Recently, I was behind a large truck in the left turn lane. As the light changed to green, the driver of the truck was not paying attention and did not begin to advance.
In frustration I spontaneously blurted out, “Come on you big lunk, go!” For those unfamiliar with my vocabulary a ‘lunk,’ is short for lunkhead, a stupid or dull-witted person. Based on our Gospel reading, ‘lunk’ is the equivalent of ‘raqa’ or 'stupid' (Matthew 5:22).
If I ask myself, “What would Jesus do in this situation?” I think that the answer is that he would show more patience and not say this to another person, even if he or she cannot hear what I am saying. Since my sincere desire is to conform myself to Christ, I need to improve my behavior.
I freely admit my error in losing patience, and blurting out my inner thoughts saying “lunk” to the other driver, even though he could never hear me.
Yet based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:21-26, have I committed a serious sin? St Paul displays similar impatience with the Galatians, and addresses them, “O Stupid Galatians” (Galatians 3:1), and this is the same apostle who also says, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). The reality is that growth in virtue is a gradual process, not a light switch.
Here is the important point, I think. How do we improve our behavior? How do we best learn to imitate Christ?
Does Jesus want us to have even more rules to follow, and to be stricter in our obedience to them? Is our development in moral character about an increasingly stricter adherence to external rules?
Shall we add this rule to the list of new rules from Jesus? “Thou shalt not say stupid, idiot, lunk, or even twit, or nitwit to another person.” Ironically, in our Gospel reading, it is the scribes and Pharisees who are all about external conformity to the rules. Furthermore, Jesus says our righteousness must “surpass” that of the scribes and Pharisees! He calls us to an even higher perfection.
If we are not careful, I think we have subtly adopted the exact method that the scribes and Pharisees followed, which was about mere external conformity to the rules. This is what Jesus was condemning in our Gospel!
This Sunday’s Gospel concerning Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law highlights many issues that people get wrong about our approach to our moral life in Christ.
The ancient view of the moral life found in the church was about conversion and growth in virtue, led by the interior work of the Holy Spirit. We call this the New Law. This is Jesus’ approach in the Beatitudes, and the approach followed by St. Paul elsewhere in the New Testament. This is also the consistent view of the Church Fathers and is the perennial view of the Church for most of history.
In modern times, a new view of morality emerged under the influence of Neo-Scholasticism called the ‘Roman School.’ Under its influence, a change came about in how many Catholics viewed our moral life in Christ. This view ignored the ancient virtue-based approach.
Unfortunately, this unprecedented new method was prevalent in many seminaries just prior to the Second Vatican Council. This casuistic approach emphasized following the law, and duty and obedience above all else. There was a resurgence of the use of the Ten Commandments as a moral guide for the faithful. Previously the focus was entirely on the virtues.
Perhaps we should point out that this does not change the truths or standards found in the Ten Commandments, but is concerned with our method of reaching these standards.
This new view affected entire generations of priests who instructed in this method during their seminary training. This in turn affected how generations of the lay faithful came to understand the moral life. In fact, we still take this for granted today, as most examinations of conscience follow this method.
Older treatments of our moral life in Christ centered on the virtues. The faithful were led to the same outcomes but using an entirely different methodology. As I mentioned, this is not a dispute about what constitutes sinful behavior, but an entirely different approach to living the moral life.
Unfortunately, the type of spirituality we see in the scribes and Pharisees in our Gospel parallels the faulty thinking of many people today. We see in our Gospel that Jesus was trying to refocus the moral life away from mere external conformity with the law and formal outward duty, and to replace this with a New Law, which was the presence of the Holy Spirit working interiorly in our hearts enabling us to pursue moral excellence through the virtues.
Mere external conformity to the rules did not work in Jesus’ time, and still does not work today. It leads to moralizing homilies, legalism, and results in either pride or shameful failure and discouragement.
One stanza in an ancient hymn Magnæ Deus potentiæ, attributed to Saint Gregory the Great, (540-604) captures this perfectly,
Let none despair through sin’s distress,
Be none puffed up with boastfulness;
That contrite hearts be not dismayed,
Nor haughty souls in ruin laid.
The sin of legalism leads to presumptions against the virtue to hope. As the Catechism notes,
There are two kinds of presumption. Either man presumes upon his own capacities, (hoping to be able to save himself without help from on high), or he presumes upon God’s almighty power or his mercy (hoping to obtain his forgiveness without conversion and glory without merit). (CCC 2092)
We need God’s help and the conversion of our hearts before the life of Christ is even possible. Growth in virtue is a process, not a light switch operates like, “obey, don’t obey, go to Confession, we must follow stricter duty.” As we grow in relationship with Christ, we form our hearts more and more in his character. The sacraments are not rites of passage, but a means of grace to grow in a deeper relationship with Christ.
The practical reality is that rules without relationship with Christ leads to rebellion and discouragement.
The Catechism and the Renewal of Moral Theology
The Catechism of the Catholic Church presents a restored approach to the Christian moral life as compared to some newer 19th century treatments whose legacy endures today. These 19th century manuals of moral theology focused almost exclusively on an exposition of the Ten Commandments, and the notion of obedience to the law. Ironically, the casuistic focus on the Ten Commandments in 19th century manuals of moral theology is not the traditional Catholic approach to the subject, but later development.
Without suggesting that nothing good came from this tradition, many of these pre-Vatican II works were based on faulty philosophical notions (nominalism, voluntarism), were generally unscriptural (focused on external duty without a notion grace, justification, or conversion and life in the Spirit), and out of step with the sources of the patristic tradition (largely ignored).
A strong focus on law, obligation and duty, can lead to negative pastoral results in the faithful. Our modern post-Christian culture, has lost the sense of Christian societal duty, is highly individualistic, and typically rejects authority. Many Catholic faithful have also been formed poorly in both Scripture and personal prayer. This situation has left many younger people to be virtually inoculated against this legalistic approach to our moral life.
Many younger people today view this law, obligation and duty approach as primarily negative, and merely about following the rules. We often hear them say, “You are just trying to guilt me into following the rules, but the rules don’t make sense!” Not surprisingly, this criticism is true, and an apt description of the obvious weakness of this approach.
Early in his pontificate, Pope Francis warned that, “The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.” Francis notes, “We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.” He notes, “The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules,” while, “The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.” [1] To put this in simpler terms, we need to begin with conversion, and focus of all catechesis should unceasingly include our relationship with Christ.
As St. John Paul II notes in his encyclical Mission of the Redeemer;
“From the outset, conversion is expressed in faith which is total and radical, and which neither limits nor hinders God’s gift. At the same time, it gives rise to a dynamic and lifelong process… Conversion means accepting, by a personal decision, the saving sovereignty of Christ and becoming his disciple.”
The life we receive through the sacraments requires our cooperation. It requires a “total, radical, personal decision” to put Jesus at the center of our life. Conversion may involve a decisive point of decision, but as St John Paul II points out it continues with ongoing discipleship.
One of the primary features of the restoration of virtue ethics by the Catechism is the return of the topics of “grace” and “justification” to a central place in the moral pillar of the Catechism. In a word, it begins with conversion. The notion of grace continuously informs the entire Christian life. As St Paul reminds us, “I am what I am by the grace of God” (1 Corinthians 15:10a).
We must understand the Christian life foremost, as a life in the Spirit. Again, the Christian life begins with conversion and our life in Christ flows from our understanding of grace and continues to develop through our relationship with Christ.
Modelling its presentation on St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catechism renews the focus on the New Law or the Law of the Gospel. “The New Law is the grace of the Holy Spirit given to the faithful through faith in Christ. It works through charity; it uses the Sermon on the Mount to teach us what must be done and makes use of the sacraments to give us the grace to do it” (CCC 1966).
Aquinas developed this model by drawing on Sacred Scripture and patristic sources, especially on St. Augustine. While the Catechism still discusses the topics of fundamental moral theology found in older manuals of moral theology, and even later includes the Ten Commandments, but the framework for this discussion is completely different.
The Catechism seeks to integrate its four pillars, so we find the theme of the New Law throughout the Catechism (CCC 459, 715, 782, 1114, 1210, 1548).
Under the treatment of the sacraments, we find sections on the “Conversion of the Baptized” and “Interior Penance” (CCC 1427-1433). Quoting Second Vatican Council, the Catechism notes, “The sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church”: [SC 9] it must be preceded by evangelization, faith, and conversion. It can then produce its fruits in the lives of the faithful (CCC 1072), The Liturgy of the Eucharist is “mystogogy” (CCC 1075) which assumes both “conversion” and “initiation.”
Again, the Catechism highlights the centrality of grace, human cooperation and conversion. The treatment of these truths in the catechism are modelled on the New Law framework found in St. Thomas, and this merely echoes a more biblical perspective found in the patristic sources.
The Catechism seeks to restore the ancient understanding of morality found in the Church fathers and in St Thomas Aquinas, against the notions of the Roman School that developed in Neo-Scholastic circles in the 18th and 19th centuries. During the Second Vatican Council, a working document called a schema on morality began to be discussed, but was not completed during the council. The Catechism of the Catholic Church represents the completion of this renewal envisioned by the council.
The Catechism and Following the Rules
If we ask a room full of faithful Catholics, what they think might be on the first page of Our Life in Christ, or the moral section of the Catechism, the most common answer is the “First Commandment.” The average person still assumes today that the moral life is about ‘following the rules’ and that this life primarily centers on the idea of ‘duty.’
There are 866 paragraphs in the Our Life in Christ section of the Catechism, but there are 366 paragraphs before we get to the Commandments. Where does the Catechism begin?
The Catechism as a whole highlights the organic unity of the faith (CCC 11). We must connect the faith we profess, with the sacraments in order to discover our human dignity and divine purpose as we are empowered by the Spirit through the sacraments and prayer (CCC 1692). We should recall in the first section of the Catechism that,
The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. The Holy Trinity is the source of all the other mysteries of faith, and the light that enlightens them. The Trinity is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the “hierarchy of the truths of faith.” (CCC 234).
Not surprisingly then Our Life in Christ Part 1, begins by highlighting the role of the Father (CCC 1693) and the Son (CCC 1694) and the Holy Spirit (CCC 1695) who sanctify us bringing us to new life. God calls each of us to imitate the Father through the example of the Son. Jesus begins his discussion of the moral life by introducing the beatitudes.
As the Catechism reminds us, the Beatitudes are important because they are “at the heart of Jesus’ preaching” (1716) and because they depict the countenance, or character of Jesus Christ and express the vocation of the faithful, the actions and attitudes characteristic of the Christian life and they proclaim the blessings and rewards of eternal happiness (1717).
The beatitudes respond to our natural desire for happiness which is of divine origin (1718) –there is a God-shaped hole in the human heart which can only be filled by God (cf. Acts 17:22-27; John 7:38; Ecclesiastes 3:10-12). Beatitude reveals the goal of human existence. The ultimate end of all human acts is God’s own beatitude (1719).
God put us in the world to know, to love, and to serve him, and so to come be “partakers of the divine nature” and of eternal life (1721). The Catechism notes, “Such beatitude surpasses the understanding and powers of man. It comes from an entirely free gift of God: whence it is called supernatural, as is the grace that disposes man to enter into the divine joy” (1722).
A prior work of the Holy Spirit first prompts our hearts, and then heals and renews us as we cooperate with his grace (CCC 1695). This is the beginning of our journey toward an act of faith. This divine calling enables us to live the joy and demands of Christ’s way of life (CCC 1696-1697). As we journey through the stages of conversion, the act of faith is a radical and total decision to put Christ at the center of our life.
Beatitude invites us to purify our hearts of bad instincts and to seek the love of God above all else. It teaches us that we find out true happiness not in earthly pleasures or achievements but in God alone (1723). As St Augustine notes, “Thus no one is happy but the man who has everything he wants, and wants nothing wrongly.” (St Augustine, De Trinitate, XIII, 8).
As we turn back to consider the Commandments, we see that they still reveal God’s truth and his heart, but they are fulfilled in a completely new way in union with Christ Jesus. In imitation of Christ, our journey towards perfection begins not primarily by duty and mere external obedience, but by an interior work of the Holy Spirit. Transformed grace, the Holy Spirit, directs our hearts to eternal happiness through the forgiveness earned by Christ’s own sacrifice. The light of this good news also awakens in us a new grasp of the beauty and the attraction of right dispositions towards goodness, enlivened by the supernatural virtues of faith, hope and charity.
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[1] in an interview with Antonio Spadaro, editor of La Civiltà Cattolica
