It’s the Theology, Stupid

What went wrong, and when, and why? Father Robert W. Crooker of the University of St. Thomas in Houston offers an interesting take on how to explain, at least in significant part, the priestly scandals. In short: it’s the theology, stupid. Like others, Crooker notes that some of the most notorious serial offenders were ordained before Vatican II, in “the good old days” when seminaries insisted on obedience to the Magisterium, scorned effeminacy, and were strict about “particular friendships.” The same is true of almost all the bishops and religious superiors on whose watch these bad things happened. Crooker asks, “Was there, then, some weakness in the Church of the 1950s that would have been vulnerable to the upheavals of the 1960s, even without the excitement and confusion over aggiornamento after the Council?” His answer is yes, and he believes the Council tried to address such weaknesses. For instance, the decree on the training of priests said: “Special care is to be taken for the improvement of moral theology. Its scientific presentation, drawing more fully on the teaching of Holy Scripture, should highlight the lofty vocation of the Christian faithful and their obligation to bring forth fruit in charity for the life of the world.”

What was wrong with the moral theology conventionally taught is that it had very little to do with theology. Morality was mainly a matter of learning the list of duties and prohibitions necessary for hearing confessions. At stake was access to the sacraments and therefore a soul’s salvation. It follows that a certain leniency, if not laxity, is in order, and that resulted in a garden variety of “probabilism.” Meaning the confessor would not insist on an obligation that “approved authors” held to be doubtful. What the confessor must insist upon is not the good but the tolerable. This was joined to a kind of legal positivism: acts are seen as bad because they are forbidden rather than forbidden because they are bad. This invited the suspicion that one had a better chance at eternal salvation by remaining blamelessly unaware of the harder obligations. In other words, the legal opinion favoring freedom from obligation, if supported by probable opinion, may be followed with moral integrity even if the opinion favoring obligation is more probable.

Following the lead of the Council, the new Catechism of the Catholic Church begins with theology—the human person made in the image of God and called to share in the life of the Trinity. The Catechism goes on from there to treat the beatitudes, the virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and only then takes up the prescriptions and proscriptions of the Decalogue. Had the Council been understood and implemented, says Fr. Crooker, “It would have made a wonderful difference in the ministry of penance to ordinary, good people struggling with human weakness: the discipline of regular confession, instead of falling into general disuse, would have found fresh vitality and fruitfulness.” But on this score, as on many others, the Council was not understood or implemented. For most priests, “moral theology” continued to mean probabilistic casuistry, with the very big difference that, after the Council, there was no limit to the number of “approved authors” offering probable opinions. Any professor of theology, especially if he had been a peritus or “expert” at the Council, was now an authority. The Catholic Theological Society of America could produce a book on human sexuality that put contraception, masturbation, adultery, homosexuality, and maybe bestiality on the list of doubtfuls.

Crooker thinks conservatives make a mistake by coming back with the argument that the Church’s teaching on these questions is infallible. That plays into the hands of laxists who argue that the criteria for infallible teaching have not been met beyond reasonable doubt. “Non-infallible,” it is gleefully pointed out, means “fallible,” which is only a short step, in the minds of some, from being “probably false.” A bishop was hard put to hold priests to traditional teaching when they could so readily produce “approved authors” in favor of their dissenting position that they are bound only by what has been, beyond doubt, infallibly declared infallible. Thus the pre-conciliar legalism reappears in a post-conciliar form. Moral theology is reduced to a matter of do’s and don’ts. Fr. Crooker opines that “some of us need a fear of mortal sin to get us safely past a really strong temptation; we aspire to something higher, but in a real Chinch the prospect of hellfire, like that of hanging, wonderfully concentrates the mind.” A priest who started out as “a probabilist for his penitents but a tutiorist [or rigorist] for himself” may find it hard to deny himself the benefit of the doubt when the temptation to sin is really strong.

“What we priests need to live our celibacy faithfully and joyfully is a moral perspective that sees ourselves as made in God’s image and called to eternal communion with Him, rather than one based on casuist haggling over the sixth and ninth commandments,” says Fr. Crooker. “And while we won’t deny absolution to anyone that a good and zealous probabilist would absolve, we’ll be far better able to help and guide those thirsting for something more.” That something more, I would add, is compellingly on offer from the Belgian Dominican Servais Pinckaers. His Sources of Christian Ethics is a magisterial account of what went wrong with moral theology and, more importantly, how to understand the Christian life as a journey toward the good, as a call to holiness, rather than as a roadmap for avoiding the impermissible. The perspective is set forth in a more accessible form for the nonspecialist in Pinckaers’ little book Morality: The Catholic View.

Fr. Crooker speaks from many years of experience as a priest, confessor, and moral theologian. He does not take issue with my repeated assertion that the remedy for our present circumstance is threefold: “Fidelity, fidelity, and fidelity.” But his comments help us to see that we must also ask, Fidelity to what? In an odd way, post-conciliar laxity is a perverse form of fidelity to a pre-conciliar and a-theological understanding of moral theology. “Special care is to be taken for the improvement of moral theology,” said the Council. In this instance, too, the great task continues to be the genuine reception of the Council and its authoritative interpretation in the Catechism and magisterial statements such as the encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth). But you knew that.