“We pray that tonight’s prayer will help ensure that the curtain between the sacred and the secular, ripped apart by Jesus from the cross, will never be the object of religious mending!”

Joan of Arc’s family gathered once again for soup, service and spiritual sustenance and a prayer service offered to the community by the SJA choir. The choir sang beautiful Ionic music often inviting those present to sing along. This music comes to us from the Iona Community, founded in 1938 around Glasglow, Scotland as people came together to seek new ways of living the Gospel in today’s world. Deeply rooted in Celtic spirituality, Iona attempted to marry peacemaking, political engagement and prayer. The music of the community is drawn from diverse parts of the world from Ireland to South Africa to the Far East.

Anna Mae Vagle led the choir and the rest of us in singing simple, inspirational songs with melodies based on traditional South African tunes, J.S. Bach and John Bell. Dan Chouinard accompanied the choir on piano. In between songs, Joan Riebel and Patrick Stevens read prayers of justice and poems of love. The final song was “God to Enfold You” sung to the J.S. Bach tune Enfolding.

“God to enfold you, Christ to uphold you, Spirit to keep you in heaven’s sight; So may God grace you, heal and embrace you, Lead you through darkness into the light.”

The reverberations of the final song stayed with each person as we walked out into the night.

Conscience and Character: The Catholic Moral Tradition

Some of us stayed after the prayer service to discuss “Conscience and Character: The Catholic Moral Tradition” led by Tom Smith-Myott. Tom began by asking the rhetorical question—Why do we need moral theology? We need it because life is complex and we all have moments when don’t know what to do. Faced with a situation and a range of values, we must discern how to live and make choices. Moral theology guides us in this process yet it is an art, not a science. Ultimately, the focus is on becoming fully human is not about keeping any one set of rules. Moral theology helps us find the answer to the following question: What is God enabling and requiring me to be and do?

Tom began with an overview of the history of Catholic moral tradition.

Pre-Vatican II, the moral journey had become divorced from the spiritual journey. Catholics were burdened with a heavily legalistic view of being moral; sin was breaking the rules. This pattern had occurred before in our religious history. The Hebrews originally saw the covenant as a guide to life. By Jesus’ time, the covenant had become a legalistic burden, one that Jesus freed people from. Jesus did not preach adherence to the law. He preached compassion, justice, love and that the Kingdom of God is in the here and now. Jesus preached a way of living; not a specific set of beliefs. People in the early church were called simply, “followers of the way”. For these people, sin was not being faithful to living and practicing love.

But by the middle ages, the church had compiled summaries of repeated teachings and began to create laws. The focus shifted from living and practicing love to avoiding sin. During this era, Irish monks crisscrossed the land, bringing their monastic based tradition of reconciliation and confession to the people. Yet divorced from the monastic environment, reconciliation lost its connection with spiritual direction and spirituality. In the 1500’s Luther pointed out church flaws and the church made changes. The church reformed, but ended up with a legal system. Seminaries were created to educate clergy about sins and the specific penance for each sin. Sin became breaking the rules. Obedience to church law became the overriding ethic.

The ethic of obedience and the legalistic system of sin continued until the 20th century. Morality was separate from spirituality and distant from Scripture. Vatican II reconnected morality with scripture and individual spirituality. In the Declaration of Religious Freedom, the church declared:


“In all his/her activity, a person is bound to follow his/her conscience faithfully in order that he/she may come to God, for whom he/she was created. It follow that he/she is not to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his/her conscience. Nor, on the other hand, is he/she to be restrained from acting in according with his/her conscience…”

Moral theology shifted focus from law and obedience to relationship and character. The focus on relationship also shifted the sacrament from confession to reconciliation. People still need to focus on wrongs but not as a way to get to heaven but as a way to live in right relationship with God today. Theologians write that morality moved from teleological—how to achieve ends, to deontological—how to fulfill duty and obligations, to relational—taking into account the ends, the means and the circumstances.

Tom described the foundations of a moral person: character and conscience.

Character is who we are becoming. Conscience is our inner sanctuary where we are alone with God. Character gives us our sense of self, integrity, and consistency and determines how we accept responsibility for our actions. Conscience provides us with a basic sense of responsibility, moral reasoning, and how we decide and act.

Character and conscience are bounded by freedom and knowledge. Both are essential; both are limited. We each have the freedom of self-determination, the freedom to be open or closed to the mystery of life. There are impediments to our freedom: unconscious motives, peer pressure, prejudice, chemical dependency, ignorance, passions and fears, blind habits, mass media, mental illness, poverty, etc. Our spiritual challenge is to become as free as we can be, to get to know ourselves in our entirety despite these impediments.

Knowledge is both conceptual and evaluative. Conceptual knowledge is intellectual knowledge. Evaluative knowledge comes from the heart, from intuition. It is felt knowledge rooted in experience and reflection. As Pascal says, “The heart has reasons that reason does not know.” Moral imagination comes from knowledge but paradoxically, as our knowledge increases, so does our awareness of how much we don’t know.

Tom discussed how we can determine if an action is moral:

To determine the moral meaning of an action, theologians use the 3-font principle. This principle states that the moral meaning of an action comes from three sources.
Intention: The ends, purpose or value the person is trying to live out
Action: The means used to obtain the ends
Circumstances: What’s the whole story?
We also look for a balance and a proportionality of three things:
The means cannot cause more harm than necessary to achieve the value or ends.
No less harmful way exists.
The means used to achieve the value will not undermine that value.
Tom’s last section brought it all together with moral discernment:
The question we ask is “what’s happening?” in addition to “what’s my duty or obligation?” and “what’s my goal?”

Rules still have their place. They are guidelines for us, showing us how to do good and become good and include both laws and norms. Positive laws are rules of behavior with sanctions enacted for the common good. Norms are statements attempting to express moral truths and values. Laws often have sanctions; norms do not.

In the end, we are looking for reasonable confidence, not certitude. To help us find this confidence, we can turn to the church. The church helps us in our quest to do and be good by helping to shape our moral character through formation, by telling the stories that form our moral traditions, and by providing forums for the community to deliberate moral issues.
Laura D'Ambrosio joined St. Joan of Arc in Spring 2003 and delights in the inspiring services, incredible programs and the caring, loving people she has met at St. Joan’s. In addition to her career in business analysis, training and project management, she is a spiritual director, retreat leader and writer about spiritual journeys. When not at a computer, you can find her outside in any weather with her Siberian Husky, reading or traveling to wild, solitary places.
David Rotert is a communications technician. He, his wife Sue and two boys used to walk to SJA each Sunday. They since moved to St Louis Park, but are now happy to make the drive. David and his family have been attending SJA for over 10 years. You may see him serving host or wine on Sundays, and doing the readings whenever he can help. He is also always game for a good philosophical discussion. David can be reached at dsrotert@worldnet.att.net.

In the end, Tom told us, “God does not expect us to do what we cannot do.” Those present learned a great deal about the history, terminology, and methods used in the Catholic moral tradition.



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