No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
Though in the domain of Dogma much has been done in recent years towards re-establishing the conformity between Faith and Reason, in the domain of Morals this is not so. On the contrary, we are confronted at the present time with a rupture between Catholic moral teaching and secular ethical thought which is far more disastrous than the nineteenth-century quarrel between Religion and Science. In no sphere is this rupture more manifest than in that of the ethics of sexual relationship and in the conceptions of society and of individual conduct dependent upon it. The problem does not, indeed, present itself to the average Catholic in these general terms, but in the more pressing form of the concrete case—in the opposition between the teaching of the Church and of the world around him on marriage, on the family, on chastity, on divorce, on birth-control and the rest. The devout Catholic will loyally accept the teaching of the Church on these several heads, but not many, perhaps, are able to give that teaching an intelligent assent; few are conscious of a consistent, coherent policy or doctrine underlying the Church’s precepts, which consequently are apt to appear as so many disconnected, arbitrary and unintelligible hardships; fewer still realise the essential conformity, not to say identity, between Christian moral law and right reason or common sense. Not seldom must the Church’s uncompromising teaching regarding, for example, ‘hard cases’ which seem to indicate divorce, sterilisation or contraception appear to the thinking Catholic as incomprehensibly harsh and irrational, and only by a blind act of faith can he accept it and stifle the protests of his own reasoning.
La Famille. By the Abbé Jacques Leclercq, Professor at the Institut Saint-Louis at Brussels. (Namur: Wesmael-Charlier.) The volume is the third of a series of Leçons de Droit naturel published under the auspices of the Societe d'Etudes morales, sociales et juridiques, 11 rue des Récollets, Louvain.
2 Perhaps a word of explanation is called for. Christian teaching recognises three essential bona or values in marriage: the bonum prolis—the reproduction and care of offspring, which is a ‘good’ attained by the sexual union of both men and animals; the bonum fidei which negatively involves indissolubity, monogamy and the avoidance of infidelity, positiveìy the fostering of mutual love and personal union—values attainable only by human beings; the bonum Sacramenti—a divine and supernatural value attached by God to marriage between Christians which makes of the highest expression of human love the symbol of the love between Christ and His Spouse, the Mystical Body. Because the Christian sacraments effect what they signify, it is the source of Grace to the marriage state and contract. These three bona are essential to marriage, in such wise that the possibility of their attainment is a condition of its validity. They are intimately interdependent, and no one of them is capable of being realised or frustrated without involving the others. Thus the bonum prolis, which is primary and ‘ most essential,’ though not ‘principal’ (cf. St. Thomas, Supp. xlix, 3), and which includes not only the procreation but the education and upbringing of children, postulates the bonum fidei as the guardian of family life and unity (cf. St. Thomas, 2a, 2ae, cliv, 2). Thus whatever is done to foster the bonum fidei fosters also the bonum prolis. Hence, even though conception may not always follow upon sexual intercourse, the bonum prolis is indirectly but very really fostered if the bonum fidei be thereby strengthened. Conversely, if the bonum prolis be positively excluded, the bonum fidei and the bonum Sacramenti are implicated in its frustration.
3 That is to say, it adds nothing of positive content to the natural law discoverable by our natural faculties. Our Lord Himself made it clear, for instance, that His strict teaching about divorce was no new imposition, but a reaffirmation of what was ‘from the beginning.’ St. Thomas, so far from regarding these precepts as new hardships, sees in them a new help to keeping the elementary laws of nature (Ia, 2ae, cvii, 4 ad 3). The Christian is not obliged to a more extensive or stricter code of morality than the infidel, though his obligation may be stricter and his sin less excusable. When we Catholics protest against the legalisation of divorce or contraception, we do not seek to impose a distinctively Christian morality on a non-Christian society. This is not to assert that Christianity contributes nothing to morality. Grace perfects Nature in such a way that Nature is apt to be exceedingly imperfect without it. Revelation gives a new sanction and authority to rational ethics of such a kind that the integral law of nature cannot readily be discerned without it. This accounts, as the Abbé Leclercq repeatedly shows, for the fact that human behaviour and custom, as well as positive human law, often fall far short of the dictates of rational ethics which are found intact within the Church alone. Grace, moreover, supplies a new impetus and power and a new, more effective motive for the carrying out of the dictates of reason. Again, the Christian, delivered from the bondage of the law, will realise more clearly than others that morality is not primarily a compliance with a code of permissions and prohibitions, but a means to his own good and self-realisation. He knows, as St. Thomas says, that ‘God is not offended except by what we do against our own good.’ Finally, the Christian, impregnated with the Mind of Christ and viewing all things from the standpoint of the Incarnation and its continuance in the Mystical Body, will see the precepts of the natural law in an entirely. new light. Thus St. Paul sees fornication, not merely as an offence against social iustice or personal temperance, but as the prostitution of a member of Christ.
You have
Access