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Few explicit references regarding moral theology can be found in the documents of either the Council of Trent or the Second Vatican Council. Still, moral theology before and after the two councils went through extraordinary changes regarding method, its standard of authority, and its understanding of moral truth. This chapter is divided into two sections. First, it explores two major works, one thirty years before and the other thirty years after the Council of Trent. Second, it examines developments before and after Vatican II.

This introductory chapter surveys and critically evaluates the various ways in which Hooker's influence upon both the Anglican tradition of moral theology and Anglicanism in general has been interpreted. It argues that the precise nature of Hooker's significance has often been assumed rather than demonstrated, and reveals the ways in which his work has sometimes been misappropriated by those seeking to claim his authority in support of their own perspectives. An overview is provided of the principal subject areas that are explored in subsequent chapters, and a rationale given for their selection. They include an account of Hooker's historical context, prose style, theological anthropology, use of scripture, and his understanding of the nature of the moral life. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between moral principle and pastoral practice and his handling of one specific theme: holy matrimony.

This chapter examines moral theology in the United States after Vatican II in relation to “social ethics” and Catholic social thought. More specifically, it discusses the relations among moral theology, social ethics, biblical and historical influences, and changing social and cultural contexts of moral theologians themselves along three trajectories: Vatican II and its aftermath (Humanae vitae); natural law, moral realism, and public social ethics; and “millennial generation” moral theology. It also explores how these trajectories were affected by postmodern philosophy, feminist theology, liberation theology, and the John Paul II phenomenon.

This chapter examines “casuistry,” the dominant mode of moral theology in the Roman Catholic Church that emphasizes the morally right—and the morally wrong—courses of action in a wide range of specific situations faced by Christians of all walks of life. It first offers a definition of casuistry that can account for both the manualist tradition and recent theoretical work on the topic as well as the phenomenon of case-based reasoning in the common law tradition. It then considers two sets of resources, one theoretical and one practical, that can reinvigorate interest in the Catholic casuistical tradition: the tradition theory of Alasdair MacIntyre and the Anglo-American common law tradition. It also explains how MacIntyre's tradition theory and the common law can be used to present a broader account of the context underlying the practice of good casuistry. The chapter concludes by recasting the Roman Catholic manualist tradition in an appropriate, broader context and discussing the benefits and preconditions of retrieving and reframing the Catholic casuistical tradition in a methodologically self-conscious manner.

This chapter examines the missionary training program in the Franciscan colleges for the propagation of Catholicism, focusing on the collegial curriculum, especially instruction in moral theology and languages. The objective of the Franciscan Order's college training program was to provide missionaries with pedagogic and epistemological techniques to help them in their evangelical endeavors, particularly preaching skills. Franciscan friars in the colegios were exposed to a stringent daily life and training in linguistics, philosophy, and theology. Franciscan missionaries and preachers were trained to become assertive evangelical ministers at the vanguard of the Catholic religion in the early modern world. The chapter discusses the specific elements of the Franciscan training program in the colegios de propaganda fide, what and how veteran missionaries and reformers contributed to college curricula, and quotidian life in the college. It also describes the curriculum reforms pursued by the Franciscan colleges.

The concluding chapter returns to the key questions posed in Chapter 1: how should we judge Hooker as a moral theologian? To what extent are the claims that have been made of him justified? What kind of authority might he appropriately have for modern Anglicans? Many of the conventional assumptions about the nature of Hooker's contribution to the formation of Anglicanism are no longer tenable. Hooker's contribution to Anglican moral theology is very significant, but in the informal sense that he introduces a number of insights and motifs, some of which were taken up and developed by subsequent writers; he did not synthesize an approach to moral theology as such. However, certain features of his work, particularly his theological anthropology, his interpretation of scripture, and his account of the law of reason and the claims of the exceptional case, remain both distinctive and of potential relevance to modern ethical debate.

This book outlines an everyday Christian ethics: an ethics which Christianly imagines the fundamental moments of the human life course and in dialogue with alternative imaginations of human being. This chapter argues that the challenge of providing such an ethics is the greater because of deficient and dominant self‐understandings in moral theology and moral philosophy, and consequent misrelations between these disciplines and social anthropology. It suggests that moral theology is misconceived as essentially an ethics of hard cases, that moral philosophy generally fails to reckon with moral practice, and so itself contributes to moral theology's misdirection, and that social anthropology provides a more promising partner for a more adequate Christian ethics. The chapter closes with a treatment of the Mérode Altarpiece as inviting the viewer, as this book invites the reader, to imagine human life in the light of the life of Christ.

This chapter discusses the challenges to 18th century theology, particularly when it came to questions concerning Church hierarchy, revelation and morality, and how the Benedictines attempted to answer them. The reform theologians stressed an anthropological grounding of their theological enterprises, loathed scholasticism, and emphasized the study of scripture and good homiletics. Catholic sovereigns also supported these reforms because they promised not only a spiritual renewal but also a means to more effectively control their subjects, including monks.

One of the important and distinctive features of Hooker's moral theology relates to his engagement with the tension that can exist between the general and the particular, specifically, within the context of the moral life, in the relationship between moral principles and pastoral practice. This chapter begins by giving an account of this motif within classical philosophy and Christian moral theology, most notably in the tradition of casuistry, as the background against which Hooker's engagement with this theme can be understood and interpreted. Hooker's account of the claims of the exceptional case in this context are distinctive, yet have been misinterpreted (and misappropriated) by some of his commentators. Among other factors, Hooker's pastoral awareness informs his recognition of the need for such cases.

This chapter details the (moral) reason why Thomas More refused to swear to uphold the statute of 1534 declaring Henry VIII's marriage void, and his reasons for rejecting Luther's and other's revolt against Catholic teaching. The chapter explores the modern misunderstanding of conscience, the modern corruptions of moral theology, the forgery of Church history by modern liberal Catholic reformers, the proper development of moral doctrine, and the true nature of hope and the divine warnings of hell.

This chapter provides a thematic analysis of some of the most significant applications of probabilism to a number of epistemological, intellectual, political, and theological questions. It focuses on four early seventeenth-century authors, each using probabilism to advance a specific intellectual agenda: Tomás Sánchez and his effort to articulate probability as a trait d’union between conscience and law in the context of his elaboration on the doctrine on marriage; Leonardus Lessius and his attempt to use probabilism to update Catholic doctrine and especially Catholic economic thought; Juan Azor and his endeavor to structure probabilism within a stable and coherent system of knowledge; and Emmanuel Sa and his vulgarization of probabilism for the sake of confessors and other readers who did not necessarily have a deep background in, and extensive knowledge of, moral theology.

This chapter contains a preliminary discussion of the importance and centrality of humility for the Christian moral life, and examines some initial ways of understanding the nature of this virtue, including a discussion of the biblical term tapeinophrosune. This word can be translated as humility or lowliness of mind. There are different ways of understanding the nature of humility, i.e., there is controversy over what it is and what it requires of those who seek to exemplify this trait. The main focus of the chapter is an explanation and defense of analytic moral theology, the methodological approach the book takes in its analysis of the moral virtue of humility. This chapter argues that analytic moral theology can help to clarify the nature of humility in a way that is conducive to moral and spiritual formation, if it is done with these ends in mind.

If scholastic theology paved the way for the development of (moral) theology for the coming centuries, nothing changed the way that the church as a believing community defined itself as fundamentally as the Council of Trent (1545–63). In response to the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church addressed its shortcomings, defined a number of its teachings, and laid down a programme for educating its clergy and standardizing its practices. The construction of the seminary system for training clergy played a significant role in shaping the structure of the church for the next four centuries. Included in that process was the establishment of a theory and practice of moral theology that became synonymous with the ‘handbook tradition’. In order to understand that tradition and to comprehend how Vatican II called for a renewal of moral theology, it is necessary to explain its roots and the elements that needed to be addressed.

This chapter presents an in-depth examination of the critique of one of the most famous Catholic theologians, Fr. Charles Curran. In narrating Curran’s story, it focuses on his firing as a professor at the Catholic University of America—an event that most historians call “the beginning of the Catholic sixties.” In a thought-provoking article published after the Mayflower Hotel conference, Curran laid out a number of postclassicist paradigms of natural law that rejected what some of his colleagues saw as the fatal anomalies of neo-scholasticism, while also addressing the modern concern to engage both religious pluralism and the insights of the modern physical sciences. Curran believed that a far better model of natural law should start with an anthropology that posited that rationality was an intrinsic component of human life, rather than just one part.