would appear even impos· sible to put into practice.

He wanted to speak in a fatherly Christlike way, pasto· rally rather than judgmentally, to all the faithful and to all men of good will. Yet he knew that to remove the confusion that had arisen he would have to speak clearly without am· biguity what the truth of God and the will of God really is.

He would not he enacting a merely ecclesiastical law nor promulgating a merely papal norm of morality. He would

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instead be promulgating an authentic authoritative interpretation of the divine natural law binding on all members of the Church. Although he would be the one promulgating this interpretation, the binding force of the interpretation would come from the divine natural law itself. He also knew that he would not have to rely on philosophical argumentation alone, but the Holy Spirit would be guiding him and strengthening him in a special way to make the right interpretation. To this end he devoted many hours of thought, study, consultation and prayer. His was an overpowering responsibility.

THE ENCYCLICAL ITSELF

Pope Paul VI in the Encyclical, Humanae Vitae, has written a message of faith regarding the dignity of life, love, and the human person. In it he explains and defends con jugal morals in their integral wholeness. ''The problem of birth," he says, "is to be considered in the light of a total vision of man and of his vocation, not only of his natural and earthly vocation, but also of his supernatural and eternal vocation." Drawing on the positive insights of Vatican II and of his own letter of February 12, 1966, he emphasizes the divine, spiritual and human personalistic aspects of marriage in the context of total, joyful love-commitment between husband and wife. He highlights also the fact that this friendly marital relationship tends of its nature toward the mutual personal perfection of the couple's very being.

When he takes up the question of contraception, he addresses himself to all the objections which have been voiced in the past few years contrary to the Church's traditional teaching. Granted that he has not responded philosophically in depth to all the objections, he has conscientiously evaluated all the responsible insights of the various experts and promulgated his resulting interpretation of the divine natural law.

Vatican II says that such teaching must be accepted by the faithful according to the Pope's "manifest mind and will." Now according to Pope Paul's manifest mind and will,

HUMANAE VITAE

231

the teaching in Humanae Vitae is clearly authoritative doctrinal teaching binding on all members of the Church. Furthermore, the whole tone and tenor throughout the Encyclical indicates that he is speaking about matter that is certainly grave. Finally, he explains that the faithful should accept this teaching " . . . not so much because of the reasons adduced hut principally because of the guidance of the Holy Spirit which is given in a special way to the pastors of the Church that they may clarify the truth" (Encyclical, n. 28).

Actually one's acceptance of Humanae Vitae flows gracefully and logically from one's acceptance of the teaching of Vatican II. We have already 1¡eferred to the oft quoted passage from article 25 of The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, which says that the Roman Pontiff's teaching must be accepted, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World teaches that the members of the Church "may not undertake methods of regulating procreation which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law" (n. 51). Finally, The Declaration on Religious Freedom declares: "In the formation of their conscience, the Christian faithful ought carefully to attend to the sacred and cet1ain doctrine of the Church. The Church is by the will of Christ, the teacher of the truth. It is her duty to give utterance to, and authoritatively to teach, that Truth which is Christ Himself, and also to declare and confirm hy her authority those principles of the moral order which have their origin in human nature itself" ( n. 14).

These are only a few of the relevant passages indicating how an acceptance of Vatican II leads logically to an acceptance of the teaching in Humanae Vitae. Others will appear m their proper places during the rest of this article.

PASTORAL CONSIDERATIONS

"Fallow your own conscience"? Frequently enough one hears or reads even after the Encyclical that in deciding whether to practice contraception and what method to use

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CHICAGO STUDIES

one needs only to follow his own conscience. Although' it is true that the sincere judgment of one's conscience here and now in a given situation is the decisive criterion of the formal morality of the specific action contemplated, still this judgment must be made, according to Vatican II, by " . ; . a conscience dutifully conformed to the divine law itself and . . . submissive toward the Church's teaching office, which authentically interprets that law in the 路light of the Gospel.

That divine law reveals and protects the integral meaning of conjugal love, and impels it towards a truly human. fulfillment" (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, n. 50).

When the expression, "follow your own conscience," is used it sometimes seems to mean in the context, "simply because your conscience tells you to do it." This meaning of course is based on false ethics and false theology, and .needs to be corrected. It is based路 on exaggerated subjectivism, as the late John Courtney Murray, S.J., has aptly remarked in his commentary on the Declaration on Religious Freedom, " . . . the Declaration nowhere lends its authority . to the theory for which the phrase (freedom of conscience) frequently stands, namely that I have the right to do what my conscience tells me to do, simply because my conscience tells me to do it. This is a perilous theory. Its particular peril路 is subjectivism-the notion that, in the end, it is my conscience, and not the objective truth, which determines what is路 right or wrong, true or false" (Abbott, ft. 5, p. 679).

"In the depths of his conscience," says Vatican II, "man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience. . .. For man has in his heart a law written by God. To obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged . . ." (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, n. 16). In the Encyclical Pope Paul is leading us to an awareness of this law of God written in our hearts. What the confessor should strive to do, when the opportunity presents itself, is to help the married couple develop a right conscience according to

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HUMANAE VITAE'

the objective moral order established by God as the Encyclical directs in article 10. "The responsible exercise of parenthood," it continues, "implies, therefore, that husband. and wife recognize fully their own duties towards God, towards themselves, towards the family and towards society, in a correct hierarchy of values."

A

SOLIDLY PROBABLE OPINION?

Has a solidly probable opinion developed contrary to¡ the teaching of Humanae Vitae on the immorality of contraception? The answer to this question must be in the negative. As I see the matter, when a reputable theologian or theologians teach any doctrine as solidly probable and usable in practice, the presumption is that they have solid reasons for their opinion. This presumption, however, can be removed through scholarly investigation.

If we investigate this presumption, we investigate what is called intrinsic probability, the solid basis of extrinsic probability. In making this investigation we first consider the¡ opinion under discussion to determine whether or not it has solid reasons in its favor when the opinion is looked at in itself. Then we must look at the opinion in the light of the evidence and solid reasons for the contrary opinion.

If the evidence and solid reasons make the contrary opinion certain, the first opinion is recognized as being without intrinsic probability, which also means that the presumption in favor of the reputable theologians' opinion is removed.

That is precisely what happens when the contrary opinion is the certain teaching of the universal Magisterium of the Church.

Surely when the Church's teaching is non-infallible doctrine a competent theologian through his scholarly investigations conceivably might find new evidence not yet considered by the universal Magisterium. If this new evidence were decisive for him, it is conceivable that he would be forced by the evidence to withdraw his assent from the Church's specific teaching. But recognizing the fallible nature of his own judgment he could not legitimately set himself up as

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CHICAGO STUDIES

an authority competing with that of the Magisterium. He could not, therefore, legitimately teach his opinion as safe in practice for the faithful.

Now, the doctrine contained in Humanae Vitae, although not infallible, is the certain teaching of the Magisterium. As a matter of fact, no new evidence has been presented for any contrary opinion. Consequently there is no foundation today for any probable opinion contrary to the teaching of Humanae Vitae and safe in practice.

GOOD FAITH SOLUTION?

In his administration of the sacrament of penance the priest frequently has occasion to instruct his penitent in matters brought up in the confessional. This instruction might be very necessary, if for example the penitent judged that some morally good action of his was sinful. On other occasions the confessor might judge such instruction not necessary but pastorally salutary. In the pursuit of his office the confessor supplies information, helps the penitent cor¡ rect an erroneous conscience, leads him to form a correct conscience. Whenever he becomes aware of a deficiency in the penitent's conscientious judgments, he will ordinarily help the penitent remove the deficiency. This will be true also when the deficiency is an erroneous judgment that an objectively immoral action is morally lawful.

The priest-confessor is an official representative of Our Heavenly Father, of Christ, and of the Church. As such he must instruct according to the Church's doctrines and precepts properly promulgated. If the penitent is in a state of doubt and asks for clarification of the tmth, the confessor must give the Church's teaching and not his own private judgments. If the penitent is in a state of confusion, his state is similar to the state of doubt, and the priest must clarify the penitent's understanding of the truth according to the Church's teaching.

It is also possible that the penitent sincerely and in good faith will take a moral or theological position that is unten-

HUMANAE VITAE

235

able in the light of certain Catholic doctrine. His state is ordinarily judged to be that of a man with invincible ignorance. Knowledge that the person should have is missing; for example, in the matter we are discussing the responsible adult Catholic should know of his obligation to accept the doctrinal teaching of Humanae Vitae.

According to Josef Fuchs, S.J. ( Theologia Moralis Gen¡ eraliâ&#x20AC;˘, 1965, p. 183), "That is usually called an invincibly erroneous conscience whose judgment of the act to be placed is out of conformity with objective truth, which lack of conformity the person acting neither knows nor suspects from the factors to be weighed." Noldin (Summa Theologiae Moralis, Vol. I, 1962, n. 49) gives a slightly different definition, "Ignorance is morally invincible, if it cannot be removed through moral diligence." Without asserting that these two definitions are irreconcilable, it does seem that they do not say precisely the same thing.

Were we to follow the definition given by Fuchs, we could hardly say that any responsible adult Catholic would not even suspect that he has an obligation to accept the teaching of Humanae Vitae. Following the definition of Noldin, however, we would more easily be able to find a responsible adult Catholic who after using moral diligence to uncover objective truth, still maintains his position contrary to the teaching of Humanae Vitae.

Evidence from many sources points to the fact that Catholics in their response to H umanae Vitae fall into at least four classes: those who accept the teaching of the Encyclical; those who are in doubt and ask for guidance; those who are simply confused and don't know what to do; and, finally, those who are taking a position contrary to that teaching but presumahly in good faith. With the first three groups we should try to help them develop a deepening understanding in faith of the dignity of life, love and the human person in the light of the Encyclical's teaching. The doubting and confused we should lead to an acceptance of the Encyclical, even though they do not see the decisive nature of the indi-

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vidual argumentation; for, as Fuchs says (op. cit., p. 180), "He who acts illicitly under doubt, contracts that species ,of sin which he feared to he in the act."

Those who sincerely and in good faith have taken a路 position contrary to the Encyclical merit special concern; "The case of a conscience invincibly erroneous," says Fuchs路路 ( op. cit., p. 185), "should he avoided as far as possible. This is true because it is a 'per accidens' case, an abnormal case, one which contains error. He who does not sufficiently avoid it is culpable." Ordinarily, the priest-confessor will dutifully assist the penitent to remove the error from his conscientious judgment. But it is also commonly recognized that there are cases in which the priest-confessor silently will refrain from trying to remove that error.

Here is the way Noldin (op. cit., Vol. III, n. 386) explains the matter: "The penitent with invincible ignorance should be 路 corrected, if there is hope of immediate or eventual benefit, -and no real danger of greater harm resulting. If there is no hope of benefit from the correction, ordinarily it should be omitted and the penitent should he left in good faith. For; of two evils the lesser is to be tolerated to prevent the formal sin which the penitent otherwise would commit, since it is foreseen that the penitent would not accept the confessor's correction.

"Sometimes, however, the penitent must he corrected, even though no real benefit for him can he anticipated. This will be true as often as greater evil would follow from the omission of than from the making of the correction, as would be the case, if the ignorance would cause greater harm or public scandal. An example of this would be that of the penitent who because of the confessor's silence in the matter of contraception would defend and teach contraception as lawful."

The sanction for refusal to accept the correction presumably would he denial of absolution. The practical question today, then, is: whether the confessor has the right to ah-

HUMANAE VITAE

237

solve someone, even if he is in good faith, who intends to pursue a course of conduct which the Magisterium of the Church has authoritatively declared gravely prohibited according to the divine natural law.

THE CLIMATE FOR AN ANSWER

Before answering this question let us examine the climate in which this decision must be made. According to the publicized. statements of some reputable theologians, of some Bishops, and of some loyal and responsible laity, these members of the Church seem to deny or interpret away in practice the Encyclical's binding force, if in the penitent's judgment the Encyclical's arguments are not philosophically decisive. Some of these "authorities" seem to have set themselves up as a competing authority, which, they say, the faithful legitimately may choose to follow rather than that of the Vicar of Christ. The Roman Pontiff seems to be teaching one thing; they seem to be teaching the opposite. Because of this confusing climate, it is obviously more difficult for mar.ried couples to make a correct conscientious judgment to accept and in practice live according to the teaching of Humanae V ilae.

1 In my judgment, it is inaccurate and contrary to the teaching of Vatican II to assert, as some theologians have done, that "It is common teaching in the Church that Catholics may dissent from authoritative, non-infallible teaching of the Magisterium when sufficient reasons for so doing exist." Furthermore, to my knowledge, as this article goes to press, there has been published no attempt even to substantiate this assertion theologically.

Nor can I agree completely with Karl Rahner, S.J. In the September, 1968, issue of Stimmen der Zeit (and in English translation in the National Catholic Reporter, September 18, 1968) he has published a quiet, carefully reasoned article explaining his ideas on the application of "good faith" judgments to justify the non-acceptance of Humanae Vitae in theory and in practice. To my mind he seems to interpret

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CHICAGO STUDIES

the application of "good faith" so broadly as· to practically nullify the binding effect of the Magisterium's ordinary doc· Irina! teaching. Presupposing the objective truth of the Encyclical's teaching, he maintains that if after mature deliberation Catholics find themselves unable to accept that teaching, they should not feel subjectively guilty or accuse themselves of formal disobedience to the Church. In practice, he says, they may follow their conscientious decision without feeling obliged to submit their judgment for the approval of a confessor. He is very careful to stress that "the .formal authority of the Magisteri urn must not be overrated with regard to its effectiveness." But he presents no defense against the opposite possibility, namely that the formal au· thority of the Magisterium may be underrated with regard to its effectiveness. Nowhere does he defend as true that a Catholic has any obligation to accept in theory and in practice ordinary non-infallible doctrinal teaching of the Magis· terium, when his subjective judgment does not see the argumentation offered as decisive. Practically he seems to esti· mate the magisterial authority in its ordinary teaching as no more than that of an outstanding private theologian of the caliber of Rahner himself.

Rahner does seem to see a real danger from what he is saying, since he cautions against what he considers· an un· warranted conclusion, viz. the conclusion that the Church's Magisterium should either speak with its highest and infallible authority or simply remain silent. For, if the teaching is presented as ordinary non-infallible doctrinal teaching, it would carry no more weight than that of a renowned private theologian, which as such certainly would have its own positive value. To my mind, Karl Rahner has underrated the value of the Magisterium's teaching authority and excessively extended the "good faith" application.

EVALUATIVE KNOWLEDGE

Another theologian, a friend and colleague of mine, Father John F. Dedek (Chicago Studies, Summer, 1968, pp.

HUMANAE VITAE

239

221-224), with practical insight, has called attention to the important distinction between theoretical and evaluative knowledge in his analysis of a penitent's situation today, who although acting contrary to the teaching of Humarure Vitae may have an invincibly erroneous conscience. I would like to suggest a nuanced addition to Father Dedek's analy路 sis, an addition which in fact rna y be only a nuance of em路 phasis.

In applying the distinction to the present state of the ques路 tion on contraception, I judge that we must consider two levels at which the distinction could be valid: at the philosophical level of decisive argumentation, and at the level of magisterial authority which according to Catholic doctrine authentically interprets the divine law with binding force on all Catholics.

To my mind, the penitent could have evaluative knowledge of his obligation to accept in theory and in practice the teaching of Humarure Vitae, although he does not appreciate as decisive the argumentation offered. This will depend on his proper understanding of his commitment to accept ordinary non-infallible Catholic doctrine. Before I could accept as valid the judgment that a penitent who is acting contrary to the Encyclical's teaching has an invincibly erro路 neous conscience, I would want to estimate the matter at this level of magisterial authority especially, and not only at the level of philosophical argumentation.

This would mean that the penitent who in grave matter is lacking evaluative knowledge whether habitually or only actually in the concrete situation is according to traditional terminology acting without the sufficient reflection and therefore without the full consent of the will requisite for grave sin.

THE PASTORAL ROLE OF THE PRIEST

One of the primary duties of the confessor is to achieve and manifest a Christlike, compassionate understanding of the penitent and his problems of daily Christian living. One of the primary duties of the priest-representative of Christ

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CHICAGO STUDIES

and ·His Church is to teach Catholic doctrine clearly and without ambiguity. One of the primary duties of the priest with regard to Humanae Vitae is by word and example to educate the faithful to a proper understanding and an acceptance of the Encyclical's teaching. All of these duties need to be and can be reconciled with one another.

Some national hierarchies have come out publicly in favor of at least a "good faith" application to an invincibly erroneous conscience, when couples after sincere prayerful study and because of the present acute controversy feel they cannot accept the Encyclical's teaching. It seems unreal, then, to argue that for a confessor to grant absolution to such a penitent, determined in good faith to continue acting con· trary to Humanae Vitae, would involve grave scandal. But at the same time we can expect the confessor to manifest his disapproval and give reasons for it and to make sure that nothing he says leaves the impression he is approving the certainly illicit practice. Gradually through education in and outside of the sacrament of penance we may be able to lead the faithful to a full understanding of their obligation to abide by the Encyclical's teaching.

Pope Paul himself in the Encyclical compassionately rec· oguizes the difficult practical problems of conscience and of daily living facing married couples today. He even mentions that " . . . to many the teaching of the Church will appear to be even impossible to observe . . . " (Encyclical, n. 20).

Following the Pope's own observation, it seems that the confessor may tolerate such a judgment in favor of the penitent's continuing use of contraceptives without present subjectively grave sin. Therefore, although a couple accepts the teaching, they may sincerely judge it simply impossible for them to observe in practice. Again the confessor cannot approve of the behavior, and he must explain that the reason he is giving absolution is their sincere judgment of impossible observance.

In both the above cases, the "good faith" situation hopefully will be only temporary, that is, until the educative

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241

process can enlighten all the faithful to abide by the teaching of Humanae Vitae. If we do not put a strong emphasis on the duty to lead the faithful to an acceptance of the Encyclical's teaching, the Bishops and priests by their silence, if not by their guidance, may lead the faithful to ignore the voice of the Vicar of Christ, and therefore to ignore the word of Christ in today's world.

APOLOGETICS SURVEY V

From the very beginning let us resolve to avoid the er· ror of those who take a firm unbending stance either "for" or "against" the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (here· after described simply HV).

For there is no defender of the encyclical who would not admit that certain passages could have been reworded and restructured. Nor is there any objector who Humanae Vitae has raised would not admit that the letanew several problems ter inculcates many beautiful already discussed in this lessons concerning the digcolumn. It is necessary nity of life, of love, and of the human person. Similarly, to recall that there are let us recall that HV is not several related but separate concerned primarily with the issues in the whole "pill," with the interuterine controversy. devices, or with condoms.

One of the nation's leading + newspapers ran screaming headlines, "New Enclyclical: GEORGE K. MALONE POPE BANS BILL!" If one + allows one's opinions to be formed solely Ly second· hand coverage as expressed and interpreted by non-professionals, then one's view-be it positive or negative--must ~nevitably be a theologically short-sighted oversimplification.

Underlying the entire HV controversy are three related but separable questions- the permanence of non-infallible teachings, that of academic freedom, and the formation of conscience. Since confusion can easily result if they are not

__jjumanae 'Utae r/1/i:Jcellan'l

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kept separate, let us discuss them individually and then attempt some sort of synthesis.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND CONSCIENCE

We have already discussed the question of academic freedom in relation to the ordinary non-infallible teachings of the magisterium (Spring, 1968, Chicago Studies). Our conclusions published at that time still stand-there is per se an obligation to give "religious assent" to such teachings, but dissent is possible for the theologian under certain conditions, namely, professional research and responsible publication. Note that we were speaking of the professional theologian working in an academic context. It is ecclesiologically unsound to assert that such academic freedom extends to the pulpit, where the word-proclaiming function of the magisterium is exercised. There are two possible extreme situations¡ here. In the first, the preacher mounts the pulpit and denounces the encyclical as "theologically myopic" and "not worthy of credence." What of this man? The best that can be said of him is that he is theologically inept-the worst, that he is intellectually dishonest. For he, speaking from a credally committed context, seems to be ignoring one of the data with which he is to interpret and proclaim the word.

In the second, the preacher mounts the pulpit and proclaims the encyclical as absolutely binding to such an extent that the individual even in good faith must violate his conscience.

Again, the best that can be said of him is that he is theologically inept-the worst, that he is intellectually dishonest.

For he, speaking from a credally committed context, seems to be denying the principle that even an erroneous conscience obliges.

THE DILEMMA

An'd so the dilemma presents itself. On the one hand, an official, albeit non-infallible pronouncement of the Holy See, to which "religious assent" must be given. On the other hand, an equally sacred principle, that even an erroneous conscience is binding. An objection can he raised here. If

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you say that a conscience directly opposing the encyclical's teaching about contraception is de facto erroneous, are you not begging the question? Our reply to this would be that, admitting the active influence of the Spirit in the lives of all members of Christ's Church, nevertheless in a matter of universal teaching influencing all the members of the same Church, the presumption of the Spirit's assistance would stand in favor of the officially designated teaching authority -the episcopal college with its president, the Pope. We re· ply, therefore, that the teachings of the encyclical are pre· sumptively true and, consequently, that a dissenting con· science is presumptively erroneous. However, since every presumption must yield to truth, the possibility must be left open that a practicing Roman Catholic can and must act in accord with a presumptively erroneous conscience formed sincerely and in perfectly good faith.

What of the priest in the pastoral ministry? To denounce the encyclical is, as we have seen, theologically absurd and intellectually dishonest. To deny that a presumptively erroneous conscience formed in good faith is binding is equally absurd and dishonest. What therefore in practice? One's first duty is to announce and explain the encyclical. It is official Catholic teaching. Is he permitted, after having announced and explained the encyclical, to explain that there are dissenting views? In this context of previous announcement and explanation, we would see no difficulty in such a procedure. For it is simply to present to the local congregation what they have already read or seen in the mass media of communication. One major hang-up here lies in the fact that many preachers seek an easy solution. "What am I going to tell my people?" one priest demanded. "If this was a dogmatic de fide definition, there would be no problem! But I can't give them this stuff! Non-infallible and all that!" There is no question here of a one-sermon explanation, even though this is often a very practical "easy way out."

A PASTORAL APPROACH The very first step in inculcating the values taught in HV

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is "turning people on" to the various gradations in official Roman Catholic teaching. More about this below. Practically all Roman Catholics and the overwhelming majority of Prot¡ estants have not the slightest notion of any distinction between papal teaching which is infallible and that which is non-infallible. Practically no one realizes that all encyclicals are presumed to be non-infallible. Only one of a hundred realizes that the various decrees and constitutions of Vatican ¡ II are theologically rated as non-infallible.

Admittedly, most people are rather upset by the notion of a conditional "religious assent." In this day of revolution and social dissent, it seems almost anomalous that people hate to be confronted with the frightening responsibility of individual decision. Yes, this is official Catholic teaching.

But it is conditional. It may be changed. And many rebel not so much against the teaching as against its non-infallible provisional character. This leads us to an extremely important question.

IRREVOCABLE

OR

NOT?

The question of the irrevocability of official Roman Catholic teaching about contraception is perhaps the most critical of all the underlying questions. If the teaching is indeed irrevocable, then discussion is at an impasse; if it is revocable, then discussion may continue. It is our intention to examine one of the stronger cases advanced in favor of irrevocability, that proposed by Jesuit moralists John C. Ford and the late Gerald Kelly.

In the second volume of ContemporMy Moral Theology (1963) Ford and Kelly undet1ood the praiseworthy task of assigning a technical dogmatic note to Catholic teaching on contraception. We say praiseworthy, since many of the traditional moral manuals did not attempt to assign such technical notes to individual items of moral teaching. Frequently a proposition was asserted with a Denzinger reference which turned out, upon examination, to be one of the various "blanket condemnations" with censures ranging all the way from "heret1ca 'I" to "ff .to. o enstve p1ous ears. "ConsequentIy an

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impression was often left that an individual proposition carried greater theological weight than it actually did. Ford and Kelly merited praise, therefore, for their attempt to assign a precise theological qualification. Also worthy of praise was their candid admission that "it is not easy at present to assign a technical dogmatic note to the doctrine" (p. 277).

What theological qualification did they assign to the proposition that "contraception is intrinsically and gravely immoral"? It was twofold-first, that it is "at least definable doctrine" and, secondly, "very likely already taught infallibly ex iugi magisterio." We notice the delicately nuanced terminology of their conclusion-not defined, but "at least definable," "very likely" (hence, one may assume, not certainly) "already taught infallibly." With such painstaking precision of distinctions the reader is, therefore, taken aback to read the authors' conclusion that "the Church is so completely committed" to this teaching that "no substantial change" in the teaching is possible-that, in other words the teaching is "irrevocable" (p. 277; italics in original). Thiâ&#x20AC;˘ position on irrevocability is substantially the same as that advocated by Creusen 30 years earlier (NRT, 1932). It was, they contend, unchangeable prior to Casti Connubii, re-enforced by that same encyclical, and subsequently re-enforced again by the repeated teachings of Pius XII, and particularly by his 1951 Address to the Midwives, in which he remarked, "This precept is as valid today as it was yesterday; and it will be the same tomorrow and always, because it does not imply a precept of the human law hut is the expression of a law which is natural and divine" (Cited on p. 240).

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

Before directly addressing this question of irrevocability, we should like to make three preliminary remarks. First of all, both the leims "irrevocable" and "irreformable" have unfortunate connotations. To "revoke," or to "call back," or to "reform" seems to connote the notion of some previ-

ous error which now is being undone. But this in turn seems

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to be a subtle way of begging the question. Let us instead use the terms "changeable" and "unchangeable." Secondly, the distinction between infallible and non-infallible teaching is and continues to be one of vital importance. The "core" infallibly taught teachings of Roman Catholicism are relatively few in number. Since the overwhelming majority of tenets within the scope of "Catholic teaching" are of the noninfallible variety, any attempt to abolish or ignore the distinction can leave one open to criticisms of theological ineptitude and pedagogical absurdity. Rosemary Ruether's recent remarks (NCR, Sept. 18, 1968) seem to miss a key point. Confusion stems not from the distinction between infallible and non-infallible, but from a surprisingly general lack of awareness that such a distinction exists. In numerous dialogues and discussions many intelligent non-professionals have expressed their feeling that the whole "non-infallible" tag was just a newly thought-up face saving device, a deus ex machina to avoid a sticky situation. Greater, rather than lesser, emphasis should be placed upon the distinction.

Thirdly, the very assignment of a theological note is itself a fallible judgment. In assigning a note the theologian tries to analyze the current state of the Church's doctrinal selfconsciousness. Since the note assigned is the result of this individual's own analysis, one must distinguish two levels of theological note-the speculative and the practical. On the speculative level the theologian frequently finds that his opinion differs from those of his colleagues. A classic instance of such disagreement is discussed at great length by Karl Rahner (Theological Investigations, I, pp. 229-296)-the question of the proper theological note to be assigned to monogenism. On this speculative academic level the theologian may assign a higher note than most of his colleagues or a lower one. To deny the speculative theologian this right would seem logically to exclude all possibility of doctrinal development. But on the practical level, when the theologian discusses a proposition with non-professionals, intellectual honesty forbids him to give his own note-assignment as if it

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were the only possible op1mon. Indeed, this same inteiiectual honesty would seem to demand on this practical level the lowest possible note consonant with sound theologizing.

Finally, we note that "infallible teaching" and "dogma" are not mutually coextensive terms. For all dogma would be considered infallible. But, since there are so-called "secondary objects" of infailibility, not everything infallibly taught is considered dogma.

A

SERIES OF QUESTIONS

Having established the preceding, let us now proceed to pose three questions. First of all, is Roman Catholic teaching regarding contraception of dogmatic stature, either defined or from the ordinary and universal magisterium? If the answer is yes, the discussion is ended except for analysis of terminology and formulation. We reply that it is not. For canon 1323, n. 3, specifically states that "nothing is considered to be dogmatically declared or defined unless it is manifestly clear (nisi manifeste constiterit)." From the very words of Ford and Kelly, therefore, it is not manifestly clear that Catholic teaching has been dogmatically declared-hence it is presumed to be non-dogma. Therefore another question anses.

Secondly, is Roman Catholic teaching regarding contraception infallibly taught? If the answer is yes, the discussion is ended, as above. We reply that it is not, for the following reasons. On the one hand, HV itself is, in the words of Msgr.

Ferdinanda Lambruschini in releasing the encyclical, an authentic, â&#x20AC;˘ion-infallible pronouncement. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility of this non-infallible document's containing tenets which have been already taught infallibly elsewhere. However, from Lambruschini's words such a possibility seems most unlikely. On the other hand, the possibility of Catholic teaching on contraception being i~fallibly taught prior to HV seems to be excluded by an extension o{ the previously mentioned canon 1323, n. 3; If nothing is to he considered dogmatically declared or defined unless it is manifestly clear, this norm would seem to apply a fortiori

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to all allegedly infallible teaching. For if the norm of 1323 applies to the primary object of infallibility, it must apply all the more to the secondary object. In other words, Ford and Kelly have the right to assign a higher note as speculative theologians but on the practical level, Catholic teaching here must be regarded as non-infallible, both prior and subsequent to HV. Whence arises another question.

Is Roman Catholic teaching regarding contraception unchangeable? If the answer is yes, the discussion is ended, as above. But we reply that it is not, for the following reasons. First of all, we contend that any non-infallible statement is of its very nature fallible. If it is fallible, it is changeable, or at least open to the possibility of change. Why does fallibility indicate changeability? If a tenet is fallibly taught, error is possible. If error is possible, change is possible. Moreover, non-infallible teaching postulates "religious assent," which while true and internal is also conditional ("unless and until the teaching is changed"). If this assent depends upon this condition, a fact which was indicated by Pope Paul VI in his 1964 birthday message to the Cardinals, then again we can only conclude that change is possible.

Secondly, it seems to be a logical and ecclesiological contradiction to assert simultaneously that a teaching is definable (hence not certainly defined) and "very likely" infallibly taught (hence not certainly so taught) and yet to assert that the teaching is irrevocable or unchangeable. In fact, to assert the unchangeability of non-infallible teaching seems to go directly contrary to the teachings about the non-infallible magisterium of both Humani Generis and Lumen Gentium, and perhaps to undermine the very notion of the ordinary non-infallible magisterium itself.

BrieRy to summarize, the function of the non-infallible magisterium is a vitally important one within the Roman Catholic Church. As a formalized religious institution, this church must speak to current issues in a meaningful way even when dogmatic certitude is not yet present. The manner of so speaking is present in the ordinary non-infallible mag-

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isterium precisely because of its theologically recognized flexibility. To assert that any given proposition is for all practical purposes a tenet of this ordinary non-infallible magisterium and simultaneously to assert that it is irrevoca¡ hie is a grave disservice to truth and to the magisterium.

MASS MEDIA AGAIN

Although we had already spoken about the doctrinal problems created by the mass media of news coverage, we feel that we must mention this problem again. The previous problem was more subtle-that of the theologian publishing in a technical journal and having his scholarly presentation picked up and distributed widely by way of magazines or television. HV presents another problem. In a linear form of communication Pope Paul VI taught many beautiful and positive values regarding human life and love. The linear communication of the encyclical will reach perhaps hundreds of thousands who will directly read it. But one theologian appearing at a press conference and denouncing the encyclical as theologically myopic can reach tens of millions of viewers. This, of course, is usually followed, on news programs by film clips of various chancellors, vicars general, and other diocesan officials asserting "loyalty to the Holy See." It is time for the Church to stop this business of simply reacting to stories once they have broken. The days of purely linear communication are gone. In this entire HV affair, how wonderful it would have been if an equal amount of time had¡ been devoted to the writing of the encyclical and also to preparing a film, perhaps documentary in nature, professionally done, to inculcate, to "sell" the positive values expressed in the letter! It is our firm conviction that the magisterium is viable and necessary in today's Church, but that it must adapt these modern teaching techniques to bring its message across to the world.

When St. Paul speaks about the various gifts of the Holy Spirit that he distributes in a Christian community, he .does not make any mention of the charism of a canon lawyer.

And no doubt, many persons would deny that such a charism exists or could exist. But at the same time we find that canon lawyers have a humble but indispensable role in the Church to help to develop and preserve order and peace in the Christian community and in this way prepare the ground for the work of the Holy Spirit. Order, however,

Spirit o/ Lammon Jaw

Jfw

The author shows how the revision of the Code can

does

build and strengthen the

not

mean

inanimate

structures but the ordered play of creative forces, the Christian community. ordered release of energies.

Order in a living body is + the perfection of movement.

Peace does not mean the abLADISLAS M. ORSY, S.J. sence of tension and of radical change. It means that the + moving forces are rooted in love and carry the community toward a Person. Both order and peace include a creative element.

True, the canon lawyer's charism is not that of the theologian. He is not scrutinizing God's mysteries; he is concerned with simple norms of action. He is not interpreting the Word of God to an unbelieving world or to believing disciples; he is concerned with the practical happiness of God's people.

251

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The presence of God among his people is intimately con· nected with the life of a human community. The canon lawyer's mission is to build and to strengthen the life of this community. He has a social mission; his care (as that of canon law) should be for the community.

Explained in this way, we doubt that Paul would have any objection to including the task of the canon lawyer in the list of charismatic gifts. And he would probably say that the gifts that God wants to give them is that of discernment: to help in the incarnation of God's mystery in a human commu· nity.

But what has this introduction to do with the main theme of this article: the spirit of common law and the reform of canon law? Perhaps more than appears at first. If the task · of the canonist is to help the harmonious development of the Christian community by human means, by ordered laws, surely the canonist can learn a great deal from the human wisdom and prudence that developed in secular communi· ties. In fact, canon law owes a great deal to various legal sys· terns. The impact of Roman law was so great on it that to this day our Code carries the substantial division of the man· uals of Roman lawyers who liked to consider all under the three-fold headings: personae, res et actiones. In fact, most of our general principles or particular institutions come from Roman law.

The Church did not consider the Germanic laws as alien to her way of life when she conquered the peoples of Northem Europe. Many elements of it are still retained in our matrimonial and procedural law.

Today it is once again emphasized that the Church should be inserted into the life of various peoples. The mystery of God should take on flesh in different cultures and civiliza· tions. Hence the question arises inevitably: should the Church open its doors to other legal influences than the ones received from Rome, Bisance and the Germanic nations? In particular should the Church admit the influence of English and American common law?

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The answer should be in the affirmative. But we admit that the working out of the particulars may be difficult and slow.

However, the more difficult it may appear, the more urgent is the task. Canon law and common law should come together and begin a fruitful dialogue.

This article is no more than one step towards this dialogue. It will not touch on particular problems; it will remain on the level of general principles. However, it is necessary from the beginning to define our terms of reference with reasonable clarity.

We take the term common law in a broad sense, meaning the whole legal system that developed in England and was eventually accepted by many English speaking countries and even by nations of another tongue. We include in the term the branch of law which is known as equity-although no doubt the lawyers of the old English chancery court would rise in protest. We include also the basic principles of constitutional law, a product of fairly modern times.

No need to define canon law. But if any doubt exists, we say willingly that by canon law we mean not only the Code but also the whole legal system of the Church including the principles of the so-called public law.

It is much more difficult to say what we mean by the spirit of a legal system. To some extent (but not exclusively) we mean the first juridical principles that help in the planning and formulation of new laws and in the interpretation of the old ones. To a greater extent we mean fundamental human attitudes and virtues as they are expressed in the whole legal system more in an intangible way than by explicit rules or maxims.

The spirit of a legal system is present everywhere in the laws; at the same time its root and origin is not so much in the laws as in the history, in the religious, cultural and moral life of the community that makes the laws. The spirit of the laws does not originate in the laws; it is an inspiration that comes from outside and imprints its image on the legal norms.

It is present in the acts of the legislator, in the statutes and

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orders, in the acts and decisions of the judges, and it is present in the executive and administrative powers- although somewhat less than in the other two branches of power.

By the reform of canon law we do not mean the immediate revision of the laws of the Church only. We mean something more; we mean the development of the legal system of the Church in the future. It is too early to foresee what course the reform of the Code and the development of the legal system will follow.

This article, of course, cannot be comprehensive. We have to restrict our investigations to some aspects of the common law and see if the spirit which is present in them could have a salutary influence on the evolution of canon law. In a somewhat pragmatic way we have selected five aspects which appeared to us as having a greater importance for our purpose. The five aspects are: l) the balance of powers: the harmony that common law creates between the various types of power in the state, in particular the harmony between the legislative and executive power and the harmony between the judicial and executive power; 2) the humanity of common law; 3) its sense of proportion in imposing legal obligations; 4) the law as a moving force; 5) the principle of good faith, an essential element of common law.

We willingly concede that this is not going to be a critical presentation of common law. Like any other system, common law has its own shortcomings and on a number of points is in sore need of reform. But our purpose is not the adequate presentation of common law. We are interested in those parts of it only that can serve as an inspiration for the reform of canon law; this is a restricted aim no doubt.

THE BALANCE AND HARMONY OF POWERS

Since we are dealing with general principles, it would not be right to go into details. The constitutional law of English speaking countries may be markedly different. The power of the Queen of Great Britain is not the same as the power of the President of the United Stales. The British Parliament

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does not function in the same way as the United States Congress. Great Britain does not have a supreme court to adjudicate on the constitutionality of statutes enacted by the Parliament; the Parliament itself is the supreme court. In the United States the Supreme Court is one of the most important constitutional safeguards: it has a power of control over the legislature.

Yet there is a common element in the various systems; the different types of power are so well balanced with each other that it is legitimate to speak about a harmony of powers.

The legislative and executive powers are distinct and the judicial power is separated from both. Yet this separation is never complete; that is why modern lawyers prefer to speak about the balance or harmony of powers instead of their separation. The positive aspect is more important than the negative one. Also the term separation is a static concept.

Perhaps the terms balance or harmonious play express better the necessary movement that has to be among these powers.

The different branches are separated in order to make them into forces working on each other for the good of the whole.

In this way the road is open for the dynamic development of the community.

Such a division or balancing of the powers is not so much the fruit of philosophical reflection as the result of centuries old empirical wisdom. Experience proves that our human nature is limited: one man or one group of men can fulfill one task well; they can serve the cause of one interest welL But their drive and impetus will have to be balanced by another man or by another group of men with different interests in their heart. If the two do not act in a spirit of enmity but in a spirit of harmony the life of the community will be enriched. They will mutually limit each other's power and they will create a creative play of social forces.

This system of balances can be applied to the life of the Church, too. At present, in the Church the legislative power in practice is not well distinguished from the executive branch of government. The main executive organs are the

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Roman Congregations and offices. In practice they are the legislators as well, even if officially they do not promulgate the laws. The internal dynamism of an executive organ is essentially conservative; its task and mission is to preserve the laws and to urge their observance. It is right that it should be so; the Church needs conservative forces. But the Church needs progressive forces too; they should be present in the legislative organs. The legislators should be concerned with the building up of a new society, with providing laws for new situations that progress continually creates.

An example from the recent experience of the Church will help. Before Vatican II the practical planning of the legisla· tion was the task of the Roman Congregations, and we all know that the general tendency was to preserve the legal structures in all, in great and small. The preparation for the Council itself, done mainly by commissions which worked under the guidance and in the spirit of the Roman· Congre· gations, demonstrated the same tendencies. But when the Council convened, a new legislative body appeared, independ· ent and superior to the executive branch. The result was a breath of fresh air, a completely new spirit in our legislation.

Surely, the Holy Spirit was there. But the whole process of change made perfect sense in terms of modern civil jurispru· deuce: an independent legislative organ brought in new ideas and broke new paths.

It would help the life of the Church if we had a legislative organ independent from the executive branch of the Govern· ment. A trend was the convocation of the Episcopal Synod in the Fall of 1967. It was not more than a trend since the Synod did not have any legislative power. Let us suppose, however, that eventually under the presidency of the pope the Synod becomes representative of the episcopal conferences and ob· tains the power to legislate. Every time the Synod meets, fresh air could be brought into the life of the Church. The Synod itself could set up commissions that would work paral· lei with the Roman Congregations. The task of the commissions would be to plan new laws; the task of the Congrega·

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lions would be to watch over the observance of the laws, to give permissions and dispensations.

Today the judicial power in the Church is hardly func¡ tioning-if we abstract from its use in matrimonial cases. In reality we have matrimonial tribunals, scarcely anything else.

This is the practice, not the theory. Canon law abundantly provides for the use of tribunals. But when 99.5% of the cases before the Sacred Roman Rota are matrimonial cases it is difficult to argue that by and large the judicial power in the Church is functioning.

The main task of the judicial power should be to interpret the law authentically. The high courts in a common law country have the power to make a judicial declaration; i.e. the independent judiciary is entitled to interpret the lawaccording to the mind of the legislator as it is expressed in the text of a statute. This power of the courts inspires a feel. ing of security in the citizens; they know the rule of law will be upheld by the judges, and consequently they feel protected by the courts and by the law. The ordinary priest or layman in the Church does not feel that he is protected by canon law, even if he is. He knows that the law will be interpreted by those who have a right to correct, discipline or even punish him and he would have no appeal against the interpretation if he finds it unjust, unfair or debatable. It would help to develop this feeling of security in our faithful if our courts too would have the right to interpret the laws.

The same right should not be given either to special commis¡ sions or to the executive offices of the ecclesiastical govern. ment.

Right now it appears less certain how the use of judicial power should be extended in disputes about rights and duties although it should be extended.

This extension will necessarily suppose a simplification of the procedural rules. Two years in the first instance and one in the second do not correspond to our needs any more.

There is no reason why the procedural laws of some coun. tries, at least in minor cases, could not be canonized by the

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Church or by the local Churches.

In common law the judicial procedure is always marked by a strong personal element. Frequently a case is decided on a subjective level: which of the two contending parties the jury or the judge is prepared to believe. Canon law aims at a much more objective standard: the general rule of evidence is that two adult male persons' independent testimony about the existence of a fact is required to establish judicial certainty. In canon law perhaps a more objective standard is needed since it is a law for use among many nations; yet could not some of that personal approach be admitted into our procedure, especially in cases of small importance?

Sometimes a quick solution is a greater good in itself than a perfect solution given with delay. A speedy decision by honest judges in cases of small importance can benefit the parties and the community more than prolonged investiga¡ tions and a decision delayed beyond any reasonable limit.

HUMANITY THROUGH LAW

Common law is marked by a deep humanity. Humanity means here a priority given to the human person over written rules. In the legislation and in the administration of justice the person is held in the forefront and not the written law. An exalted claim, no doubt, for common law. Yet we believe the claim can be substantiated.

To demonstrate this spirit of humanity, first of all we quote the existence of Equity. Side by side with the official tribunals of the King where the common law (now in a strict sense) was administered, the Court of Equity arose. There justice was given to all who could not get it according to the law. The rule for the administration of justice at the Court of Chancery was in the honest conscience of the Chancellor. At this court the deeply human rules of Equity developed: who seeks equity must do equity; he who comes into equity must come with clean hands; equity will not leave a wrong without a remedy, etc.

The great achievement of the equitable jurisdiction was

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that it put a living person between the rigidity of common law on the one side and the needs of natural justice (Christian justice, in fact) and the needs of real life on the other side. Through the living persons of the Chancellor the law became human.

The conflict between a rigid legal system and the everchanging realities of life is perhaps inevitable in any community. Common law somewhat forestalls it; a living person, the judge, stands with discretionary power between the letter of the law and the actual case.

This human role of the judge transcends the branch of Equity: the decision of the judge makes law at every court.

The law that he makes may be good or bad, but he makes law. The current of legal life runs through a living man, and being a living man he reacts with humanity at the meeting point of abstract rules and concrete cases.

Further, the system of common law is built on some cardinal ideas that have not much juridical precision but much of broad humanity. They can be the despair of judges and scholars sometimes, especial! y of those who are hankering for definitions and are not content with reality. Some of these concepts are: l) reasonable man (the law of torts is based on the care that a reasonable man should take in a given situation, or contracts are to be fulfilled according to the expectation of a reasonable man) ; 2) common sense (no one knows what it means exactly but judges go back to it frequently and decide issues by common sense); 3) natural justice (in recent times used especially at administrative courts) ; 4) audiatur et altera pars (a principle for administration of justice in all circumstances).

Now it is not a human person but a human concept ¡that stands between the rigidity of the law and its application.

The concept is broad; it is a direction and it is a prohibition.

It is a direction, vague, perhaps, but meaningful for all citizens; it is a prohibition, since nothing against it should. be done even if the act or judgment appears to fulfill the letter of the law.

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Finally, the discretionary remedies at the disposition of the courts, mostly of high courls, transcend the letter or even the whole text of the law and open up the possibilities for an informal procedure to give justice in a case that is beyond the reach of the law. The right to proceed against a person for contempt of court gives broad powers to a judge to re· dress injustices or to enforce actions that are not provided for by the law. Similarly, through an injunction the judge can use his power of discretion to promote peace and justice as he thinks it necessary in particular circumstances. These are remedies that enable the court to deal with personal situ· ations in a unique way without being hampered by rules.

If we tnrn now to canon law and seek to find the same humanity we find it wanting.

A court of conscience does not exist in canon law. There is not any institution, short of personal appeal to the pope that would install a living person between the letter of the law and its application. We think that such a court of con· science would have a scope in lhe Church today. It should be a court where the parties (perhaps on oath) are presumed to tell the truth, and judgment is rendered according to the conscience of the judge. Abuses may well follow, but the gain in humanity and equity would outweigh them.

In a more general way, could the Church give discretionary power to the judges? Certainly she could, but our whole doc· trine on judicial precedent should be rethought and reformed; this would be a radical transformation in the legal system.

No doubt, it could not be done suddenly, only gradually.

Perhaps it is already done in a subtle way. We all say that the decisions of the Rota are not binding on lower courts; yet all judges in every place are studying those decisions and by way of act recognize their authority.

Admittedly some discretionary remedies do exist in canon law, such as suspensio ex informala conscientia, but they be· long more to the field of administrative discretion than to the power of the judges. The two powers are entirely differ· ent. The former should decrease; the latter should increase.

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261 SENSE OF PROPORTION

The spirit of common law reflects a certain sense of proportion in imposing legal obligations. By sense of proportion I mean the respective and graded importance attached to various types of laws. Some laws are concerned with the laying of the foundation for the life of the community; they cannot be disturbed without the whole structure being somewhat shaken by it. Some laws are structures built on the foundation; they do not hold the building; therefore, they can be moved away and substituted in a relatively easy way.

Few, even among the citizens in common law countries, are aware of the fact that the stability of their laws is not uniform but that there are (to use the words of a modern commentator) two or three different layers of laws with varying stability. The most important layer is on the level of the supreme court; all decisions made by it are binding on all the courts of the land. But the decisions on the highest level are never too numerous. They constitute a loose framework, binding all, but leaving much freedom for action to tribunals at a lower level. One could easily publish a textbook on contract at common law entitled The Law of Contract at the Level of the Supreme Court. It would not Le a great volume; there would be serious gaps in it since some of the issues never reached the supreme court.

Another volume could be The Law of Coatract at Appeal Courts. It would be larger in size, and it would fill up many details, but it would still leave some freedom for local customs applied mostly at the first instance courts; let us call them county courts.

The whole legal machinery moves on two or three different levels. All decisions take their importance from their incorporation into one of the those levels. It is easy to see how their permanency is effected hy their appartenance to a lower or higher grade. A sense of proportion pervades the whole system and brings flexibility into it.

In our code of canon law tlris sense of proportion does not exist. All laws have the same authority; they are promulgated

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by the Holy See. There are no laws evolved by judicial prece· dents. Be they fundamental or merely accidental they have the same stability and permanency. The laws concerning an ecumenical council are side by side with the laws concerning the chapter of religious sisters. They form one unit in the Code. The rather unfortunate but inevitable need of numeration increases the artificial unity so that to change one is to disturb the external structure of the whole.

It should be the subject of long and careful study how this uniformity could. be broken up and a hierarchy of values introduced into the legal system of the Church. The strict appli· cation of the principle of subsidiarity would help. The re· form of canon law should not begin so much on the top; it should begin rather at the diocesan level through local legislation and experimentation. The local efforts could be supple· mented by legislation by episcopal conferences. Finally, the highest authority of the Church could make universal laws according to ·the universal needs of the Church. The inferior legislator should not be reduced to a mere executive officer as has happened frequently in the past; he should have the right to make laws and to change them according to his best judgment about local needs.

An example much to the point would be the rule that the change of religious constitutions on any point is reserved to the· Holy See, or, at least, these constitutions cannot be changed without explicit permission. If a small change becomes such a great issue how can it be expected that the religious will be able to keep ahead of a changing world?

LAW AS A MOVING FORCE

Common law has a certain dynamic element in its structure. Without it, it could not have become the law of so many countries. It adapted itself to differing cultural, social and political circumstances through an internal strength, not through imposition by an external authority, even if initially such an imposition had taken place.

By dynamic quality we mean an internal strength in the

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legal system by which it is able to renew itself in changing circumstances. This quality is the result of a fine play of hal· ancing forces, either within the legal structure or from outside.

Inside the legal structure there are fine balancing forces: a) The spirit of common law is against codification. A neatly designed legal structure as it is represented by a code immobilizes the whole system and takes away its flexi· bility. Even when for pragmatic reasons the laws have to be collected into a systematic order and promulgated as a statute, the decisions of the courts will be the· most important source for the new collection. The abstract statute has to retain its connection with the concrete life of the country. Then all statutes are handed over to the courts for interpretation.

If the courts would find that laws on the books do not cover real life situations, they can make the necessary adjustments, usually in the form of subtle distinctions. b) · Common law has great respect for customs and usages and some distrust for statutory legislation. The common law conception is not that the legislators conferred legal validity on customs but that the legislator has to respect the customs that have their validity out of real existence. The best part of common law such as contract, torts, much of the real property and constitutional law developed through customs. c) Common law can be very precise when it is needed and very vague when it is useful. Much of the .real property laws is worked out with mathematical precision; many of the fundamental concepts in contract are so vague that they can be easily adjusted to new developments in· the field of commerce and industry. d) Common law abhors secrecy. The general trend is always for the openness of a legal act; secrecy needs justification. The legislative power works in the open. Laws are prepared and enacted through open debate. All groups that have an interest in new laws have to be consulted previously.

The court deals with their cases in the open.' And the judges have to give an account of their decisions. e)· Common law has an empirical foundation and it con-

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tinuously refers to and is corrected by empirical facts. There· fore, it is very difficult for common law to get out of touch with life.

There is a continual impact from extra-legal sources to which the legal system is open.

Public opinion is a most important factor in checking, con· trolling and correcting the activities of the three branches of government.

Channels to government exist in the form of various agen· cies, corporations and associations that have their own of· !ices and are consulted whenever their interest requires.

Constructive criticism flows from university departments, especially from law schools.

The open debales that are typical of political life in a de· mocracy cause social developments to soon enter the field of legislation.

The legal life of the church needs certainly new balancing forces built into the system. Some conceivable developments in this direction are these: a) The conception of full codificalion should be aban· doned. Partial codification may be useful, even necessary, in the Church. But it should not be carried out by a commission working in secret and without broad consultation. It should be somehow the work of the whole Church. Especially the cooperation and creative contributions of all the episcopal conferences, universities and various professional groups is required. b) Freedom should be given for developing new CU-Stoms and usages. There is no community that has such resources, supernatural and natural, for the development of customs as the Church; but to give freedom for such development would require great trust in the Holy Spirit and in the people of God. It would not be a misplaced trust. c) Openness in the administration of the Church would do much to awaken latent forces in the community that would help the development of the Church. Secrecy breeds distrust and inspires indifference in those who are not initiated into

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the secret; openness invites free contribution and generates trust. d) Canon law should be based much more on empirical research. Religious sociology has not made the contribution that it should to our legislation.

Full scope should be given also to extra-legal forces in the Church: a) 路Responsible Christian and even non-Christian public opinion should be taken account of in the process of legisla路 tion. This is not to reduce the laws to the lowest common denominator but to trust human nature and in particular human intelligence inside and outside the Church . .b) There should be much more consultation and partici路 pation. Universities and professional groups should be al路 lowed to represent their problems and also to ask for special consideration. c) Much of the human wisdom of other organizations could be taken into account; e.g. the international character of many world-wide political organizations could be taken as a model and inspiration for a universal Church. The United Nations and all its agencies are far more international than the Catholic Church.

BONA FIDES: GOOD FAITH

A quality that exists strongly in common law but is not expressed by the words that we are using is bona fides, good faith. This expression is taken from classical Roman law.

Schulz has remarked that somehow the whole legal system of Rome was built on trust and confidence that the leaders of the community had in the citizens or even in the peregrines who resided habitually in Rome. It was the fides Romanorum that held the Empire together and cemented the structure of the laws.

This fides survives, we believe, in common law m many forms and gives it great internal strength.

The ordinary citizen has a respect for the law; he trusts his own legal system and he believes that he is protected and served by it in an efficient way. Therefore, on the whole the

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community is law-abiding. Also, the legal system too is structured in such a way that a quiet trust towards the ordinary citizen transpires through the rules.

In the field of so-called public law to give importance to custom is to trust the good sense of the subjects. To give discretionary power to the judges is to have confidence in. the wisdom and integrity of the judges. To let the jury decide if a person is guilty or not is to believe that there is a sense of justice in the jurymen. In the field of so-called private law the best example is the most ol>vious one: the very institution of trust. It came into being because the citizens trusted each other, and this mutual trust is still the foundation and practical condition for a legal trust.

When trust is alive and penetrates into the whole community then the number of laws need not be great. If difficulties arise a solution can be found either by the legislator or by the judges or by the citizens without recurring to formal legislation . .If there is no trust in the community there will be an inflation of laws. The legislator who does not trust the community will make norms against every conceivable evasion and by doing so he will overburden the community. Next, the community, overburdened, will really try to escape from the weight of laws, finding loopholes and fine distinctions. Then the legislator will react by making even more laws and imposing even more restructions on the subjects. As in any case of inflation the vicious spiral will speed up and¡ will eventually lead to a grave disease in the community.

It should be possible to build bona fides, good faith, into the legal system of the Church to a much greater extent than it is there now. To do this a certain vision and the acceptance of certain principles would be necessary.

The vision should be that of God's people: imperfect and sinful people, no doubt, but also blessed by God's grace, moved by the Spirit to the final revelation of the Kingdom of God. A vision of God's pilgrim Church would be necessary.

For this community no perfect legal order is possible or

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even desirable because law is not the primary factor in keeping the members together. Therefore, the aim in building up the legal system should not be an abstract perfection but the best suitable organization in the circumstances; this can be an imperfect one. The realization is necessary that it is really not law that holds the community together but a Person. the Holy Spirit. Consequently, a lack of perfection in the legal system will not be able to destroy the cohesion¡ of the commu¡nity at the deepest leveL This is not to advocate lawlessness but to put the value of Christ's promise in strong terms and to situate law in its own place.

The legislator should trust above all the Holy Spirit, the source of the unity of the community. He should believe in the effectiveness of the promise of Christ that the Spirit will never abandon God's own people. The scope of the law is not to make the community but to better its life through external organization.

The legislator should trust also God's children in their basic thrust towards God. He should believe that they do not want to escape God's laws; rather, they want to submit themselves to them. And finally the legislator should trust human nature that produced so many good legal principles outside the Church. It is likely to produce even better ones in the Church.

The laws themselves should demonstrate this overall trust.

And trust should not be withdrawn when some are abusing it.

To build up this trust some of our laws should be relaxed or plainly abolished. We have suffered and we are still suffering from an inflation of laws.

Fundamental structural laws must be clearly known and firmly applied. But unnecessary burdens should not, in the form of discipline, be placed on individual consciences. Fewer laws would give immediately greater scope to the creative action of the Spirit of God, of the children of God and of human nature. New customs would begin to develop and enrich the life of the Church. New technical, legal knowledge would be brought into the life of the community. On the sur-

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face the relaxation of laws would bring a certain looseness into the texture of the community but at a deeper level it would bring a deeper cohesion.

Even more, the exercise of authority could become more humane and more Christian. Instead of introducing a hier¡ archical order and precedence of honor into the life of the community there could be more of free associations of free persons, all working for the same goal. A parish need not be necessarily taken care of by a pastor to whom several assistants owe obedience. It could be well helped by a team of priests working together with one mind and one heart. The administration of the diocese need not be done by orders coming from the bishop or from the chancery but it could be taken care of by a body of presbyters under the effective presidency of the bishop. The Holy Father himself will not need to suffer agonies in taking a decision but he could trustingly resort to the bishops, knowing that through them the Holy Spirit will give the light much more than through the study of documents.

And in all this process the layfolk would not be looked on with suspicion but as brothers and sisters, cooperators in Christ.

There is no doubt that the task of canon lawyers in the life of the Church could be considered a charismatic gift. It is to help principally the humanity of the Church. This task has its roots in faith and in theological knowledge, but it requires a worldly skill and a great deal of practical wisdom as well.

Herman Melville once said that in order to write, one should choose a mighty theme. Hence, he chose the theme of good and evil in Moby Dick, personifying these in the great white whale and the strange Captain Ahab. I would like to apply his axiom to this article. The theme is a mighty one--philosophy, the person and Christianity-each aspect of it has been in development Philosophy and theology for at least two thousand have not always done years. Obviously, one cannot in a short article do full jusjustice to personalism, tice to the topic. What I prothe trademark of pose rather is to take a brief look at the development of Christianity. the theme of personalism from an historical point of view, expose its theoretical + foundations and lastly, but GERALD F. KREYCHE most importantly, suggest some concrete implications for man today. This will entail some skipping back and forth, but in this matter I ask your indulgence.

We have all heard and, I am sure, used the admonition, "Don't get personal!" We used it when we thought someone was becoming too prying, too intimate, too close to us and our feelings; for what is personal signifies what is private, innermost, and a root of all subjectivity. But let us begin¡ at the beginning.

P4iloMph~,

lhe P.rjon, and Chrijlianil~

+

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CHICAGO STUDIES MAN AND EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY

One might suppose that the place to commence an analysis of the person is with philosophy rather than Christianity.

After all, in the Western world, philosophy had been around about six centuries before the advent of Christianity. Yet in starting here, we find that the earliest Greek philosophers paid little or no heed to a philosophy of man. They were first of all concerned with the world and accordingly can be called cosmogonists. It was not until some two centuries later, with the coming of Socrates and Plato, that the focal point of philosophy turned toward man.

Now it is common knowledge that their view of man in this world was dualistic in outlook. Man, in his present situation, was a composite of two things, body and soul, both of which could be called separable entities. They were only accidently conjoined much as a pilot and a ship. The real man, like the real world, was opposed to and beyond the realm of sensible appearance. The real man was the "inner man," the soul; the proper definition of man (in his present state) for Plato and Socrates was that of a "soul using a body." The true philosopher was "always dying" for he deplored his condition of "being in the body as an oyster in its shell." He sought a return to the transcendent world of ideas in which he would no longer be "dragged down by the chains of the body."

This view of man as constituted by his soul alone, is dramatically illustrated in the Phaedo. Here, Socrates upon being asked by his friends where they should bury him, expresses great disappointment, for they clearly missed his essential teaching, namely, that he was not his body, but his soul. Consequently, it mattered not what was done with his body, for his body wasn't really he. Man the person was man the soul!

Sharply opposed to this view, especially in its epistemological implications, was the view of Aristotle, holding that man was the essential union of body and soul. It was a view so radically different from Plato's that even the term "body," taken in this context, meant something completely different

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than its Platonic counterpart. (Aristotle takes great pains to be quite clear on the nature of this union. He explicitly states that it 't"ould be as foolish to ask if these were a unity as in asking whether the wax seal and its imprint were one. The oneness of the union of body and soul was, for him, too obvious to belabor).

But Aristotle's view of man gave rise to great problems concerning man and immortality. Being empirically minded, Aristotle observed an obvious fact which completely eluded Plato, namely, that man dies. According to Plato, man does not really die; he is simply released from a temporary imprisonment. Hence, the Platonic man who understands his own nature will look forward to the separation of body and soul.

This is hardly the view of Aristotle, for since man the person is the composite of body and soul, death implies the cessation of man's existence. Since men do die, the problem of immortality is a vexing one, and Aristotle provides no real clues with respect to whether the soul survives, the intellect of this man survives, or only some impersonal universal intellect survives-if indeed anything at all of man survives.

In the language of Aristotle, the death of man is evidently a substantial change-a change of substance. Accordingly, what survives a substantial change is prime matter, and not the substance, in this case, man.

Although Greek philosophical thought presented some varying insights into man the person, it is fair to say that they had no explicit philosophy of the person. Though they developed a theory of individuation, they cannot be credited with developing a theory of the person. Always looming as the backdrop for Greek thought was the supremacy, not of the individual person, but of the species-the theory of eternal archetypes which remained immutable amidst the fluctuations of the individual existent.

It is interesting to note in this respect that even the term "person" comes to us not from the Greek philosophers, but from Greek playwrights. For the latter, person meant-the masks worn by actors symbolizing comedy or tragedy.

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Such, m brief, is part of the legacy given to Christianity by several prominent Greek philosophers. It presented two diverse views of the unity of man and several variations on the¡ theme of immortality.

PERSONALISM AND THE BIBLICAL TRADITION

Christianity vacillated considerably between these philosophical views on the unity and nature of man, but in its early days, it generally leaned toward Platonic thought. But (and we should note this well) while struggling and vacillat¡ ing in its theoretical philosophy, Christianity nonetheless held tenaciously to a basic tenet which very early revealed its trademark of religious personalism and which later was to prompt a further development of a philosophy of the person.

Now it is true that primitive Christianity lacked the speculative sophistication of Greek thought (the same thought which made Greek philosophers ridicule the convert-maker, Paul); but Christianity possessed, in contradistinction to Greek thought, a rich and existential Judaic-biblical heritage. That heritage traces its roots unmistakably to the book of Genesis.

As the heritage grew and gradually unfolded, it revealed a latent theological and philosophical depth undiscovered by and unknown to Greek philosophy. Often that heritage was seen only in retrospect, bnt like history, retrospect is frequently more revealing than prospect. Let us briefly trace this development.

In the early books of the Bible, God reveals himself generally to the Chosen People and more specifically to their leaders and prophets-men such as Abraham, Moses, Lot, and Isaiah. He reveals himself not as an impersonal Platonic One, located above the reality of being, and at best approachable only by a gnostic elite. He reveals himself not as an impersonal Aristotelian unmoved mover who never seems to "move" anyone. Instead, he reveals himself as one who speaks and loves and therefore as one who is personal, as one, who on his own initiative, is willing to enter into a covenant with other persons. God's personal revealation of himself to the

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community of persons is eventually completed in the name of Christ, "through Whose Name and through Whose Name alone, we are saved."

It is important to note that in revealing himself and later permitting his Son to be named, God truly gives to the Chosen People a power over him. (In the Oriental tradition, to know the ¡name of people or things was to have a certain power over them. Thus, man's supremacy and power over nature is indicated in Adam's right to name the animals of the world.

An early phenomenology of names also reveals the name as pregnant with meaning, as ultimately signifying the person.

This is why Abram is called Abraham; Jacob, Israel; and later Jesus, Christ. This power freely given by God to his Chosen People was clearly exercised by them as the story of Lot reveals. We all recall the incident of Lot, who, like an Armenian rug merchant, barters with God, reducing the sum of good people he must find in Sodom and Gomorrah from one hundred to ten, in order to save those cities from God's wrath).

This Old Testament tradition, enriching our insight into the personal character enjoyed by God and man, continued and deepens especially in the New Testament. Here Christ is revealed as person, as the son of God; here God is clearly the Father; and here, too, begins the fullest development of the doctrine of the Godhead as a Trinity who are persons, a doctrine confirmed and consolidated by the Council of Nicea.

PERSON AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY

While philosophy began as world-centered and worldoriented, Christianity began as person-centered and person¡ oriented, for if Christianity is anything, it is Christo-centric, Granted, this has been forgotten from time to time, but we have always been reminded of its fundamental truth when we say that we not only believe in him, but more biblically oriented, we believe on him.

Already in the sixth century A.D. we see that great transmitter of Greek thought to the Latin West, Boethius, giving

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us a definition of person as "an individual substance of a rational nature." Although expressed in the language of phi· losophy, the idea behind Boethius' definition of person be· trays perhaps more its Judaic-Christian heritage. In its incep· tion (and Christianity has never betrayed this Judaic-biblical legacy), Christianity was a community of persons, guided by the most personal trait of love for one another. It is this notion of love which pervades the first two commandments - the greatest of the commandments. Early Christians took these commandments seriously and scandalized orthodox Jewry by shedding the shackles .of deuterocanonical juridicalism and basking instead in the liberty of love.

But as Christianity encountered the Greek world of logos and sought to assimilate it in the Christian Logos, as Christi· anity made philosophy the handmaid of theology, as theology sometimes became mistaken for faith itself, Christianity si· multaneously became more and more concerned with its own institutionalization. Nonetheless, accompanying this concern was a continued concentration on the meaning and dignity of person. But this concern often manifested itself exclusively at the theoretical level, while all but ignoring the rights of per· sons at the practical level.

ST. THOMAS, GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

Moving quickly now to the Middle Ages, it will pay us to glance at the thought of St. Thomas. Here again we find a major effort to reconcile Greek philosophy with Christian theology. Here again we find an attempt to read into Greek philosophy a notion quite foreign to it-the notion of person.

And although Aquinas' contributions were positive and re· warding with respect to the development of a theology of person, his attempt to produce a Greco-Christian synthesis of personalism was never really successful. At best, it was a patch quilt; at worst, a contradiction.

In philosophy, Aquinas developed Aristotle's notion of the human soul to the point of demonstrating its immortality.

This was quickly hailed by philosophical dilettantes as a ra·

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tional proof for personal immortality. But those who so ex· ulted (and their number is legion) never realized that they were unconsciously reverting to the Platonic view of man which saw man the person as man the soul. For Aquinas, to prove that the soul was immortal was to prove only that an element of the person survived death, not that the person survived. Accordingly, for the Angelic doctor, it is not sim· ply the Platonic "body" that dies; it is man who dies, even though his soul lives on.

Consistent on this score, Aquinas held that we cannot call the souls in Purgatory persons, for these souls lack a completeness which can only be found in the whole person. Neither should we call persons "souls'~ as some pastors do in numbering the members in their parishes. The Church herself has not, on occasion, escaped Platonic thinking while using the language of Aristotle, when it asks that we say in our prayers, "May they rest in peace. May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace." The "they" reads as though the souls were persons.

But Aquinas could always fall back upon the biblicallyrooted theological doctrine of the resurrection of the deadof the whole man-of the person. In the last analysis, philosophy again proved inferior to Christianity in realizing the dignity and transcendent character of person, for philosophy never permitted the person to transcend death. Philosophy still continued to think dualistically, whereas Christianity with its Biblical heritage (in spite of dangerous philosophical flirtations) clung to the nepesh-to the unity of the whole man.

To some extent, Christian doctrine is still hampered by its retention of a Greek philosophical vocabulary inadequate to its task. One might go so far as to say its religion is hampered by its theology; its theology by its philosophy; and its philosophy by its excessively Greco-Roman modes of thought.

THE COMMON GOOD AND THE GOOD OF THE PERSON

A type of schizophrenia now developed in Christian cui· lures between the practical and theoretical implications of

•

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the dignity of the person. The treatment of the Jews in the times of Aquinas bears unholy witness to this split thinking, as does the reaction in Rome to Luther's theses, the Inquisition, the Treaty of Augsburg, the St. Bartholomew's massacre, etc. Clouding the meaning,- rights and dignity of the person at the practical level was an overriding concern for Christianity as an institution and its preservation almost as a body politic. The doctrine of the bonum commune nearly always relegated to a secondary role any concern for the bonum personae. Yet even in committing this error, Christianity tried to justify itself by appealing to the principles of personalism - by treating the institution, such as Church and State as persons, albeit ¡moral persons. In this, however, it failed to see that the primary analogate of person was in God and that this perfection of personality could be found intrinsically only in intelligent beings; when predicated of institutions, the expressed analogate of person was secondary and extrinsic.

Nonetheless, for a long time the secondary took precedence over the primary. Yet lest we become too critical, it should be cautioned that we must see these matters in their historical perspective and in their evolutionary development. We must remember that for a long period of time, men thought that the worth of an individual w&s derived from his affiliation with an institution and that accordingly the individual existed because the institution permitted him to exist. Of course, we must now realize that a changing relationship obtains, namely, that the institution exists precisely because it derives its worth from the persons seeking in the institution, and by means of this institution, their own personal good. (There is more than one application of the principle that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath).

THE PERSON AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Coming back again to the historical development of the notion of person, we find in modem times that its dignity abounds and its centrality is highlighted in the philosophy of Immanuel

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Kant. However, the reason for this stress on person can be more traced to Kant's Christian heritage than to his philosophical princi pies. He himself made explicit his intention to "deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." In so doing, he shows in the Critique of Practical Reason (which was his main purpose in writing the Critique of Pure Reason) that each man has an inherent dignity as a person, a moral autonomy which is violated when we regard him only as a means rather than see him as he is-an end. Yet in making man morally lofty, Kant at the same time made him metaphysically lowly. In the former case, we must recognize !he concomitant danger of pride and rationalism; in the latter, the danger of despair and nihilism. Kantian thought spread both seeds, and their roots in contemporary philosophy are directly traceable to him.

Hegel, in attempting to move man toward the collective, tu1011ed Christianity into a Christendom (if we may echo the charge of Kierkegaard). Thereby, Hegel, according to many of his commentators, carved the heart out of Christianity, for it was no longer person-centered, Christo-centric, but mind or reason-centered. The logos of Greek philosophy which became the Christian Logos, became Greek again and gnosticism reigned once more.

But abstract reason was not to prevail for long. Karl Marx forced it to the level of the concrete and, with others, led the way for secular society becoming more humanistic. Marxism itself rightly claimed to be a humanism, as earlier, the followers of Comtian positivism claimed. Indeed, both humanisms advanced the cause of the person without however being personalisms, for while they were concerned with the well-being of man, it was always at the expense of God. They failed to see that humanism and personalism, though related, are not necessarily identical, anymore than individual and per~on are necessarily identical. The former finds its completion, indeed, its ultimate raison d' etre, in the latter. (This is why we can claim, in the language of John Courtney Murray, that Christianity gave legitimate birth to twin humanisms; the

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one an eschatological humanism of the kind found in Augustine, the other, an incamational humanism of the kind found in St. Francis of Assisi. But within the Christian framework these humanisms were at once personalisms as well).

PERSONALISM IN CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT

The contemporary world, bearing the imprint of Vatican II, finds that its own interest and insights into 'the person were aided by the many recent concerns for the individual by secular society. Freud, for example, assisted this movement by helping to establish the doctor-patient relationship as that of an I-thou instead of an I-it relationship. Nietzsche caught an insight into the depths of the person with his declaration, "That which does not kill me will make me stronger." The contemporary Viennese logotherapist, Viktor Frankl, builds on this when in reviewing his experiences in the death camps of Dachau and Auschwitz saw that, "He who knows the reason why will always find the how." Even Jean-Paul Sartre is not without his contributions in distinguishing the world of l' en soi (objects) from le pour soi (subjects). So does Heidegger in distinguishing our relations with things ( Vorhandensein) as that of Vor-W eg-Sein, a "pre-occupation with" and our relationship with other men as that of Sorge or "concern for."

But although a host of twentieth-century thinkers have brought their thoughts to hear on an exposition of person, men such as Scheler, Buber and Brunner, probably the best known is Gabriel Marcel. Marcel is a convert to Catholicism, and while he disclaims that his philosophy is a Christian philosophy, he admits that his philosophy is open to revelation.

For Marcel, person is what is innermost in reality; it is at the root of all meaning. Perhaps one might even say it is the giver of meaning. Faith, for example, is always_ rooted in persons, for we believe that a thing is so only to the extent that we believe in the person who has related it to us. It is the person, who in bringing his testimony, his presence, rather than his presents, to a situation, makes that situation meaningful, be he the visitor to the sick patient, the lawyer to his

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client, the professor to his students, or the mother to her children. This is why Marcel is so insistent that the root of error in our times lies in the identification of being with having--of identifying a person with his functions-of making him someone on! y to the extent that he has something.

Marxism, for example, implicitly identifies being with hav¡ ing. Although it has rightly distinguished between the "haves" and the "have-nots", it has failed to see beyond its legitimate aspirations for humanism to the richer perspectives of a personalism. Its faith lies not iu humans, but only in humanity, not in the person, hut only in the collective. To a large extent the struggle of our times (and make no mistake, it is a strug¡ gle to the death) is that between the abstraction of Marxist humanism and the concretion of Christian personalism. A true personalism will incorporate what is valid in a mere humanism, be the latter Marxist, Sartrean or otherwise. Rather than have what is only a humanism fall prey to a reductionist error of naturalism, a true humanism will discover that its strength lies in its transcendence to a supernaturalism. This supernaturalism is not one which shuts out nature, hut is itself the immanent ground of nature, as seen by the visionary, Teilhard de Chardin.

As we review the progress of history, both sacred and profane, we realize that a philosophy of person has been slowly but steadily emerging. Its development at the theoretical and practical levels has been see-saw, each at times running ahead or behind of the other. Christianity, with its Judaic-hihlical heritage, provided the skeleton on which to build such a philosophy, but it often needed secular society to fill in the meat.

Secular society frequently "stole the ball" when Christianity fumbled on the concrete implications of freedom. Jefferson's and Lincoln's faith in the people often exceeded that of the Church hierarchy.

Vatican II was symptomatic of the see-saw movement, being both an effect of society's increasing concern for persons and a cause of gaining further insights into the meaning of persons. It is especially Pope John XXIII who must he given the

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palm here. Although it had long been recognized at the theoretical level that rights were primarily rooted in persons, the Augustinian dictum which governed the Church's practical activities was that error has no rights. Accordingly, those in error should be coerced to see the truth-as if this were real! y possible. Pope John forcefully pointed out that while it is true that error has no rights, it is also true that erroneous persons do have rights and they have these because they are persons. In fact, it is true that truth has no rights, for unless we are speaking metaphorically, tmth is not a person.

It is to the credit of Vatican II that we now witness positive steps being taken to recognize the dignity of the person at the concrete level; these were object lessons learned from secular society. A new theology of marriage is being studied, one that considers marriage as more sacramental and sacrosanct and less the means of employing biological warfare to populate the Christian community. We see the first. steps being taken to rewrite Canon Law from the viewpoint of favoring persons over institutions. We witness a radical rethinking among the members of religious orders as to their meaning, role and aspirations, and who, as individual persons, participate simultaneously in the life of the order, the Church anJ civil society. We see race prejudices being cast aside, no longer accusing the Jews of Deicide or describing them in insulting adjectives in the breviaries of priests. We see greater stress on freedom of conscience and a new understanding of the meaning of obedience and authority. We once again realize that man is more than the zoon logon echon (the animal that has reason) of Aristotle; that he is also the "free man" of St. Paul.

SoME coNCLUSIONS Although we must draw to a close, we would be remiss in our obligations to the concrete demands of a personalism if we did not suggest some further practical implications of personalism for our lives. What are some of these demands?

Unfortunately, space limitations prohibit us from listing more than a few.

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l) We must always see the other as a whole. For people in love, the body of the other is never an "it" but part of the thou. This other is always a subject, and even in its ex¡ teriority, points to the person as its principle of interiority.

2) The world is for the person, not the person for it. His role is to personalize the world, which is the same as to say that this role is to transform the world-to sanctify it.

3) Our lives must express a great tolerance and a greater respeci for freedom. This means that our attitude toward error must change from a negative one based on fear, to a positive one which uses error as a step in our ascendancy to truth.

4) We must continue to explore the non-discursive knowledge by connaturality as another means toward truth. This is a knowledge which comes through love, which instead of being unjustly accused of blindness, really opens up perspectives unfathomable to the non-lover. We must realize we can never love all people equally, for that would be the height of injustice; but we can and we must love them differently.

5) We must realize that participation in truth is not abstract but personal and hence always involves a commitment; that especially for the Christian, the truth is he who said, "I am the Truth."

6) That because we are persons, we must create our own world-our own values. This means that properly qualified, the only truly Christian morality is a situ_ational ethics.

7) We must work to eliminate the sources of estrangement-of alienation-which continually threaten to displace and to depersonalize man.

8) We must expect and welcome the trends toward deinstitutionalization in the Church today so that the Mystical Body can better reveal itself as made up of persons, not bureaus. As the Swiss theologian, Hans Kung, says, "It is noteworthy that, although the conciliar text describes the Church here as the 'entire body' or 'congregation' of the faithful in the old traditional and clerical fashion, the Spirit is not said to live in a kind of abstract Church as such but in

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the individual Christian."

In this respect, we must not be afraid of progress toward becoming more mature in our lives as Christian-more personally responsible-more personally committed. We must realize that as intellectuals coming of age, we must at the same time become both more critical-minded and charitablehearted.

9) In our quest for perfection as persons, we must seek unity. But we must remember that true unity of the person lies in com-unity-in community.

There were rumors in 1964 during the fourth centenary celebration of the birth of Galileo Galilei that the pope would issue a document offi. cially exonerating him and admitting the Church's error in calling his ideas heretical.

But was such a move really feasible? Has his doctrine to this day been fully accepted hy all quarters of the Church? Does not the magis· terium still favor the Ptole· maic notion of scholasticism that man is the center of the The author explores the universe? It certainly would effect contemporary seem so, for from this per· philosophy and psychology spective alone can all things seem absolutely static and is having on our theology unchangeable. Motion in the of grace. microcosm is much too rapid for man to perceive, while + that in the macrocosm seems much too slow. Only in the CHARLES R. MEYER world of man's abstractions can there be a universe with· + out movement.

Since apparently it has not yet even fully accepted the ideas of Galileo, naturally it is impossible for the Church to enter into a meaningful dialogue with today's intellectuals. They are totally committed followers of Einstein and Darwin. They see the very substance of the universe to be motion and proc· ess. They hold the truth relating to it to be contextual and not immutably absolute.

DOCTRINAL SURVEY V

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While the neo-scholastics were still bogged down in the distortion of reality introduced by an Aristotelian-Ptolemaic law of parallax, Teilhard de Chardin leaped across the infinite distance separating man from God. In accordance with the Einsteinian principle of relativity he began to look at creation from the clearer and more absolute perspective of God. He saw the God of revelation as being not merely transcendent, but also immanent in his creation. Teilhard's methodology avoided the scholastic negations and extrapolations from the created universe in attempting to describe God. Teilhard recalled theologians to their essential task of interpreting the universe from the standpoint of God's revelation in the light of contemporary scientific thought, and not from the philosophizing of Aristotle and Ptolemy. He found a new approach to the spiritual, strangely enough, through the paradox of applying the laws of dialectical materialism.

THE LAWS OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

The law of union of opposites is basic to motion and life.

The positive charge attracts the negative and the negative the positive. Organisms become more alive as they grow in their ability to support within themselves contradictory elements.

The law of transition from quantity to quality underlies the ability of matter to modify itself and give rise to new forms in order to preserve the old. Water heated up to the boiling point merely grows hotter. But at lOO'C. it changes form. Individuals in a species tend to multiply to the point where they can no longer be sustained by their environment. Then new species emerge. These two laws of dialectical materialism found the Teilhardian notion of complexification. All beings seek union, for it is only in union that preservation of identity becomes possible. This phenomenon becomes most apparent at the self-conscious level of existence. It is only in contact with others that one can really become a person and thus be uniquely distinct from others. The closer the relationship of one person with another, the more each becomes aware of his distinctive identity. It is the Thou that establishes and

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defines the I. The possibility of modification in the I varies in direct proportion to the number of contacts with the Thou.

But so does the awareness of the I as I. The law of negation of negation proposes that every modification of a being will eventually itself be modified. Thus the seed is negated in the plant and the plant in the fruit. It is the law of negation that gives rise to Teilhard's most fundamental idea, that of process. The whole universe is in process, and it is the function of man to discern the meaning and direction of that process. The philosophy of process is the only one that can strike a respondent chord in modern man acculturated as he is to the world of science. Yet this philosophy is diametrically opposed to Hellenic thought-forms, those in which our theology has thus far developed. Theology has been a kind of logical game played with such pieces as substance and accident, natural and supernatural, God and man, sin and grace, end and means. All the problems it sought to solve arose because of the values given to the chessmen and the limitation of their movement in accordance with their "essences" and "ends". But Teilhard has indicated. that in real life, in the real universe, these are actually non-problems. He has taken away the Aristotelian chess-board.

TEILHARD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

The implications of Teilhardianism for the theology of the incarnation and grace have been developed in a thought-provoking way by Eulalio R. Baltazar in his Teilhard and the ¡ SuperTUltural (Baltimore, Helicon, 1966). Before we can come to any synthetic understanding of the new personalist approach to grace, it will be necessary to review a few of Baltazar's main points, for I believe that it is in Teilhardianism as well as in existentialism and psychology that the new approach to grace and the supernatural will discover its philosophical underpinnings.

THE WORLD VIEW OF ARISTOTLE

The world of Aristotle was one of being and not becoming.

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For him a being in flux would be entirely unknowable. The termini a quo and ad quem alone would provide the polarities to make any process intelligible. All that is in the world must be seen as substantially complete and finished. If it is possible to have substantial change, this has to occur through a kind of magical substitution of one essence for another. The only free-flowing change that his system envisages is accidental. Otherwise what is would be undone, and reality would be unthinkable. It is essence that gives a being identity and intelligibility. The problem of the one and the many is re· solved by concentrating on essence and ignoring the individual who is constituted as such in an almost accidental way.

It is essence that gives to the individual complete self-suffi· ciency. Each nature has an end toward which it tends, and it contains within itself the means or at least the right to the means which it needs to reach that end. Aristotle's accent is on mechanics and justice, for he conceived each individual as a self-contained mechanism essentially able to achieve its purpose, or if it is conscious, at least the right to acquire from others what it needs in pursuit of its goal. Man is seen as a complex of tendencies and desires which demand fulfillment in accordance with right reason. His virtues are habitual ways of responding to his needs and have to be completely in tune with his nature. Any defect or excess in response is a vice.

It is unthinkable that there should be in nature itself a tend· ency or demand for that which exceeds nature, for that would he a vice not of man himself but of his maker. Since nature is an absolute, so is truth, for it is nothing more than the conformity of the mind to the reality of nature. Truth is at· tained most perfectly when the mind focuses upon essences and natures. The individual is something of a paradox, espe· cially if it is personal, because as such individuality and es· pecially personality is not totally comprehensible. The individual can be completely understood only as one possessing a nature. Personality can be thought of only as a kind of essence. It can be related to substance only as a kind of accident. So too personal qualities like sex or grace must be rele-

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gated to the status of accidents. Grace must be a total mystery and absolutely supernatural since it ordains a person toward an end that totally exceeds his nature. Otherwise its excessive¡ ness would be a vice. The semantics of the system allow only for a literal or metaphorical understanding of words in rela¡ lion to essences. Such statements as that of Tertullian that man is naturally Christian, or that of Anselm and Augustine that one has first to believe before he can understand cannot be taken literally. They would contradict the main presuppo¡ sition of the system: man cannot be substantially completed by an accident.

THE WORLD VIEW OF TEILHARD

The Church has always stated that its teachings are not eternally wedded to Aristotelian philosophy. They are viable in the ambit of any realistic philosophy. Now the gauntlet is down. For Teilhardianism is a totally new philosophyone indeed which seems better to correspond not only to the reality evidenced by modern science but with the data and language of the Bible itself. Yet it has already lost the first round. For many years the writings of Teilhard were suppressed hy the magisterium because they seemed to do away with the supernatural.

Teilhardianism in its methodology is radically opposed to scholasticism. It starts not from the world of man's abstractions, from the world of essences and substances, but from God and his revelation. It is fides quaerens intellectum. God is the only supernatural being. Baltazar does not mention it, but since the tendency among theologians today in speaking of grace is to understand the uncreated Grace, i.e. God himself present outside of himself in a unique way, grace as identified with God is then also ipso facto supernatural.

Creation in its different levels is an extension of God's love in various degrees. It is essentially a process of union. There is no question of pantheism, of course. Creation is not identical with God. It is in union with him. And it is precisely in union that identity and distinction are established. Process is a kind of becoming, a growth from within resulting in an

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ever mounting complexification or establishment of separate identities. Process therefore requires union. The seed needs the ground. The union of the seed and the ground is precisely the process. If the whole universe is in process, it too needs a ground. And the ground of being is God. The more the seed is united with the ground, the more it differentiates and expands itself. The more beings in the universe are united with God, the more distinct and perfect they become.

Now a process has a beginning and an end and an indefinite number of stages in between. The beginning may be designated as Alpha and the end as Omega. It is only at the end that there is achieved an absoluteness, a completely finished product. It is from Omega only that the process can be completely understood and denominated. It is only if I see the future apple that I know a seed is an apple seed or the young tree an apple tree. It is only the Church as custodian of God's revelation that can provide the ultimate answer to the process one sees in the universe. It is only in and through belief in God's word about the future that the present can be a structure of hope and not despair. It is only the self-inthe-future, projected there through faith, that can attain the absolute. If truth is conformity to reality, then it must present reality as it is-as in process. This does not mean that all truth is 1¡elative. Absolute truth is achievable where absolute reality exists-at the end of the process. The Omega is the only valid principle of intelligibility of the absolute. Truth about intermediate stages of the process cannot he, like the process itself, completely immutable. It is only a grasping of the reality of a particular stage in the process. It is unchanging not in regard to content, hut in regard to direction; It is valid only within the ordinary scale of everyday life, where forms seem to be permanent.

The semantics of process allow for only a provisional literal statement in relation to intermediate stages of the operation. Completely literal statements can he made only about the Omega. Thus in the semantics of process the statement that the acorn is an oak is neither literal nor metaphorical.

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It is 'symbolic. By this is meant that prior stages in a process derive their meaning from higher ones. A symbol is a halfrevealing, half-concealing sign. Only it can express process perfectly. It alone can set forth the paradoxical nature of the present as half-present and half-absent, half-complete and half-to-be-made, and thus come to full grips with reality.

The central fact about the world of man is that it is not one ¡o{ natures, substances, accidents and ends. It is a world of persons. Man's essence is not an absolute. Man like all reality is in process. He is partly finished, partly to be made.

The basic dynamism of human process, like that of all process, is uriion. But in man union is not just the affinity of being for being. It is not physical union. It is love. And love is an interpersonal relationship. Nature does not love; only persons love. Love is based precisely on the subjectivity and uniqueness of individuals; it can in no sense be universal and objective; it is not an abstraction. As being-toward-another, finding its identity only in union with others, the "I" is intrinsically ordered toward love. Its end and goal is necessarily love. And thus it is not self-sufficent, because love requires two. But the "I"¡ is not created in vain; it can find its self-sufficiency in union with the Thou. And Thous are available at every stage of .the process. But complete self-sufficiency for the "1", of course, .can be had only in union with the Thou-Omega.

When there is question of love, there can be no exigency or demand for the Thou. Exigency and demand are words that belong to the semantics of justice, to the world not of persons, but of natures. For love the Thou must call freely and the "I" must respond freely. As Baltazar says: "If there is any exigency at all it is that there be no exigency, for this would be the death of love. Gratuity is of the essence of the relationship of love" (p. 244). Woman is totally structured for man. Scholastic philosophy has to consider sex as an accident. Otherwise it would be confronted with the anomaly of having to say that all women must have husbands. They would sin: against their nature by not marrying. In Hebrew thought masculinity and femininity constitute what a man or woman

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is. Woman is made for man. That is what the book of Genesis reveals when it states that Eve was taken from Adam, and a wife must cleave to her husband. But as St. Paul says, the union of man and woman symbolizes a greater mystery-the union of man with God. So as Eve came from Adam, man came from God. He is structured for God and union with him.

The covenant of grace in the Old Testament is proclaimed under the symbol of marriage. God is the masculine element.

Traditionally it was the man who initiated and arranged a marriage. Israel is the feminine element. It was the woman who responded in fidelity and love. But despite all structuring, the covenant was not considered valid from the beginning unless it was undertaken by both parties in complete freedom.

Structure is only the condition, not in any sense an exigetive cause of the relationship.

Because in the scholastic system that which was the¡ very heart and essence of human existence according to God's revelation-union with God in love--was relegated to the category of accident, it was necessary to postulate two different orders: one natural--creation, the other supernatural-redemption. Redemption at times came to be viewed as a kind of divine after-thought produced by God's goodness to rectify the mess man made by his initial rejection of that which was only accidental to his nature, union with God. Teilhard sees only one order: that of God's love. I would suspect that he might have conceived of that love as being differentiated by different phases of the process that is creation. The kind of love God offers man is precisely personal love, a familial kind of love, a love of friendship. It is that type of love which "pares aut invenit aut facit." Man is offered the possibility of loving God not merely as his creature, but in some astounding way as his equal, as a member of the divine family. This divine love must be totally and absolutely gratuitious. In no way does it correspond to man's nature as such but to his personhood alone. And man's personhood cannot today be conceived merely as a function of his nature rendering him an individual. It has to be seen as the uniqueness of his very

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being whereby he is an image of God, whereby he is most like God himself. In his personhood man is free like God. Natures cannot be free. In his personhood man is in a sense a creator, like God. Natures do not create. They merely cause.

According to Teilhard then in no sense can we say that grace was created for man. (St. Thomas would not say that either; he says man is created in grace). Just the opposite is true. First in God's intention is the total grace that is Christ, the Omega-then man. Karl Hahner puts it most beautifully when he says (knowingly or unknowingly in perfect accord with the third law of dialectical materialism!) : Man can be defined as what arises when the expressiveness of God, his Word, manifests himself as an instrument of love in the void of nothingness outside the divinity. It is the divine Word that has been reduced, and so can be truly called the Word made man. This negation, this contraction of God is man: that¡ is, the Son of Man and all men, who, in short, exist because the Son of Man carne. to exist. When God sought to become something other than God, man arose" ("Zur Theologie der Menschwerdung," Schriften, IV, p. 150). Thus the divine Word truly ¡mediates creation. All creation exists because of and through him. He in his humanity is the Omega that defines the process of which God is the ground. This is so clearly the Pauline message that it is amazing that it should have been so long somewhat neglected in theology.

For the Israelite creation itself was looked upon as the first in a long series of God's saving acts. It was a kind of cryptoManicheeism that arose from the dualism of the natural and supernatural orders that led theologians to downgrade the secular as not pertaining to salvation. For Teilhard the whole process is sacred, because it has been initiated in and tends toward Christ. It was the nature of Christ, of God's grace par excellence, that determined the structuring of man-not viceversa. God does not bestow grace, and what it leads to, the beatific vision, because man is intrinsically structured to receive it; rather he equips man with an intrinsic ordination to grace and the beatific vision because of Christ, because of

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grace. Thus from the viewpoint of man grace is gratuitous by a twofold title: that of creation, which is the free act of God, and that of love of friendship, which as we saw of its very essence has to be free.

EXISTENTIALISM AND PERSONALIST THEORY

Baltazar's organization of the reflections of Teilhard upon scripture and science provides ample basis for a skeletal superstructure of a personalist theory of grace. What has to be safe-guarded, of course, was what medieval theology called the "supernaturality" of the whole operation. Grace must be seen as the very special work of God and as absolutely gratuitous. Baltazar has shown how these essential notions can be maintained in a Teilhardian setting. But it is to the existen¡ tialist philosophers of our time, particularly to Heidegger and Sartre, as well as to modern psychology that we must look for a further elaboration of personalist theory. The skeleton must be enfleshed. If grace is God's love, if it is interpersonal love, then it must be symbolized by human love. And the psychologists and existentialists of today have devoted themselves fully to an analysis of human love.

THE BEING OF MAN

Existentialist philosophy sees the being of man as Dasein.

Man's being is never fully possessed; it is always there out in front of him, forever to be achieved. It is a to-be-made. It is never complete, finished, neatly packaged. Yet as human history developed there has always been a tendency to put man in a box. As a result human life has crystallized into protest.

The Reformation first formalized protest as a philosophy of life. Scholasticism viewed man as a kind of machine, a ¡structure, a nature. What autonomy man had was limited by canon and civil law. So Luther complained that the Church had substituted scholastic philosophy for the Gospel and canon law for love. He organized the revolt against the formalism of Catholic teaching; he tried to get man out of the box. Emphasis was placed upon the personhood of man. Luther saw

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every human being as a completely autonomous individual responsible directly to God. During the industrial revolution philosophy lodged another protest. Machines began replacing men as better instruments in getting work done. Machines came to be regarded as su · peri or to men. As a result of this insult to human dignity, the personalists retrenched and began to place stress upon other human values. After all, only human beings could really think, create, direct, guide and lead.

Then came the cybernetic revolution. Human values, the very ones salvaged during the industrial revolution, were again imperiled. Computers could outstrip man in thinking, directing and guiding. A new threat was posed. In the future even man's creativity might be overshadowed by the prowess of electronic gadgets. Once again there was a retrenchment, this time to the alogical aspects of human existence, to expe· rience, to the psychedelic, to consciousness as such. Here human values might still be preserved. Still doubt reigned. Phi· losophers were concerned with the question raised by a works like that of A. Danto ("Of Consciousness in Machines," in Dimensions of Mind, ed. by S. Hook, New York Univ. Press, 1960). If machines could be developed that could program themselves, develop as the human brain develops, would it be possible to deny them consciousness? Attention· shifted from the intellectual to the volitional. Freedom began to emerge as man's highest and most distinctive quality. Man can protest. As long as he can protest he is free. And his free· dom is most distinctive! y his own.

Dasein implies the power to transcend. And transcendence is achieved by a continual investment of freedom. Freedom is not to be understood in the sense of Molina as the power to act or not act, to do this or that, when all things are readied for action. It is to be taken in a much broader and deeper sense. It is simply man's ability to dispose of himself. Man fulfills himself through his projects, by committing himself, either totally or partially, to different objectives or goals.

His personality is perceived by others as the sum total of all

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his projects known to them. His individuality is marked by others in accordance with the ways he has made use of his freedom. He becomes a sign of the dispositions he has made of himself, of the ways in which he has chosen to exist.

The basic truth about man in his freedom is that he continually desires to be other than himself. His objective existence can become apparent to him only through confirmation by another. And precisely it is only the freedom of the other that can guarantee and objectify an individual's own freedom and human existence.

Though freedom is man's greatest possession, to certify his own objective existence as well as its capabilities he must surrender it. This is the great truth exploited by Dostoyevsky in the Brothers Karamazov. It has held some fascination for existentialist thinkers ever since. The true goal of a lover's enterprise must be the alienation of his freedom. Complete self-fulfillment can be attained only in love. And love is im¡ possible without the total investment of that which a man values the most, that which founds his very selfbood and subjectivity-his freedom. It is like the man who must prove his masculinity. Masculinity can ultimately be proven only by the alienation or giving to another that which constitutes one a male. As Sartre says, then, to love is really to want to be loved. Love of the other is the ultimate recognition and vali¡ dation not only of one's objective existence as a human, but of one's selfbood and freedom.

LovE The process of love begins with seduction. It must be un¡ derstood from the start that by seduction is not necessarily meant something false or evil, but simply a call to love. The other is first perceived as a look. The one who wants to love must risk being seen. It is only in the capture of his being by the other that the objectivity of the lover can be confirmed.

He realizes that he must present himself to the prospective beloved as a fascinating object. In some way he must appear as possessing the fulness of being. He wants to present the world to his beloved. He displays his power. He has money,

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posl!lon, connections, intelligence and elan. He must be seen as unsurpassable. His own self-concept is influenced by his project. As Heidegger says, he becomes what he says, what he proclaims to his beloved. He projects himself into the posi ¡ tion of the other and sees that from. that standpoint it is true.

He is what he says. What he says is linked to his subjectivity, but still too indirectly. The lover's presentation of himself as an object, albeit a fascinating and valuable object, can as such produce in the other only a desire to possess an object -not as yet a person. The beloved may still be ambivalent about his personhood. What the lover wants is that the beloved possess his very subjectivity, and that he in turn possess that of the beloved. He must overcome the other's subjectivity. It is only in that way that he can validate his own personality in relation to the objective data already in possession of the beloved. To do this the lover must eventually, as Sartre says, take as his project being loved. Love is really a demand to be loved. This is the only posture that can com. pletely win over the other's subjectivity. The other's most precious selfhood, his freedom itself, must he alienated. But freedom can never be alienated before another perceived merely as object. The lover wants to assimilate the other pre¡ cisely as looking at him. Such an engagement alone will validate the lover's being looked at precisely as a. lover, and consequently the lover's person precisely as person. As Sartre says, the lover must always assay to capture a consciousness.

Yet he must do that without crushing the subjectivity of the other. The enslavement of the beloved kills love. Love is cheapened by demands in justice, or the use of violence or deceit. When the lover truly loves he frees his seduction from all lcinds of instrumentality. Once he has projected his pure subjectivity the instruments of his projection must no longer influence the beloved. The lover then can no longer be looked upon as ugly, small or cowardly. His defects are swallowed up in the overpowering force of his loving personhood, in the totality of his commitment to the other. If the beloved responds and commits his subjectivity, the lover achieves the

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;elf-transcendence he desires. The lover is fulfilled· in the depths of his being, for he has been conscious all along that he is a being-for-others. But paradoxically enough, the more he is loved, the more the lover loses his being, the more he is thrown back on his power to be, and the more responsive he becomes to his concept of himself as Dasein, as a to-bemade. To put it in scholastic terms, when love is complete and total self-giving, it brings out the lovers' potentialities.

So love is essentially an invitation to further ecstasies.

The person truly in love is aware of his need to fulfill the expectations of his beloved. He wants really to be what the other sees him to be. He has to measure up to the image that has been projected upon him. It is this projection that trans· forms a beloved in the eyes of a lover. Yet it must let him be what he actually is. Here is the paradox of love. The beloved is invited to. do more than surrender his subjectivity.

The commitment of subjectivity is at the same time the all and still the not-enough of love. The beloved expects more from the lover. But love cannot be conditioned upon the ful· fillment of these expectations. Otherwise it would become instrumentaL The beloved must be loved precisely for what he is. So it is that true love can exist even when there· is no external manifestation of it, even though there is no empiri· cal evidence of change either in the lover or in the beloved.

But the image the lover has projected upon the beloved is an incentive, an impetus toward further self-transcendence of the beloved. It is the expectation, the invitation of the lover for the beloved to be what love sees him to be. But if this expectation is not fulfilled in the life of the beloved, love is not necessarily denied. Only a complete negation of the commit· ment of subjectivity can destroy love. Love can never do violence. The beloved must be transformed by leaving him be what he is in himself, but inviting him to be what he is in the eyes of the lover.

NEw FaEEDOM

Though love requires an alienation of freedom, at the same time it confers a new kind of freedom, a shared freedom, a

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freedom which involves that of the lover with that of the beloved. The sacrifice of freedom which the lover makes in regard· to the beloved is rewarded by the enlargement of the possibilities of his own Dasein as precisely involved with that of the other in whom his freedom is at one and the same time surrendered, validated, strengthened and augmented in a new way. So it is that through love, and through love alone one truly achieves a state of being at one and the same time fully oneself and a state of being other to oneself.

LOVE AS IMAGE·PROJECTION

In the psychology of C. G. Jung the transformation of the beloved in the eyes of the lover takes place through a projection of an archetypal image, the animus or anima. These images belong to the collective unconscious, and are reflected in each individual. The animus is the dominant image in the mak and the anima in the female, but each possesses both.

In the process of falling in love (as described by one of lung's disciples, J. Goldbrunner, Realization: The Psychology of Pastoral Care, Notre Dame University Press, 1966, p. Ill :ff.) the male projects his anima upon his beloved. She be· comes in reality his ideal woman. He is blinded to her faults and defects, even when pointed out, for example, by his con· cerned parents. All he sees is the concretization of his anima.

All he wants is to unite it again to himself.

APPLICATION TO GRACE

I am sure by now the reader has many times applied thio description of the love-process to the case in point-the ques· lion of grace. I shall highlight just a few areas. The ultimate validation of man in his being must come from God, and it is found concretely in Christ. . The Good News about Christ is God's seduction. Through God's transient special presence and operation in the human heart Christ comes to be seen as fascinating, as possessing the fulness of being, as conqueror of the world, and finally as a divine Person who in union with the Father simply loves man and wants to he loved. The

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response in faith and love on the part of the human being is brought about by the projection upon him of the image of the Son of Man. But, of course, God's projections are not merely psychological archetypes or idealizations. Whatever God does is creative of being.

In believing and loving man limits himself; he alienates himself. But in so doing he also associates himself with the free act of God; he comes to share in a sense the divine freedom. Man and God now share the same project-Christ. Teilhard's process of Christogenesis becomes now a part of the believer's conscious life, and he has a responsible share in it. In the semantics of process, the beloved of God is now really and consciously a symbol of Christ. This is what the liturgy communicates to him, when in the various rites he identifies !_iimself with Christ by acting out again and again the redemptive mysteries. This is what he should understand when his gifts of food and drink representing himself are transformed into the body and blood of Christ at Mass. This is what he perceives when he seeks identity with Christ at communion by introjecting the sacred elements. This is what the Fathers of the Church proclaimed when, e.g. Ignatius of Antioch called believers Christophoroi or Clement of Alexandria wrote that the Christian has within himself the morphe

tou logou.

In the personalist dimension, then, grace can simply be described from the standpoint of God as his loving presence (transitory in the seduction stage; permanent after the full commitment); from the standpoint of man it can he described as the transformation of his person by God's loving presence' (or of his acts only in the seduction process). Such a transformation of the person can be aptly called divinization, first because it involves a total investment of freedom in God's free act and consequent identification with God in the project of his freedom, and secondly because it presupposes the creative projection of the Logos upon God's beloved, so that he becomes a conscious symbol of the Omega. This transformation can also be seen as a power vectored toward or as an

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invitation to further ecstasies. The individual is moved to communicate his faith and love by forming community with others. He has an incentive for prayer; he is drawn to dramatize his love in the liturgy, etc.

When grace is described as God's loving presence what is meant, of course, is a special kind of both presence and love.

God's presence is precisely a loving presence in the full sense, and hence stricti y personal. The love God expresses in his presence is of the same order as that which in the Trinity the Father has for the Son. It is truly personal, and not just that general loving concern which God would be required to have for his creatures. So it is completely gratuitious.

Gon's LOVING PRESENCE A special difficulty occurs in describing grace primarily as a presence of God. It seems that such a presence should be in some way empirical. Karl Rahner, still adhering to scho路 lastic. terminology, maintains that the "supernatural" is some路 how empirical. But he does not elaborate this point. More cogent is the testimony of legions of believers. They are in no way conscious of the presence of God in any way in their lives.

Perhaps the reason for this difficulty is that we expect God to be present in a way that he does not choose--as for m路 stance my desk is present to me now.

Existential philosophy points out that presence cannot be defined or delineated in terms of the parameters of space and time. A person standing right next to me might be considered to be present in an empirical way. But if I am un路 conscious he is in no real sense present to me. If presence is somehow made a function of the present moment, then it is nothing. As Sartre says, the present does not exist. It makes itself present precisely by fleeing. By the time I have thought of it,. the present is already past.

Presence may be in some way related to space and time, but it is primarily a category of consciousness. By my awareness of them, I make t11ings present to myself-or, to speak GRACE AS

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more accurate! y, I make myself present to them. Thus it is by my faith and my love directed toward God that I experience myself in his loving presence. Ill-defined though the experience may be for most men, it is nonetheless real.

CoMMUNITARIAN ASPECTS OF GRACE

Thus far I have been describing grace in terms of indi¡ viduals. I suppose that is what a personalist view should do.

But the fact is that individuals with common interests . tend to form communities or corporate persons. In the Old Testa¡ ment, as a matter of fact, it was really only the corporate person, the people of Israel, and not individuals as such, that counted. Yahweh was present to his people. The nation was the spouse of Yahweh. To have a part in the saving acts of Yahweh, it was only necessary to belong to this people. In the New Testament too grace has communitarian aspects. The first and foremost of the empirical ecstasies of faith in and love of God is the Church, the people of God. It is this Church that is the most evident witness of God's presence in the world. In the community failures of individuals to respond fully to the invitation to exhibit further ecstasies implied in their transformation by God's presence are sublimated in the perfection of the faith and love that pervades the whole body of believers. It is only in the body at large, in the whole community, that one finds perfect transformation, and relative to the stage of its evolution and development, perfect achievement of the common project of God and man, the representation or symbolization of Christ in the here and now.

CoNCLUSION

The world today is not conceived of as made up of essentially immutable substances, some of which are crowned with divinely injected supernatural accidents. Today's world is one of persons seeking love and the verification of their human existence that only love can give. If there is a personal God who through his love can validate human existence, he and not man must be the epicenter of the universe. It is from his

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vantage point and not man's that meaning for today's world must emanate. From a contemporary examination of the reve路 lation of that God in his word to his people as well as in scientific research, a new-style theology is aborning. And maybe it is the kind of theology that the world today is look路 ing for.

But the Galileo case is not closed. It is still being fought in our time. What a tragedy for such a theology if responsible persons in the Church take seriously the pun of the peripa路 tetic Tommaso Caccini, O.P.: "Viri Galilaei, quid statis ad路 spicientes in caelum ?"

Each fall Charles Schulz leads his readers out into the pumpkin patch with Linus.

There he awaits with unbounded confidence the arrival of the Great Pumpkin.

Chri:5lian

Yet, no matter how "sincere"

fiope and lhe

Linus' patch may be, there is never any real doubt that this wait is simply another moment in a long, hopeless cause. On November 1, he is driven to that weakest refuge of all when the only retort he can muster is: "Wait 'till next How can man live year." Such a warning is hardly likely to upset the "as if" there were amused spectators who are hope, when his greaiest willing to do just that, perachievement will fectly confident that the outevemually be negated come will be exactly the same br deaih? next fall.

This annual tribute to sin+ cerity unrequited recalls, at least vaguely, elements of the DANIEL P. O'CONNELL Christian hope for the Parousia. In one form, that hope is simply a proclamation that the Lord will indeed come again accompanied by a willingness to await that coming through repeated disappointments.

Waiting and believing are the principal requirements. Christian hope has another version, one which sacrifices nothing of longing or belief hut one which accords human effort a genuine place in shaping and, perhaps, hastening¡ that Parousia. Thus, the work of men becomes an important collabora-

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tion in the redemptive task, au extension to other men and to all creation of the victory of Christ.

As simple as this might seem, the task of man's collaboration in redemption is currently subject to an intensive review.

Some of these questions are posed precisely and carefully; others find their only expression in a malaise which encircles persons and whole societies. At the root of the problem 'there is deep questioning of the point of human labor, its capacity to effect any lasting and truly valuable results, and a profound suspicion that the type of work circumstances required of men may contribute more to their destruction than to the redemption of what is truly human. It may be that we can find clear guidance on these points in the Scriptures or in some of the recent instructions of Church teaching with their admirable call to labor directed toward the development of this· world. It is to some of these principles and the ·further questions they raise that we now turn our attention ..

A DIVIDED SUMMONS Among the most urgent demands that the Lord made of those who would be his disciples was a willingness to lay aside all earthly things for the sake of the Kingdom. Nothing was too great, nothing too valuable in contrast with the surpassing treasure of the Kingdom (Lk 14:26f, 33). In return, the disciple shares the Lord's promise to Peter that his re· ward would far exceed anything he had left behind to follow Jesus: A hundredfold now and life everlasting (Mt 19:29).

All this appears intelligible enough until we consider another Gospel theme, that of the use to be made of God's gifts in the service of the Kingdom. The parable of the talents Mt 25:15-30; in another context, Lk 19:12-17) issues grave warnings to those who squander or hide away the things given them in trust, things given for the growth of the Kingdom.

In view of the telling seriousness with which the .Lord demands that his gifts be taken, it seems that it will be legitimate to pose questions on the development of human talent and its place in the collaborative process of redemption.

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The encyclical Populorum Progressio has taken a very affirmative position on the responsibility to develop both national and personal capacities so that, by slow steps, men may make progress toward the transcendent humanism of Christ. There is, the Pope admits, an ambivalence in any development because greed and loss of valuable traditions may accompany the very progress which is so earnestly desired and is the right of all. Nevertheless, so important is the duty to develop human capacities that the Pope insists it is a responsibility as urgent as the invitation to salvation ( n. 14-16).

To this great progress of development the Church lends her global vision of man and the human race. The Holy Father, therefore, can speak of a great solidarity among all the generations of mankind which he likens to an over-rising tide approaching the shores of eternity.

Bearing in mind the imperative of the Gospel that men set aside all things for the sake of the Kingdom, it is all the more urgent that some principles be evolved to meet those questions which divide to its very depths the heart of any man who would undertake the task of personal and world development. First among all these is the fundamental question: why develop at all? Is development simply like the great mountain which is to be scaled merely because it is there, or are there deeper motives? What is the great eschaton toward which this tide of the generations is rising? Can it be described any more adequately than to assert, as in the case of Linus' Great Pumpkin, that it will surely come? Can its coming be described concretely enough to make its advent an attractive object of hope for modern man?

Further questions arise merely because part of any intelligent development requires a laying aside of elements which, though they may be good and valuable in themselves, are, nonetheless, excess baggage for the task at hand. It is one of the deep mysteries of human existence that a decision, once taken, often embraces many future choices in a way that gradually closes off ever more of the possible routes for personal development. Since this is the case, by what principles

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does one decide which talents he is called to develop? Is there wide open freedom for man to choose his way of ex· tending God's dominion over creation? Is the correctness found simply in the freedom to choose and the making of a wise choice?

THE CONTEXT OF CHOICE

Intelligent choice also demands that a man have some vi· sion of that into which he and the rising tide of generations is developing. Here, there is great ambivalence. Experience makes it most difficult to see any glorious growth toward the shores of eternity when the very best that man is able to accomplish in himself, or in a culture, seems doomed to death.

Perhaps no sight is more pitiable than the gradual destruc· tion of a great culture or personality through prolonged de· cline and eventual death. Yet, if man is to be moved to contribute his energies to the work of personal growth or to the development of human society, it is certainly legitimate to expect that what he is doing be not merely a temporizing with death and total oblivion, but an enduring achievement.

This is to suggest that there is an ambivalence in development far deeper than the possible loss of cultural values and the arousal of greed of which the Pope writes. The ambivalence runs as deep as the question of the goal of human existence · itself.

Attempting to share the anguish as well as the joy of contemporary civilization, the Fathers of Vatican Council II turned an attentive ear to just this sort of questioning in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes). Paragraphs n. 4-10 touch upon these questions at least sketchily. Toward what goal should man direct the societies whose laws he is beginning to grasp ( n.

4)? Paragraph n. 10 raises some of the most fundamental questions concerning the nature of man and his destiny upon which the Council Fathers propose to shed some of the light of the Gospel. They remind their readers of the solidarity of the human race in nature and the redemption of Christ (n.

29, 32), that only in God does the heart of man find its true

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fulfillment (n. 21), especially in the Lord who is the focal point of history (n. 45). To the modern world the Council Fathers proffer the great hope of a new order which is already in the process of formation. That new order which will per¡ fect the dialogue of love begun between God and the person at his creation and will reach its fullness in blessings which far surpass the hopes of the human heart, a new creation where man will find again in Christ the treasures he has had to lay aside in the present age.

Gaudium et Spes virtually brims over with the Church's joyful faith in the risen Christ and her insistence that his Passover is the way man must walk if he would enter into life (n. 18, 22). Through the victory of that Passover from death to life is destroyed the power to crush the human heart ever inherent in the riddles of sorrow and death. No genuine Christian hope can ,possibly bypass the mystery of the Resurrection, urging upon us as it does the realization that death is the way to life. Nor can Christian hope adequately proclaim the faith which inspires it today if it does not bring that same Resurrection faith to bear as it plumbs the mysteries of existence in union with all those troubled hearts with whom it claims solidarity in Christ.

WHITHER DEVELOPMENT!

With these thoughts in mind, it seems legitimate to ask for a cogent, Christian vision of the future which is expansive enough to embrace the real possibilities now confronting both persons and the race. Christian hope cannot be genuine if it is able to encompass only one possible route of human development. Possibly it is on just such a point that Chardin's vision needs tempering, claiming as it does that there is an ever-deepening, ultimately irresistible process of growth into consciousness which finds its goal in the risen Christ. For example, how very difficult it would be to think in terms of a growing Christification were one to remain to survey the results of a world¡wide nuclear exchange--certainly one of the possibilities of the current age. Rather than revealing a direction in evolution rooted in man and consciousness, it

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would appear more likely from such an outcome that the pressures of the Divine mandate had driven God's regent to suicide instead of dominion.

William F. Lynch (Images of Hope) makes the point that a man is never lost so long as he remains able to imagine possible ways out of his present difficult situation. Only when all possible routes of escape have been closed do despair and madness set in. As with individuals, so with the race, if it happens that all ways out of the present crisis appear closed, then it is simply a matter of time before the onset of true madness, perhaps brought to an external and universal manifestation in the destruction of the race.

A VISION OF THE FUTURE What is it, then, that is needed to provide mankind a way of real hope and some useful guides for action? Perhaps Christians must begin to sketch the dimensions of the future they anticipate in the concrete terms suggested by the victory of Christ. Hope; is viable and Christian only insofar as it corresponds to reality, therefore such a vision of the future must embrace the world and its anguish as it really is. The vision of the future must include the painful facts of current existence, things which are perennial human mysteries as well as those difficulties which make our own age unique. Without pretending to list them all, these are some of the elements for which this age asks a reckoning. First, there is the question raised earlier-why develop at all? By what means are we to determine which human goods and talents really have a place in the future and are, therefore, worth the costs which inevitably accompany any human development? Is the goal reached simply by human genius? If it is, how do even the most advanced nations of the present offer a solidly motivating hope when their current status reveals as much great hopes dashed as it does an invitation for others to follow their paths. Is the present unrest in our own nation, both the turmoil in cities and the ennui of suburban life, a loud proclamation that the promise of a secular city is not yet expansive

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enough to fill the longings of the human heart for justice and peace? Is the Great Society merely Utopia traveling under an assumed name? Does the use of hallucinatory drugs indicate a flight into controllable fantasy and an aversion from a reality which no longer stirs the imagination of men? And what shall we say of the great qualitative differences among men? Can the underdeveloped and uneducated of the world make any contribution to the future, or is it simply to be formed for them apart from their own aspirations? If they have no part in shaping the future are only the educated and the powerful destined for salvation in the new world order?

If not, is there anything more for those who labor well and devotedly for the coming of that new order?

Other questions arise which are more intramural to the Christian community in its role as architect of a vision of hope. How is the Lordship of Christ over all creation to be expressed in a way that is intelligible and attractive for the present? How can a single Christian life express both the laying aside of all for the sake of Christ and the imperative to use all God's gifts in the service of the Kingdom? What is to be made of the scandal that the Christian community itself is often the obstacle to development and itself squanders these talents it should be employing to lead men? Depending upon "how one describes the lines of the future, who really witnesses to the return of the Lord, the one who sets aside everything to follow, or the one who invests all that he has in extending the Lord's dominion-or may these ever legitimately be separated? Similarly, how does virginity bear witness to the glory of the Lord's Kingdom and exalt human capacities in the service of the Kingdom rather than squander a sacred talent?

THE ELEMENTS OF THE CRISIS

These questions are neither new nor complete, but they may help establish the dimensions of the problem of constructing a new vision of hope. Even though simply raising questions may advance the solution of a problem by clarify-

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ing its scope, some attempt should also be made to point out elements available for the work of constructing that vision.

First of all, this is a work of eschatology. Untold effort has been expended in trying to determine the eschatology of the New Testament, almost as though there were an absolutely unitary vision of the future contained there which would be fully adequate to solve the difficulties of any age.

Rather, there are, as in the case of the multiple Christologies, and perhaps as a function of them, several New Testament eschatologies which answer the problems and express the faith of the Church during the time of the formation of the New Testament canon. Eschatology is a theological enterprise, one in which Christian faith comes to grips with the problem of expressing its conception of the fulfillment of the great process begun in Christ. The eschatologies of the New Testament are certainly privileged expressions of the Church's faith in what lies before God's world, but they do not rule out further investigation as the elements of the problem alter.

For example, what does the victory of Christ mean for a universe where past, present and future are increasingly indistinct in that we now witness events long since completed thousands of light years away and know of present and future phenomena only as their histories now fill our skies? Thus, the New Testament encourages further attempts to probe the mystery of the future by providing the principles of Christian faith and an example of their application in its multiple Christologies which can serve as foundations for such investigation.

Wreckage lines the course of our cultural heritage where noble attempts have been made to chart a vision of an ideal order to be realized in the future. A few examples of these projections in the Scriptures are the visions of Zion restored (Is 11, 65:17-25; Ez 4 Off.), the inauguration of God's kingdom (Dn 7:7-14) and a resurrection hope spelled out in the face of merciless persecution (2 Me 7). These and others like them are constructions whose very detail and assurance were instrumental in rekindling a threatened hope. In the

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New Testament, as well, there are similar visions of the future, for example, John's Revelation (21-22:15) or Paul's attempt to fill out and clarify the resurrection hope ( 1 Cor 15:35!1). The Letter to the Hebrews, too, is filled with the glorious priesthood of Christ and the heavenly liturgy toward which Christians are advancing. Concern for the shape of the ideal order is not, of course, limited to the Scriptures. Plato's Republic, the millenialism of some of the Fathers, Augus· tine's City of God, Joachim of Flora's idea of the three great ages, Thomas More's Utopia, the renewed millenialism of some of the reformers, all give continued expression to this feeling for tracing out the ideal age and its coming. Nor are such attempts lacking in our own age, whether they take the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the Great Society. A future without form inspires neither confidence nor action; that is precisely why Chardin's vision is so attractive and will certainly be a part of our present conception of the future. The sober awareness that such visions are never wholly adequate to the mystery they attempt to express cannot prohibit us from striving to fill what appears to be a perennial human need. It· does not seem fully fair to accuse any of these projections of being a myth, naive, or the sign of shallow faith when we recall the constant Judea-Christian awareness that human language and theological insight never more than weakly approximate the mysteries they explore. Perhaps this time-conditioned hope based upon Christian faith must ever share the scandal of the self-emptying and Incarnation of the one who is the root of this faith. All this will require great skill lest we needlessly repeat the mistakes of the past and confirm the many warnings of those who label any such at· tempt a misuse of time and talent.

We may not, therefore, simply tum to the New Testament, or Augustine, or Chard in and say: "There, that's what is going to happen!" It is, in fact, probably unreasonable to expect that a single person is going to complete the task for this era. This is a work of theology, faith striving to understand, but not necessarily the work of professional theolo-

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gians alone. Christians are somehow going to have to articulate their hope for the future in a way that speaks to the mind and heart of their own generation. Certainly they may rely upon the insights of a few very perceptive men, but it is a collective task to give flesh to their skeletal principles and perceptions. It is legitimate to expect that this work will provide a basis for Christian optimism in the present, but if this optimism is not to be baseless and a cruel mockery, it must embrace the experience which sees death as man's only destiny, the decay of the greatest human talents and achieve¡ ments and the growing fear that the consummation to come was previewed not so much at the first Easter as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Effective principles for living must emerge, as well, from this vision of hope. Should man live "as if' there were real hope when obviously the best he can do will somehow cease?

Perhaps he should wipe his hands of everything and let the world drift along to its doom. That course is really total abandonment to fate more than it is any liberation from a reality too bitter to endure. Or, may it be that man will be¡ come convinced that what he is doing is touched at every moment by death and is headed toward death in the very same way that Jesus, the summit of all the Father's work in creation embraced the way of death as the single route of life (Mk 8:31-3). As representative for all creation, in death he turned over all things into His Father's hands. Over the nothingness of this death, as over the stillness of the first ere¡ ation, was poured forth the Spirit of God establishing Christ as the head of the new creation. Henceforth, all who die in him are delivering into the hands of the Father all that they are and all that they accomplish, in order that God may bring to perfection in the Kingdom to come whatever men have fashioned as perfectly as human capacity will allow. It is for such a vision of context, embracing all that overjoys and saddens the heart of man, extending to its greatest and smallest manifestations, that we long today.

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Finally let us suggest some of the principles and resources that seem available for shaping this vision: l. This is a work of theology. Therefore, it is going to bear the marks of the present age, its outlook, its anguishes.

We need offer no apology for the human limitations of the vision achieved provided it is an authentically Christian understanding of the mysteries involved.

2. It must avoid the pitfalls of earlier attempts at visions of the future. Thus, it must not waste its energies trying to reconcile insoluble New Testament problems. Rather it must use the varying elements found there, avoiding as well con¡ centration upon individual destiny to the neglect of the collective destiny we share in our solidarities with Adam and with Christ. Nor may this vision run into fanciful detail which would little reflect the limited nature of what is certain of the future. This vision will inspire genuine hope and will be true to its sources only as it reflects the New Testament and its sober, often very conservative limits in describing the future.

3. The work of eschatology is partly negative; it denies that the present is the Kingdom come, but its task is not thereby complete. Its mandate is done only when it turns its principles to the service of Christian hope.

4. If human freedom and sinfulness are genuine realities, then Christian hope must somehow reckon with the possibility of massive failures and reversals in the process of redemption. Christians can not create the impression that they pos¡ sess a blueprint of the future, or even that there is such a plan with every detail already drawn. This would be intolerable arrogance and a denial that human freedom and effort have any role in the redemptive task. What is needed is an attempt to discern the implications of the Resurrection for this century, its life and its work.

5. The finitude of man must be accorded its rightful place, so that what is simply the result of man's limited share m being is not laid to the malice and consequences of sin.

6. The root norm which must guide man in the use of

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God's gifts is the good of the race (Gaudium et Spes n. 35).

This implies that whatever perfects the order of justice among peoples, whatever leads to individual growth as well is a genuine talent of the Kingdom and, therefore, worthy of development. Here we should expect that a definitive step of faith will almost always be required.

7. The hope proposed must reflect appealingly the goodness of God for which the human heart longs. A great civil order in the sky is simply inadequate, no matter how brilliantly that may be conceived (cf. Augustine, Confessions 1:1).

8. One of the biblical images which might be employed with profit is the theme of the seed. It has the advantage of conveying the idea of gradual growth, of potentialities for the future contained in the present, and, therefore, a share in that which is to come through the genes which control its unfolding. This imagery also points to the great mystery that the present passes into the glory of the future only through death. Not only is the imagery useful, but it is also a means of unifying three of the great elements of New Testament tradition since the image of the seed finds a place in each of the Synoptics, in John and in Paul.

9. The hope that we profess must be expansive, wide enough to embrace both life and death in Christ, the legitimate differences between Christians and the great mastery man is winning over creation. A place must also be found for the frightening possibility that man will be enslaved or destroyed by what he has wrought.

10. The ideas of corporate personality, the headship of Christ, and the insights of Irenaeus of Lyons on recapitulation can provide useful resources for a more adequate description of the place of human collaboration in the work of redemption.

11. The transcendent humanism of Christ, his Passover from death to life and his place as the Lord and focal point of history are the principal sources from which Christians will draw their vision of the future. The Church, by her very presence, confronts men with the fundamental questions of

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life, death and the meaning of human existence ( Gaudium et Spes n. 41). Questioning by her existence is merely one phase in the task. Christian ministry to the vexed heart of man also requires that the Church labor constantly to plumb these mysteries as adequately as faith and skill allow while she is yet on her pilgrimage with those very persons to whom ¡ she offers the hope of salvation.

Today's student for the priesthood is more than a little wary of his theological mentors. If I read him correctly he feels that his theological formation is not meeting his own needs; nor is it preparing him to meet the needs of his contemporaries.

The objections are valid enough to warrant some exploration, if only because they are troubling the whole theological world and not The classical theological simply one faculty or another.

The student complaint is models of Christianity that he is packed aboard an seem alien and remote academic express scheduled for all the proper historical to today' s student of stops, then dropped off in the theology. middle of nowhere. He is impatient of history, of theological thought that was addressed to people of another GEORGEJ.DYER time, another place. The world about him clamors for his involvement and his theology seems deaf to the clamor. And so he hurries from the classroom to the "real world" of the apostolate. Finally, his theological notebooks closed, he faces moments of anxiety, self-doubt, loneliness.

Theology becomes an insulated chamber in his life to which he repairs at scheduled moments of his day, searching with a melancholy perseverance for "answers."

If this description of the contemporary theological student

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is not universally applicable, neither is it an isolated profile.

For today's student is a man of his age, and the age itself has drifted away from classical theology and the more traditional expressions of Christianity. Ours is a culture in transition, the very foundations on which it stands demonstrably shifting. After the tremors it felt from the successive impact of Copernicus, Darwin, Freud and Marx it seems on the verge of being set totally adrift from the past ways of thinking and acting by the technological revolution. Saturn V is a symbol of man's freedom from bondage to the forces of nature and his new mastery of them. With this new sovereignty his image of himself and his world is in flux. The classical theological models of Christianity, couched in another vision of man and his world, seems remote and alien to him. Nor is his new view of the world yet in focus, for it is blurred by the ambiguity of the technological revolution itself. Man's growing dominion over the forces of nature is a mixed blessing that has produced not only Saturn V but the nightmare prospect of a hydrogen bomb in orbit. If our civilization has pioneered a pathway to the planets, it has also contrived to reduce to minutes any warning it might have of its appoint¡ ment with oblivion.

This cultural shift is not something vague, distant and subterranean. It echoes through every stratum of American life and perhaps it is felt nowhere so keenly as in the seminary.

The old images of seminarian, priest and parish, once so clear are now blurred. Well-known landmarks of formation and academics that served past generations so well have been engulfed by the onrushing tide of events. The seminarian finds himself afloat on a shoreless sea searching for a clear image of himself, his God, his hoped-for priesthood. It is hardly surprising that this experience should issue in moments of anxiety and loneliness; it is no less surprising that the student is frequently impatient of a theological formation that seemingly ignores his need.

There is an important dynamic at work in contemporary theology that may lead to a solution of the student's prob-

EXPRESS

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lem. For the dynamic itself entered theology to fill a vacuum sensed by the theologian even before his students began to point it out-that theology was failing to meet the needs of our contemporaries in society. Both Protestant and Catholic theologians are well aware that most of the bridges between them and secular society had been blown by their predecessors. This is certainly the reason why theology was shunted off to the periphery of university life, treated good-naturedly if not quite reverently as a quaint relic of the past. Theo¡ logians busied themselves with important questions but contemporary man ignored them because the questions were not his. Today the bridge-builders are hard at work trying to open lines of communication into the lives of modem men.

If much of our theology seems remote from the concerns of our contemporaries, theologians reason, it is because we have failed to point out the religious dimension of many of the problems that trouble them.

The riots in Watts and Detroit, the yippy-policc collision in Chicago, the peace protests, the resentment of authority in the Church and in society at large point to fundamentally religious questions that lie at the spiritual roots of man and clamor for articulation. These questions are religious, as man himself is religious, in the very fabric of his being. Only when they have been searched out and verbalized, however, can the theologian capture the attention of his contemporaries, for only then can he address himself to their needs. Once the theologian begins to speak directly to the concerns of modem man, his theology assumes a cogent relevance. An important tool in this bridge-building process is the interdisciplinary dialogue between theology, psychology, sociology and imaginative literature. But of that we will say more in a moment.

If we can take a cue from the dynamics of present-day theology, it would seem that our answer to the student's first objection to his theological formation is "involvement."

Troisfontaines, following Marcel, suggests that we cannot get involved in a problem, only in a mystery. A problem is open

,,

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CHICAGO STUDIES

to complete objectification; a mystery is not because it touches us too deeply. We feel the importance of reaching an answer because the answer responds to our needs. The theologian's first task, therefore, must be his student's involvement. Just as an illustration of this process we might try to uncoil the root religious problem that lies beneath the insecurity and self-doubt of the student.

The psychologist and sociologist have much to say on the subject of insecurity but the theologian too can find a point of insertion here. For the student's insecurity, if probed deeply enough, poses a question of religious dimensions.

Fundamentally it reflects man's instinctive reaction to his own slippery hold on being. Change is the most resounding reminder that man has no permanent place, no lasting grasp on his own being. Nothing seems more likely to remind the student of this fundamental fact of his existence than a culture or community in transition, where the student's old image of himself is dissolving and a new one not yet taken form. The theologian's first task in this case is to help the student to state reflexively the question that lies unasked heneath his experience. Essentially it is a question of the meaningfulness of life.

There are fundamental tensions in man: between his longing for a place of his own and the experience of a change he cannot control, between his clinging to being and his awareness that he has only the most tenuous hold on it. These tensions, of course, reach a climax in the fact of death when man's grip on being relaxes entirely and "his place knows him no more." This climactic moment of death is repeatedly anticipated, Troisfontaines suggests, in the experience of change: the transition from a mother's lap to adolescence, through the stages of maturity to old age are successive moments of rupture that cause no little dismay. This constant reminder of the irresistable movement across the stage of life toward the wings and apparent oblivion is the sonrce of what contemporary theologians call anxiety. It is our creaturehood experienced from the inside, as Tillich phrased it, the reali¡

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zation that we are not the source of our own being nor its sovereigns.

Confronted by tensions that are woven into the very fabric of life, man searches for meaning. And here he either fol· lows Sartre to the conclusion that the tensions are contradic· tions and death the ultimate absurdity, or he looks beyond mankind for meaning. The disfavor into which Sartre has fallen suggests how intimate a part of the human fibre is man's quest for meaning. This common human quest is both the root of the religious question of meaning and the bridge across which the theological dialogue can move. For there is a Christian response to the problem of meaning, that of the creating and redeeming God. But until the student has become involved in the question, the response will have little interest for him except as a problem. It will be an important bit of scientific information but not a response to his own needs. His theological work will be an exercise but not a quest.

The theologian will recognize that we have just approached the problem of meaning down the philosophical roads of personalism and existentialism. The interdisciplinary dialogue, however, has moved beyond the traditional exchange of philosophy and theology to a broader exchange with soci· ology and psychology. Distinguished representatives of these disciplines have pointed out that there is a religious aspect of human behavior that has an undoubted effect on man and society. Their attempts to describe this dimension are well known; they can be seen in the work of Weber and Durkeim, in the analystical studies of Erikson, in periodi· cals such as the Journal of Religion and Mental Health. Their importance for the theologian is manifold. Dialogic contact with these disciplines can lead to the contraction or expan· sion of our theological models; it can also help the theologian to see precisely where the religious needs of modem man lie. In a sense the latter value may be the more important.

For if the theologian fails to uncover the real religious con· cerns that underpin human problems, he may find himself

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more irrelevant than ever. For he will not be responding to the needs of others, only to his own. These are the consider· ations that led our faculty at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary to establish the Theology Laboratory.

The laboratory occupies the Fall semester of the student's final year in the theology program. Essentially it is an interdisciplinary analysis of problems arising from the student's own experience. The students are deacons: ordained the preceding Spring they remain in parochial assignments during the Fall Semester rather than return to the seminary. For this reason the laboratory is located in Chicago not at the seminary in Mundelein. On Tuesday and Thursday after· noons from three o'clock until six some forty-five deacons gather at Resurrection parish on Chicago's West Side. They would seem to be the ideal candidates for the experiment in theologizing out of life experience. The largest part of their fonnal academic work is behind them. And corporately their diaconate experience is impressive; it covers a broad cross section of Chicago life: from the aflluent suburbs to the ghettos. They spend the preceding summer listening to alcoholics, working with impoverished Blacks and Latins, in wards of wounded American soldiers, at the bedsides of the dying. They've worked in the Towers that line the Lake and in the slums that spill over the South and West side.

The laboratory tries to embody the two principles that we have been discussing: involvement and interdisciplinary dia· logue. Cases prepared by the deacons from their own experience are explored with the help of a psychiatrist, a sociologist and a theologian. The laboratory tries to uncoil this life experience, pealing back its psychological and sociological layers until its reaches the religious core, the point of contact between the three disciplines. It is also the point at which the deacon can bring to bear the theological resources he has acquired during the past three years.

Perhaps an illustration or two would demonstrate the possibilities of the laboratory. In one exchange a psychologist was asked how he would analyze the widespread discontent

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with Humanae Vitae. Obviously there was friction here be· tween the freedom of the individual conscience and religious authority. But what else lay beneath the issue? His reply was interesting.· In his opinion we were watching a phenomenon that was cultural and fairly recent-a growing incapacity to trust. Now I submit that there is a religious problem here.

The incapacity to trust may well be constant in the human condition rooted in the limitations of human resources, whether individual or corporate. If the theologian fails to recognize that the problem exists, as the psychologist suggests it might, he may well fail to meet the fundamental issue. All the learned treatises he might write on doctrinal authority would miss the point, for the basic problem lies elsewhere.

In one other case a woman of a formidable religious background was overly-dependent; unwilling to see a psychiatrist she insisted on talking only to the priest. What fundamental religious problem might exist here? The sociologist in our group may have hinted at the answer when he asked: why do people seek out a priest or a deacon rather than someone else. The answer was suggested that somehow we are reposi· tories of meaning for people, that we somehow validate the meaning they have found for their own lives. The answer the deacons gave was startling, because they had unknowingly struck a theme that has been explored by some of the great sociologists of religion. In moments of disappointment and uncertainty-in what these sociologists have termed a limit situation-people reach out for an answer that lies beyond their everyday experience. They reach out for an aspect of reality that other religious sociologists have called the Sacred. It occurred to me at the time that without the help of these other disciplines we might well have addressed ourselves theologically to other questions-real and important questions perhaps, but they would have been ours and not those of the people we were dealing with.

The Theology Laboratory is still very much in its infancy: we have already fallen into enough pitfalls to be able to rec-

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ognize some of them. This was inevitable, of course. Putting flesh, bone and sinew to a paedagogical theory can be a try¡ ing exercise as any academic administrator knows. Hopefully, the investment in time and energy will be profitable, paying dividends for our entire program of theological formation.

I

J

What happens to you when you work in a 520-bed hospital for eight weeks as a member of a supervised training program? Well, you have an opportunity: to consume all the free food you can, to meet a great number of people, to empty bed-pans, to participate in televised liturgies, to get depressed, to learn how to make a hospital bed, to "T" group, to reflect on your experiences, to help patients die, to procrastinate by taking a morning off, to sit with a patient waiting in the clinic, to watch electric-shock therAn open letter on a new apy, to work with authority phase of Catholic sem1nary figures, to meet nurses, to make an inventory of your experience. areas of competence and incompetence, to view surgery, to visit a captive clientele, to drink coffee, to manipulate people, to talk with injured White Sox players, to heal and not quite know how. Any questions? Well perhaps some more information distilled from this summer's Mercy Hospital team experience might be of help.

56 ::barp5 in

a _jjo&pita/

325

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WHAT SHOULD YOU INITIALLY EXPECT FROM JOINING A PAS· TORAL CLINICAL PROGRAM CONDUCTED IN A HOSPITAL SET· TING?

Because the program is tailored to fit within and complement the operational structure of the hospital, it offers opportunities for working in and comparing the different hospital roles you will be in. These roles include orderly, worker in the mental health unit, and principally chaplain. The experience of working with the sick can, therefore, be personally examined from different vantage points. Because of the hospital structure you can expect to meet a great number of people in situations ranging from joyful optimism to hopeless and trying circumstances. The work is there and it is reaL You should also ·expect to be looked upon as a professional with your own competency; you are one profession among many at a hospitaL Expect to be impressed by the professionalism and dedication of those with whom you work. They expect the same.

In addition to working eight hours a day, five days a week in the hospital, you take time to reflect on the program. Some of this reflection is structured. There is a weekly individual conference with your supervisor in which together you critically evaluate your verbatim record of some interpersonal situation you were in. There is also a weekly reflection on one of the gospel cure-stories which are analyzed in terms of what happens to those people involved and how this applies to your own situation at the hospitaL There are also weekly lectures by the hospital staff aimed at defining the role of a priest working in a hospitaL Apart from the structured reflection, you can expect to enjoy a supportive atmosphere engendered by the other men with whom you work. The sharing of one another's positive experiences as well as the communication of anxieties and frustrations are all part of the value of being a team in your work.

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WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT TO ENCOUNTER AND LEARN IN A HOS¡ PITAL TRAINING PROGRAM ITSELF?

Perhaps one of the most important things is the opportunity to balance whatever your expectations of the ministerial priesthood are with the expectations of the patients and stafi.

The great majority of the visits with the patients are quite shallow and formal encounters of little dramatic consequence; yet they are a form of therapeutic service to them. Do not expect to be a problem solver or simply a listener: expect to do a great deal of spontaneous reacting. Expect to be yourself: your personality is necessary in any efiective approach in a pastoral role.

What does ministry and priesthood mean to a wide spectrum of people? The implicit ministerial role of the "institutionalized friend" can he experience in the concrete much like the pattern of an intern's training, the scheduling permits assignment to the various services of the hospitaL Working on the mental health floor or obstetrics or pediatrics or in the emergency room guarantee opportunities in which your skills can be measured in dealing with many types of people.

How far does the role of the "institutionalized friend" extend? What are the limits of charity in these relationships.

Is the gospel asking me to be a professional "Joe-good-guywith-a-smile"? These are but a few of the many theoretical "hang up" questions you ask in the seminary but the questions are never really met head-on until you find yourself in a concrete and particular pastoral situation.

Finally, because the program operates within an organizational structure, the real and often exasperating problem of working constructively with authority figures is presented as an actual situation.

In short, you can expect to encounter and learn about many facets of your personality which previously had remained dormant because you may have doubted about how others might respond to them.

WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM A CLINICAL PROGRAM BECAUSE IT IS SUPERVISED?

First, it keeps you honest and in touch with what is going

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on witllln you. It helps you to clarify your realistic impact on others. Supervision is the atmosphere of a professional approach, an approach which is organized around specific goals. Such an approach enables you to know and think about what you are doing, before and while you do it as well as after you do it. The verbatim report as well as the weekly "T" group session with a psychiatrist were found to be particularly effective. Unless you reflect on the experience of a visit with a patient, there are many practical things which repeatedly go unnoticed. There are small things like: missing a verbal clue to what is on a person's mind; or communicating a non-verbal message to the patient by the position you take in the room. The preconceptions you may have together with your implicit and explicit goals become more apparent when you are critically analyzing a verbatim report of your work. You are confronted and challenged by thinking out critically a reasoned mode of ministry to a particular person.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE LIMITATIONS

AND

SETBACKS OF

A

HOSPITAL TRAINING PROGRAM?

While there is the opportunity to visit patients frequently during the course of their stay, the relationship with them is short-termed and qualified by their illness. This is certainly not the whole complexus of a parish ministry. There is also the inevitable depression generated by routine, the feeling of not wanting to visit the patient in the next room or of meeting too many people as "institutionalized friends." There is the tendency to work more with the sick individuals than with their families. There is little follow-up. There are the personal expectations of giving one thing, while the people expect something else. Because the hospital is a highly structured situation, the range of creativity and response is narrower than in the often highly unstructured setting of a parish. Then too men of little or no theological training may find themselves somewhat handicapped in dealing with basic problems of faith.

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WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT TO CARRY AWAY FROM AND TRANSFER FROM THE HOSPITAL EXPERIENCE?

In addition to the specific skill of ministering to, and to some extent empathizing with sick people, there is the expe¡ rience of working and communicating with a professional staff. You will experience an increased awareness of the dif. ferent needs of people as well as of your preconceptions of them. There is also the benefit of working productively with people in authority and with people who seem to be an obstacle.

There is also a growing self-confidence that you can handle yourself in many different situations with sensitivity and prudence. There is the realization of how your own personality becomes an integral part of the ministering and healing re¡ lationship. There is the practical information on hospital procedures which may be beneficial in comforting people in their doubts. Lastly, there is also the opportunity to formulate within your own faith-context the realities of suffering, death, and the whole mission of ministerial healing.

Father Thomas Ventura, Dean of Men James Noone Paul Burak Thomas Libera Ronald Lewinski Robert Tonelli Thomas Cademartrie Thomas Hickey St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois

AUTHORS IN THIS ISSUE George J. Dyer is the Dean of the School of Theology at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois and Editor of Chicago Studies.

Gerald F. Kreyche is the chairman of the Department of Phi¡ losophy at De Paul University, Chicago, Illinois.

George K. Malone is a professor of fundamental theology at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois.

Joseph T. Mangan, S.J. is chairman of the department of moral theology at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mun¡ delein, Illinois, and moderator of the archdiocesan clergy conferences.

Charles R. Meyer is a professor of systematic theology at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois.

Daniel P. O'Connell is assistant at St Mary's, Windsor Locks, Conn. He received his B.A. and M.A. at St. John Seminary, Brighton, Mass.

Ladislas M. Orsy, S.J. was professor of Canon Law at the Gregorian University from 1960 to 1966, at present he is on the theological faculty at Fordham University.

INDEX TO VOLUME 7 (1968) n.1 (Spring), 1-ll2; n. 2 (Summer), 113¡224; n. 3 (Fall) 225-336).

Chirico, Peter, S.S., The Theology of the Pari.Jh: The Problem ____ 89 Curran, Charles A., Counseling and Sacramental Confession ______ 163 Dedek, John F., Freedom of the Catholic Conscience ____________ ll5 Dedek, John F., Humanae Vitae and the Confessor ______________ 221 Dedek, John F., Some Moral Minima/ism ______________________ 53 Dyer, George J., The Academic Express _______________________ 317 Eight Men: Fifty Six Days in a Hospita/ ______________________ 325

Giblin, Charles H., S.J., Why Jesus Spoke in ParablesAn Answer from Luke 15--------------------------------213

Hanigan, James P., S.J.,The Theology of War and Vietnam ______ 127 Kiesling, Christopher, O.P., From Ceremony to Communication ___ 69

Klauder, Francis J., S.D.B.,The Challenge of the Thought ¡ of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ____________________________ 101 Kreyche, Gerald F., Philosophy, the Person and Christianity ______ 269 Malone, George K., Academic Freedom Revisited_______________

3

Malone, George K., Church and Credibility Today ______________ 175 Malone, George K., Humanae Vitae MiscelU.ny ________________ 242 Mangan, Joseph T., S.J.,Understanding the Voice of the Vicar of Christ: A Commentary on Humanae Vitae __________ 227 Meyer, Charles R., Grace as Freedom _________________________ 143 333

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Meyer, Charles R., TM Status of Grace Todar------------------ 27 Meyer, Charles R., A Personalist View of Grace: The Ghost of G~0-----------------------------------283 O'Connell, Daniel P., Christian Hope and the Dawning Reign of God-----------------------------------------303

Orsy, Ladislas M., S.]., The Spirit oj Common Law and the Reform of Canon Law----------------------------251

Sarno, Ronald A., S.J. The Word of God and Mass Media ________ 15 Siedlecki, Edmund ]., Renewing the Sacraments (1) ------------189 Tavard, George H., A.A., Ecumenism and Religious lndi0erence ___ 201

CHIC A G 0

STU D. IE S

REPRINTS The following reprints are available in limited quantities at a 40% discount; you may find them valuable for class work, study clubs, etc. Please send 20¢ for each reprint ordered: Chicago Studies, Box 665, Mundelein, Illinois 60060.

Ahem, Barnabas M., C.P. Sacramentality: Its Biblical Background Bastian, Ralph, S.J. Confirmation: The Gift of the Spirit Baute, Paschal, O.B.S. A Report on Past<>ral Counselor Training Bea, Augustin. Aspects of a Peaceful Revolution.

Bernard, James. The Priest of Being Biechler, James & McDonald, James. New Horizons in Canon Law Boe, John. Church Music and Aggiornamento: An Ange/ican View Boyer, Charles, S.J. One Flock and Many Shepherds Braybrooke, Neville. Voices in the Desert: lung and Teilhard Buckley, Francis, S.J. Penance in the Church Camara, Helder. Vatican II: Reflections and Suggestions Chirico, Peters, S.S. The Theology of the Parish: The Problem Collins, Joseph, M.M. The Strange World of Father Teilhard Congar, Yves M.-J., O.P. The Church Seed of Unity and Hope Connors, Joseph, S.V.D. Science of the Sunday Sermon ' Cooke, Bernard, S.J. Theological Education of Seminaria;..

Crossan, Dominic, O.S.M. Biblical Truth as Dialectical Analysis Danielou, Jean, S.J. The Church of the Poor Dedek, John F. An Excursion in Theological Methodology, Some Moral Minimalism Della Penta, Joseph C., O.P. On Dante "Cantabile" Dirscherl, Denis, S.J. Doestoevsky: Advocate of Christian Suffering Donlon, Stephen E; Monarchial Episcopate Dreher, John. Sacramental Aspects of Tradition DuBay, William H. Democratic Structures in the Church Dvornik, Francis. The Patriarch Photius and Roman Primacy Dyer, George J. The Unbaptized Infant in Eternity, Doctrine Growth or Betrayal, New Emphasis in Sacramental Theology, The Theology of Death Ellis, John Tracy. A Seminary Jubilee Emanuel, Thomas, C.SS.R. The Numen and the Good News 331

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Fichtner, Joseph A., O.S.C. The Fellow•hip of the Saints Gafiney, James, S.J. Williom /ames on the Virtues of War Geaney, Dennis J. The Chicago Story Gorman, John & McDonagh, Andrew. God's Disappointments Gray, Donald P. Sin and the Destruction of Community Haring, Bernard, C.SS.R. The Dynamism of Christian Life Hassel, David, S.J. Mediotor Between Church and Secular Learning Heaney, Thomas W. Cosmic Resurrection and Apocalypse Hofinger, Johannes, S.J. Contemporary Cathechetics J edin, Hubert. Luther: A New View Keating, John R. Marriage of the Psychopathic Personality Kiesling, Christopher, O.P. Dewart on Faith, From Ceremony to Communication, The Church'• Institution of Liturgy, Liturgy in the Modem World Klauder, Francis. Challenge of Thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Kreyche, Gerald. Philosophy and Contemporary Man Lambert, Rollins. Jewish Background of the Liturgical Year Lay, Thomas, S. J. Contemporary Images /or Contemporary Preacher.

McClory, Robert. Modern Morality and the Natural Law McElwain, Hugh. Theology in an Age of Christian Renewal McFarland, John S.J. Polority in Certain Existentialists McKenzie, John, S.J. Signs and Power: NT Presentation of Miracle• Mahon, Leo T. Machismo and Christianity Malone, George. Mater, Si! Magistra, Si!, Academic Freedom and Apologetic•, The Church Organization and Structure, Academic Freed om Revisited Mangan, Joseph, S.J. Questions on "The Pill" Meyer, Charles R. Sorrow that Sanctifies, Lost Virtue? Obedience in the Modern World, Ordained Women in the Early Church, Status of Grace Today, Signs of Times: Theological Overview Motherway, Thomas, S.J, Supernatural Existential Munson, Thomas, S.J. Marxist Atheism: Reflection in the Phil<>•ophy of Religion, Philosophy in Ecumenical Dialogue Murphy, Roland, O.Carm. Divine Afjlante Spiritu - Twenty Year.

After Reicher, Robert. Priest in Civil Rights Demonstrations, Collective Bargaining and Church-related Institutions, Social Origins of Seminarians, Priests and Community Organizau"on: A Dissent

Siedlecki, Edmund J. Liturgical Reform: Diagnosis and Prognosis