The Making of a Moral Theologian
by Russell Shaw
Growing up during the Depression as the youngest in a family
of nine children, Germain Grisez ate more seashell macaroni
than he likes to remember. "I don't care if I never see
another seashell," he says. All the same, one has the
impression of a tightly-knit family, with a strong sense of
identity rooted in shared beliefs and commitments. Two of
the Grisez boys became religious brothers and one of the
girls became a nun. The Grisezs' house in the Cleveland
suburb of University Heights was physically isolated from
the rest of the neighborhood, and as a small child Germain
seldom played with youngsters outside the family, so that,
when the time came to go to school, the hurly-burly of
classroom and playground struck him at first as an
unpleasant change from the well-ordered atmosphere at home.
The forebears of the Grisez clan on the paternal side had
come to the United States from France in the 1830s, traveled
upriver from New Orleans to Ohio, and settled down to
farming southeast of Cleveland. Germain's father, William
Joseph-universally known as "W.J."-worked on the family farm
as a child. Trained as a bookkeeper, he went to work as a
bookkeeper-accountant with an Ohio firm and remained there
some twenty years. In the 1920s the family moved to
Cleveland so that the children could attend Catholic
schools, and he became wholesale credit manager with a
manufacturer of major appliances. On September 30, 1929,
their youngest son was born, and on October 19 of that year
the stock market crashed. The appliance manufacturer
struggled on until 1933 but eventually the firm failed. One
of Grisez's earliest memories is of his father coming home
from his last day there.
Thereafter W.J. Grisez, like many other men in the
Depression, took whatever work he could get to support his
family-part-time bookkeeping for a succession of business
establishments, door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales, peddling
a mineral water from Toledo. All in all, he made a go of it.
On January 9,1915, W.J. Grisez had married Mary Catherine
Lindesmith, whose family was of German-Swiss stock. Her
education ended after the eighth grade. Her father, a
railroad switchman, had died in an accident, and thereafter
the 14-year-old girl was needed at home to help with the
younger children.
By current standards, Mary Catherine Lindesmith Grisez was
not a highly-educated woman; but, according to her son, "she
read so much that she was really quite well educated." This
reading included standard Catholic authors of the day-
Newman, Chesterton, Belloc-as well as the Bible, which she
knew much better than most Catholics. Her belief in learning
is reflected in the fact that, although the family was
hardly wealthy and had no tradition of extensive formal
education, much less scholarship, in its background, the
Grisez children received as much schooling-college in most
cases, graduate degrees in several-as they could benefit
from.
Germain attended a parochial school and Cathedral Latin
School and in both places found at least some able
instructors. At 14 he began working after school in the East
Cleveland public library, a job that expanded to full time
hours in the summers. That established a pattern of working
while attending school that would continue through his
graduate years at the University of Chicago, when he held a
full-time clerical job at night at the Federal Reserve Bank.
The encounter with Aquinas
Graduating from high school in 1947, Grisez entered
Cleveland's John Carroll University, run by the Jesuits. It
was there that, intellectually speaking, significant things
started happening for the young man.
In his sophomore year he encountered a youthful philosophy
professor, Marshall Boarman, who had received a master's
degree under Etienne Gilson at the University of Toronto and
become an ardent Thomist. This was an enthusiasm Boarman was
eager to share, not only in the classroom but outside,
organizing an informal Aquinas seminar for his better
students that convened weekly in the basement of a nearby
pub. There, over beer and potato chips, Germain began
reading St. Thomas.
Senior year brought one of those vocational epiphanies that
often come to serious-minded young people. Up until then,
Grisez had been mulling a career in journalism or law; he
also had attended philosophical gatherings outside the
sheltering Catholic environment of John Carroll and had
encountered a largely negative attitude toward Catholic
philosophy; and he was doing research for a bachelor's
thesis on "Art and Beauty in Aquinas," and, lacking indexes,
was skimming widely in St. Thomas. On Christmas morning of
1949, while he was sitting quietly in the family living
room, things came together. He remembers the moment:
I had been going through the four books of the <Commentary
on the 'Sentences" of Peter Lombard>. The end of the fourth
book is on the Last Things. Aquinas has quite a good
imaginative description of heaven there. I was very taken by
this, and I came to the conclusion that it would be a good
thing to go ahead and do philosophy-be a professional
philosopher and try to teach in a state university or a non-
Catholic university. A place where a lot of Catholic kids go
and don't have much of this offered to them and where there
are a lot of non-Catholics who don't have anybody to argue
with them about their faith or lack of it. You could do some
good in a place like that. I thought it would be a
worthwhile thing to do. But first there would be the long
slog of becoming a scholar. Aware that he had a great deal
to learn about his revered model, Thomas Aquinas, Grisez
concluded that the best place to start learning it would be
the house of studies conducted in River Forest, Illinois, by
the saint's brother Dominicans, many of them contributors to
a new three-volume translation with commentary of the <Summa
Theologiae> prepared under Dominican auspices. Today it is
common for lay people to study in Catholic seminaries, but
it was virtually unheard of then. How did he manage it? He
supposes his application to River Forest was accepted
because the Dominican reviewing it assumed that, sooner or
later, the applicant would end up in the Order. Whether for
that reason or simply out of a generous spirit (they are
mendicants, too), the Dominicans charged him nothing.
One day, departing from custom, the prior asked the young
layman to lunch in the refectory. Rising at the end of the
meal, the priest announced to the community, "This is the
first case in which a student in the <studium> has announced
he was getting married and remained a student in the
<studium>." Says Grisez, "I think he invited me to lunch so
he could make that joke."
Marriage and career
Germain had met Jeannette Selby two years earlier, in the
spring of 1949, at a parish dance. Soon they were dating
regularly, and by the summer of 1950 they knew they wanted
to marry; but the Korean war was on by then, Germain
expected to be drafted, and River Forest lay ahead even if
the Army did not. They decided to wait. In the year that
followed, living in a boarding house and attending school,
Germain was intensely lonely. Perhaps Jeannette was, too. On
June 9, 1951, "despite everything"-no money, years of
graduate school ahead, and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for
the marriage on the part of both families-they were married.
Germain was twenty-one.
As everyone who knows the Grisezs realizes, theirs is an
exceptionally close relationship in which the ideal of
complementarity-on each side a set of skills, attitudes, and
personality traits that balances and meshes harmoniously
with the other party's-is realized to an unusual degree.
Besides successfully carrying off her roles as wife, mother,
meticulous housekeeper, and admirable cook, Jeannette acts
as Germain's secretary, sounding-board, and commonsense
critic. God alone-literally-knows how much she has
contributed to his work, both directly and indirectly, over
the years.
Finishing up at River Forest, Grisez was still intent on
teaching philosophy in a non-Catholic school. That would
require getting a doctorate at such an institution, and the
University of Chicago was his choice. Given his interests,
he gravitated in particular toward Richard McKeon, an
eminent scholar of ancient and medieval philosophy who was
to exercise the greatest influence on him among his Chicago
professors.
Back then, though, Grisez had no ideas of going into ethics.
"I thought ethical theory was a vast, swampy area that
wasn't philosophically very interesting," he says. With
McKeon as mentor, he selected as his dissertation topic
"Basic Oppositions in Logical Theory." This involved
comparing <The Summary of the Whole of the Logic of
Aristotle>, an influential work that at one time was
incorrectly attributed to Aquinas and that contains an
implicit theory of knowledge and metaphysics, with Aquinas'
actual views, scattered through out his writings, and also
with William of Ockham's <Summary of Logic>. His aim in
pursuing this project was "to figure out how you do
metaphysics"-since it was metaphysics in which he was
professionally interested.
Still planning on a career in a non-Catholic school, he sent
off "probably hundreds" of inquiries to such institutions-
and ran into "a good deal of resistance to the idea of
hiring a Catholic who was a believer." That was demonstrated
in a particularly "brutal and grotesque" fashion, Grisez
recalls, at a well-known Midwestern school. After an
apparently successful interview, the philosophy chairman
drove him to the airport and there, in the coffee shop, put
one more casual yet crucial question about his religious
faith: "You don't really believe that stuff?"
"You bet your life I do."
"Then, I'm sorry, there's nothing here for you."
Reactions elsewhere were less bluntly expressed, but Grisez
got the message. Early in 1957 he sent applications to
twenty-five Catholic schools. Five job offers resulted.
Georgetown University proposed an assistant professorship at
five thousand dollars a year, and Grisez accepted.
Drawn toward ethical theory
By the time he received his PhD from Chicago, he had been
teaching at Georgetown for two years and the last of the
Grisezs' four sons had been born. Germain was now 29 years
old. With a doctorate in hand, he was eligible to teach on
the graduate level. The only graduate position then open at
Georgetown, though, was in ethical theory, and so in 1959 he
began working up that subject. Soon he was teaching two
graduate courses: one on St. Thomas' moral philosophy, the
other on the ethics of Aristotle and Kant. In these years he
also read widely in Protestant moral thinkers and engaged in
a lengthy dialogue with the eminent Princeton ethicist Paul
Ramsey, a Methodist, who often participated in summer
programs at Georgetown.
Now, too, Grisez was beginning to draw certain conclusions
about the version of ethics he found in Aquinas. He
explains:
He wasn't primarily interested in philosophy; he was
interested in doing theology, and you didn't have to have a
tight ethical theory and tight moral arguments in his day
because in general the big arguments weren't going on in the
area of ethics. So the theory in Aquinas is no more refined
and perfected than it needed to be, and it didn't have to be
very refined and perfected for his purposes. It's sound as
far as it goes and very suggestive, but it's not honed and
not worked out carefully. He's a gold mine of a starting-
place, he's got a lot of good ideas, but he doesn't have any
coherent overall theory of ethics, and he doesn't equip you
to argue the issues and solve the problems as they've been
posed in modern times.
As for ethical thinking since Thomas, Grisez renders a tough
judgment: "It's a lot less impressive and lot less
philosophically viable than what you've got in Aquinas."
Grisez began to think he might be able to do something about
that. He had been teaching the utilitarians Bentham and Mill
in an undergraduate course, and had come to the realization
that they were psychological determinists: "What you choose
is determined by what looks most appealing." To hold this
view, however, places the would-be ethicist in a rather
strange position, since if what people choose is determined
for them, then they have no freedom of choice. What Bentham
and Mill were in fact seeking, Grisez saw, was a "strategy
for socially controlling people" so that they would act in
society's best interests.
These insights set him musing about why psychological
determinism is a false basis for ethics. When making
choices, he observed:
it just isn't the case that one alternative is better or
more appealing or seems better to you. That is <not> the
experience of choice. The difficult thing about choice is
that <both> alternatives are "more appealing" in <different>
respects, and you need to choose because the goods and the
bads don't commensurate-you gain something and lose
something from either alternative. So the idea that the
right act is the act that's going to have the better payoff
is mistaken. You can't know that, and if you could know it,
there wouldn't be any free choice. Any kind of ethical
theory that tries to derive the rightness or wrongness of
action from the calculation of good and bad consequences has
got to be wrong.
The contraception Issue as a key
Around this time, the early 1960s, the birth-control debate
was heating up in the Catholic Church. To the extent Grisez
had given the matter any thought, he supposed that
"contraception maybe isn't always wrong." In his thorough
way, nevertheless, he read Pius XI's 1930 encyclical <Casti
Connubii> in which the Pope unequivocally condemned
artificial contraception. "It looks like the Church's
teaching is nailed down and cast in concrete on this," he
told himself. But what did that mean for the ethical theory
he was beginning to conceptualize?
Wrestling with these questions, he drew a diagram
representing "different aspects of the well-being of the
person;" it was one's attitude of being either for or
against these, he had begun to think, that was crucial to
the moral question. Morality lay in the relationship between
choice and action and the good of the human person: to be
"for" the different aspects of the well-being and full-being
of persons was to be "loving;" to be "against" these human
goods was to be "unloving."
In 1963 Louis Dupre, a Georgetown colleague in philosophy
and Flemish Belgian who had studied at the University of
Louvain, returned from a visit to that important continental
center of Catholic thought with the interesting suggestion
that contraception is not always wrong. Grisez and Dupre,
who later was to teach at Yale, discussed that at lunch one
day, and after lunch Grisez invited the other philosopher
into his office and showed him the diagram of human goods.
"We argued all afternoon," he recalls.
A few months later, Dupre was invited to speak about
contraception to a Catholic lay group that met at
Georgetown. Grisez was asked to comment, and explained why
he considered Dupre's arguments unsound. His remarks drew a
"ferociously nasty reaction" from some members of the
audience to which his faculty colleagues raised no
objection. He recalls the incident as "the beginning of a
kind of personal antagonism. I got mad."
In the spring of 1964 Grisez had attended the annual
convention of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association, held in Kansas City. By then the contraception
controversy was going strong. Grisez found hardly any of his
fellow Catholic philosophers interested in defending the
Church's teaching; it occurred to him that he should further
develop his own thinking on the subject and publish an
article. But he hesitated. If he went into print defending
Catholic teaching on birth control, he could forget about
teaching in a non-Catholic school. (This was no idle dream.
By now he was acquiring a modest reputation, had taught a
graduate course in medieval philosophy for a year at the
University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and had received
an invitation, which he declined, to be visiting professor
at a large university in the Midwest.)
"I decided, 'Well, I ought to write the article on
contraception,"' he recalls. After two weeks of concentrated
effort in the spring of 1964 he had produced the manuscript
of a book. He sent it to the Bruce Publishing Company in
Milwaukee, a Catholic house whose principal editor, William
E. May (now an eminent theologian in his own right as well
as a close friend and Grisez enthusiast), had earlier
invited him to write on the subject. The volume was
published in January, 1965, as <Contraception and the
Natural Law.>
Its core was the laying-out of Grisez's emerging ethical
theory and its application to the question of contraception.
In much over-simplified terms, the argument is this: The
choice to contracept is a choice against the human good of
procreation and as such can never be justified, since it is
never morally right to turn one's will against a good of the
person, not even for the sake of some other good. The
argument was developed meticulously, accompanied by a
devastating critique of inadequate "natural law" arguments
against contraception (e.g., the "perverted faculty") and a
similar critique of the case some Catholic moralists had
lately begun to make for the practice (or at least for "the
Pill"-the new oral contraceptive-in the confusion of those
days sometimes thought to be morally distinguishable from
older forms of contraception). The book is dedicated to
William Joseph Grisez and Mary Catherine Lindesmith Grisez,
"who did not prevent my life."
The "birth-control commission"
Canny readers recognized in <Contraception and the Natural
Law> a new and potentially important voice, and this was
reflected in the reviews. "In the modern controversy [over
contraception]," observed the Jesuit moralist John C. Ford,
"Grisez's work is the first philosophical attempt I have
seen which makes a substantial, constructive contribution to
an understanding of the Church's natural-law position." In a
long "Special Review" in the <American Ecclesiastical
Review>, the Jesuit theologian Richard McCormick called the
volume "an unusual book," and said "the quality of Grisez's
work is a guarantee that we shall profit enormously by his
further research in this area." In light of their subsequent
careers- Grisez as an innovative defender of received
Catholic teaching, McCormick as a major figure in Catholic
proportionalist dissent-there is a certain poignancy in the
inscription on Grisez's file copy of this review: "To
Germain-with affection and admiration. Dick, SJ."
Pope John XXIII in 1963 had established a Commission for the
Study of Problems of the Family, Population, and Birth Rate
to advise the Vatican Secretariat of State on positioning
the Holy See as a participant in the international
discussion of population. In June 1964, Pope Paul VI
enlarged the commission and expanded its mandate. As he did,
the internal Catholic debate over birth control burst into
the open. Was the Pope contemplating a change in the
Church's teaching? Might not the Pill at least be approved?
With change in the air, thanks to the Second Vatican Council
then underway, the very existence of the Birth Control
Commission (as it became known immediately and forever)
seemed to suggest intriguing possibilities.
In the spring of 1965 the expanded commission held its first
plenary session in Rome. One of its members returned to the
United States and shared startling news with a number of
interested parties, among them Grisez: about a third of the
theologians on the commission held that the Church's
position on birth control had to change, another third
believed that at least it was subject to change, and the
rest argued that the teaching as it stood was true and
therefore could not change. Grisez's informant also shared
with him the meeting's written report. Having read it,
Grisez called Father John Ford and said, "Let's talk."
Perhaps the most distinguished of the pre-Vatican II
American moralists, John C. Ford, SJ, was then teaching at
the Catholic University of America. He had read Grisez's
contraception manuscript before publication and, as noted,
had favorably reviewed the book. In expanding the birth-
control commission, Pope Paul had named him to it.
From June 1965, on, Grisez collaborated closely with Ford on
commission-related work. The collaboration continued after
the Pope, in early 1966, reconstituted the body, naming the
non-bishops (theologians, physicians, demographers)
<periti>-advisors-and restricting membership to sixteen
cardinals and bishops. Grisez spent June of that year in
Rome working with Father Ford-"drafting stuff, criticizing
stuff." (One of the documents they produced was a rebuttal
of the document that in time would be called the
commission's "majority report" favoring change. Of the
commission documents that have turned up in print to date
Grisez says dourly that they are "only a small and not very
representative part" of the whole-understandably so, since
what to publish and what to hold back has been determined by
the supporters of contraception. )
Pope Paul's own position
All this points to an obvious question: What really was the
role of Pope Paul VI? Grisez has no doubt that the Pope
believed from the start that contraception is wrong. "What
he wasn't sure about was whether the Pill is a contraceptive
in the traditional, condemned sense," he explains. Worried
about overpopulation in some areas, Paul thought oral
contraception might be a solution, and therefore was
"inclined to approve it if possible." Nevertheless, Grisez
says, as Vatican II was nearing its end in later 1965, Paul
VI wanted <Gaudium et Spes> [the Pastoral Constitution on
the Church in the Modern World] to say clearly
"contraception is always wrong." That would leave the
question about the Pill for him to decide. He had Ford and a
bishop draft some amendments, and they were sent over to the
Council commission around Thanksgiving time. Then there was
a big scramble: "Can we put these in our own words?" By the
time they got done doing that, they had changed the meaning
of the amendments so that it was no longer clear they were
saying contraception is always wrong. So <Gaudium et Spes>
came out rather ambiguous in the end.
What the document says, in fact, is that the "sons of the
Church" are "forbidden to use methods disapproved by the
teaching authority of the Church in its interpretation of
the divine law;" a footnote here cites <Casti Connubii> and
two allocutions by Pope Pius XII. The footnote adds that
"certain questions requiring further and more careful
investigation" had been turned over by Paul to a commission,
and the Pope would announce his decision in due course.
Thus: "With the teaching of the magisterium standing as it
is, the Council has no intention of proposing concrete
solutions at the moment." Whatever all this was supposed to
mean, it naturally had the practical effect of inflaming
speculation.
Long before the publication of <Humanae Vitae>, Grisez had
concluded that, just as contraception had triumphed in
secular society, so, practically speaking, it also would
triumph-indeed, already was well on its way to triumphing-
among Catholics, regardless of what the Pope finally said.
He began research for two more books, one on abortion and
the other on nuclear deterrence. He was working on the
abortion book in the summer of 1968 when <Humanae Vitae>
came out. Pope Paul had reached his decision. The
condemnation of contraception stood, with no exceptions for
the Pill or anything else.
Earlier that year, attending an abortion conference at
Louvain, Grisez had found the groundwork for theological
dissent in the event of such an outcome already laid in
Europe. It quickly became clear that dissent in the United
States also would be widespread and fierce. The Archdiocese
of Washington, DC rapidly became a center and focal point
for this dissent-because of the concentration of pro-
contraception theologians there, because a substantial
number of archdiocesan priests immediately announced that
they intended to set aside the teaching of <Humanae Vitae>
in their pastoral practice, and because Cardinal Patrick
O'Boyle of Washington was a staunch defender of the
encyclical. O'Boyle, a crusty Irish-American with a gruff
demeanor and a warm heart, took an uncomplicated view of the
situation: the Pope had solemnly restated the clear teaching
of the Church, and it was his duty as a bishop to uphold
that teaching and see that his priests did the same. O'Boyle
told the dissenting priests that they were forbidden to
preach, teach, or hear confessions in his archdiocese.
Showdown In Washington
O'Boyle called in John Ford to help, and Ford called in
Grisez. Within a week the two men had a pastoral letter
ready to go in the cardinal's name. It was Friday afternoon.
The chancery staff, accustomed to a less frantic pace,
maintained that the document could not possibly be issued
until the following week. Grisez argued that it needed to be
out that weekend. The cardinal agreed, and the staff
suddenly found ways to get the job done. Afterward, the two
men were left alone in O'Boyle's office. Grisez, his voice
growing husky, recalls: "He said, 'You'd make a better
bishop than I am,' and he put his pectoral cross on me. I
handed it back to him and said, 'No, you're the bishop and
I'll help.' And then we all went over to the Mayflower Hotel
and had dinner."
At O'Boyle's urging, Grisez was given a leave of absence
from Georgetown to work full-time for him. Ford having
returned to his duties in Massachusetts, Grisez was the
principal theological advisor on matters pertaining to the
birth control controversy in Washington. His work involved
extensive negotiations with the dissenting priests,
critiquing the National Conference of Catholic Bishops'
collective pastoral letter <Human Life in Our Day>
(published in November 1968, in response to <Humanae Vitae>)
helping to establish a new national entity, the Human Life
Foundation, to foster the understanding and practice of
Natural Family Planning, and drafting replies for the
cardinal to the "piles and piles of letters" that poured in.
Grisez was able to return to work on the abortion book in
the spring of 1969 and to resume teaching at Georgetown in
the fall; but he continued part-time work for Cardinal
O'Boyle until 1972.
In time, the dissenting Washington priests-those of them,
that is, who had elected to remain in active ministry-
appealed their case to the Roman Rota, the Church's chief
appellate court. Pope Paul removed the case from the Rota
and turned it over to the Congregation for the Clergy for
what Grisez calls an "administrative-pastoral solution."
Would it be fair, I ask, to say that the rug was pulled out
from under Cardinal O'Boyle? Instead of answering directly,
Grisez notes that the Washington dispute did not concern
theology as such but centered on "faculties"-under what
conditions the dissenting priests, now dwindled in number
from 54 to a remnant of about 15, would be allowed to
preach, teach, and hear confessions in the archdiocese.
Responses to <Humanae Vitae> on the part of bishops'
conferences and individual bishops were now in, and the
picture they produced was one of "open, obvious conflict
among the bishops about contraception and conscience, the
authority of the teaching, and so on," Grisez notes. Instead
of risking further, and possibly worse, conflict by
confronting this state of affairs, he says, Pope Paul
apparently decided to calm things down.
Against this background the Washington case came to its
inglorious conclusion. The Congregation for the Clergy
apparently was instructed to find a pastoral solution. The
result was a statement that seemed to say all the right
things but gave the game away by requiring restoration of
the faculties if the priests merely agreed to insist that
Catholics whom they dealt with in the matter of
contraception be "guided by objective moral norms." One
night shortly before its publication Grisez argued with
Cardinal O'Boyle until well past midnight, urging him to fly
to Rome to remonstrate with the Pope and even threaten
resignation if need be. "I just can't do that with the
Pope," O'Boyle said. Says Grisez: "That was the sad ending
of that episode."
Keeping perspective
Grisez is unusually detached- even disengaged-about such
matters. Using a formulation that students of his work would
recognize as an element of his moral theory, he says now:
"My overall project isn't that I've got a particular state
of affairs in mind that I want to accomplish." It was not
always that way. He recalls leaving the May 1968 abortion
conference at Louvain deeply discouraged by the evidence of
dissent he had found among Catholic intellectuals there, not
only on birth control but even, to some extent, on abortion.
On the way home he stayed overnight with a priest-friend in
London.
I woke up very early with the light flooding the room, and I
was thinking about this. And it occurred to me, "Well, the
whole things is providential, and you can't really figure
out where what you're doing fits in or what good it's going
to do. But that shouldn't really concern you too much. It's
all going to come out right in the end." And beginning to
think of things that way made it possible for me to do
everything I've done since then.
If that sounds Pollyannish, Grisez's view of the state of
the Church is a blunt, harsh corrective. Conditions in
Catholicism worldwide, he believes, are very bad, with a
kind of "artificial unity" masking confusion and dissent not
only on moral questions but on fundamental dogmas like
Jesus' bodily resurrection and the Real Presence of Christ
in the Eucharist. The problem extends not just to the simple
faithful and the theologians but to people in authority.
Much depends on the next pope.
Meanwhile the Church is in crisis, and the condition of
moral theology is particularly bad. Pope John Paul II, to
his credit, is "dealing constantly with morality as a matter
of truth"-for example, in <Veritatis Splendor>--while also
speaking of Christian humanism. Says Grisez appreciatively:
"That's light years away from how it would have been looked
at in the old days, and I don't think it's going to go away.
If the Church gets itself straightened out..." As for his
own efforts: "What I'm doing is coming along and getting
picked up in a few places." Still, the overall picture is
bleak. The renewal of moral theology for which Vatican II
called "isn't happening." And: "On the whole, dissenting
moral theology is prevailing around the world. If I had been
thinking about fighting and winning some kind of war, the
whole thing would be completely impossible. You just
couldn't do it. I don't have the status, I don't have the
power. I haven't' accomplished that much."
Further complicating matters is the neo-Platonist strain of
other-worldliness in Christianity against which secular
humanism so disastrously rebelled several centuries back.
More and more it's nonbelievers who set the framework,
determine the agenda, establish the public culture... If
there is no God, you've got to be a consequentialist and do
your best. That's not a bad position for somebody who
doesn't believe in anything. And an awful lot of people who
think they believe in God really don't believe in anything,
because it doesn't have any practical effect. Whereas faith
is telling you, "You're cooperating with God but you hardly
know what his plan is." And you've got to do his will
without seeing good results-not killing the baby, not
contracepting, sticking to a marriage when it seems
impossible. It's terribly difficult... If Christianity is
going to survive at all, it's going to survive among people
who are very tough and very clear-headed, and there don't
seem to be many of these around.
Time has run out. "No one will ever accuse us of optimism,"
I say.
"No," Germain says, "I'm afraid not. I'm not optimistic."
Russell Shaw is director of public information for the
Knights of Columbus in Washington, DC. This article is
excerpted from a profile that will appear in Ethics,
Metaphysics, and Politics: Essays on Grisez, edited by Dr.
Robert George, forthcoming in the fall of 1996 from
Georgetown University Press.
This article appeared in the March 1996 issue of "The
Catholic World Report," P.O. Box 6718, Syracuse, NY 13217-
7912, 800-825-0061. Published monthly except bimonthly
August/September at $39.95 per year.
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