Toward an American Catholic Moral Theology by Charles E. Curran (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 757 Toward an American Catholic Moral Theology. By CHARLES E. CURRAN. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1987. Pp. 221. $18.95 (cloth). This latest book by Charles Curran, Professor of Moral Theology at Catholic University of America, is a collection of essays written during the past several years. Curran gathers the first four under the heading, " Moral Theology Looks at Itself," and the second five under that of "Moral Theology Looks at Our Society." The thread that holds them together may be gleaned from the title of the book: all the essays deal with moral theology in a specifically American context, whether it be the historical development of American moral theology (first two essays) , the dialogue among American moralists concerning the uniqueness of Christian ethics (third essay) , their dialogue with biomedicine and bioethics (fourth essay), or the specifically American ethical questions raised by the phenomena of taxation, filial responsibility to elderly parents, religious freedom and human rights both in society and in the Church, the bishops pastoral letter on the economy, and the difference between personal morality and public policy (last five essays) . Several important themes recur throughout a number of these chap· ters, and a few words should be said about at least some of them. The first deals with what Curran understands to be profound shift that has occurred in the discipline of moral theology itself since Vatican II. In the centuries between the Counter-Reformation and our own time (when the dominating genre of moral theology was that of the /nstitutiones theologae moralis) , Curran stresses that the role of the moral theologian was primarily to train priests as confessors for the sacrament of penance , which meant to train them to judge the various degrees of sinfulness involved in particular acts. Moral theology was something that took place almost exclusively in the seminary, and was more a professional than an academic discipline (and indeed a professional discipline that was considered to be directly dependent upon the magisterium for both its content and its practitioner's competence to teach). Since the Council, however, the centers of moral theology have increasingly shifted from the seminary to the university, from a professional training of confessors as judges to the academic role of critical reflection on the whole of Christian life; it has become increasingly declericalized and academically professionalized, one implication of which is a new-found concern with academic freedom and a consequent critique of any position which would hold that true Catholic moral theology is dependent upon a (revocable) canonical mission to teach. American moral theology has become an autonomous academic disci- 758 BOOK REVIEWS pline according to Curran, a discipline in which competency to teach is dependent upon academic, rather than canonical, considerations. Secondly, Curran often takes up the question of the tensions that exist within the Church, especially those between the magisterium and moral theologians. He traces these tensions to three factors: to a modern historical consciousness, shared in general by the latter, but not by the former; to different views of the roles of theology within the Church (for instance, the question of whether or not there can be a pluralism of theologies which are all genuinely Christian, and the closely allied one as to whether or not theology is but a continuation of the hierarchical teaching office) ; and especially to different ecclesiologies held by the two groups (for instance, the Church-as-primarilyhierarchy versus the Church-as-People of God). It is in the context of these tensions that Curran discusses the role of dissent within the Church, a role to which he assigns an important and necessary place. Thirdly, Curran stresses (particularly in his discussion of ecumenical issues) the unique place of the concept of mediation in both traditional and contemporary Catholic moral theology. By ' mediation ' Curran means that " Catholic ethics appeals, not immediately to the will or word of God, but rather to the human that mediates the divine will and word " (34) . The implications of this become especially important in the final :five chapters, in which Curran stresses again and again that the gospel " ... does not provide a shortcut which avoids the human and supplies rather direct and easy answers...