From thinking like a Catholic lawyer to a Catholic theologian
But many of our parishes in the English-speaking world are failing to help everyone take the next step. Quite the opposite, we just start teaching the word “no” with more complex phrases and applying it to more difficult moral situations. For too many of us, faith feels like a spiritual checklist and a legal code that must be followed at all costs.
Many of our parishes are training us to be mini-Catholic lawyers. Don’t get me wrong, the rules are extremely important, but do they reflect the end goal?
Being only a few weeks away from the publication of my book Theology for the Unwanted, I wanted to offer a lengthier reflection on how we are called to go deeper in the faith. To see with the eyes of God rather than the eyes of a court. I’m advocating for a shift to a more freeing, but more difficult standard of a theologian.
Beyond the Checklist: Becoming “Children of the Day” According to Saint Paul
Professor Enrichetta Cesarale, a biblical scholar at the Gregorian University in Rome offers a beautiful starting point for our Christian transformation. She highlights a powerful image from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians (1 Thess 5:5) where he speaks of both children of the light and children of the day. You might think that’s a redundant phrase…
Imagine the dawn each morning: the light of the sun dispels the darkness from our lives. But the day by itself isn’t a mere instant. When you wake up and have the whole day ahead of you, it’s an invitation to do something with the time the Lord has given you.
Professor Cesarale’s insight as I read it is an invitation to move past our legalistic tendencies. Holiness isn’t like flipping a light switch, moving from OFF to ON. It’s not about a single moment of rule-following. The day and our lives are often messy. They are a process of seizing the day and becoming everything we were made for by God.
We are not simply meant to live under rules, but to work toward becoming something. You become a child of the day as you start taking those bold steps toward a life focused on finding God in your messy life.
How the Law by itself Falls Short
To understand why this shift is so crucial, it’s helpful to look back at a previous era of moral theology. Professor Diego Alonso-Lasheras from the same university in Rome, has critiqued the methods found before Vatican II. Looking at the widely used “Compendio de Teologial Moral (Arregui-Zalba) as his example, he points out the limitations of a canon law first approach.
In older times, we treated moral theology as a system of rules, especially for confessors. Imagine a massive book where 1/3 of its pages were dedicated to law, the ten commandments and church rules. The focus on justice was largely individual and especially focused on contracts and property. It overlooked pressing social issues of the time—the things that most parishioners were probably concerned about—and turned morality into something of a bureaucracy rather than theological or mystical in nature.
Take a look at the concept of conscience. According to Professor Alonso-Lasheras, it was narrowly defined as a mechanism to apply the law to a specific case (“a proximate practical judgement”). Reading that makes me feel like a machine rather than a being created in the image and likeness of God. Nowadays, we use a God-centered vision that was articulated in Gaudium et Spes (GS, 16) which presents the conscience as a sacred inner sanctuary where we encounter God’s voice.
Similarly, the sacraments were often reduced to disciplinary practices and rituals. Think of the detailed rules for celebrating the Mass and just how much real estate your parish bulletin dedicates to explaining what the Lenten Fast is every year.
In earlier times, we prioritized helping people avoid sin at the expense of teaching people how to search for and find God. We spent so much time on defining and explaining mortal sin that we spent comparatively little time on fostering virtue.
The recipe for becoming fully human and finding God
So if we’re moving beyond the Catholic lawyer mindset, what exactly are we moving toward? For me, it starts with understanding my own fundamental identity. We as humans are moral agents because we are created in the image and likeness of God.
Canon law, rules, and discipline are like the recipe. For any chef, having a recipe is important. The goal of the recipe is to help fully bake the ingredients into whatever the chef intended them to be.
Think about chocolate for a second. Centuries ago, it was often more acidic and prepared more simply than it is today. Over time, we’ve not only developed better recipes (and ways of preparing cocoa), we’ve come to understand the complexity of the ingredients themselves. Our best chefs did not understand cocoa and it’s diverse flavors and how they interact with other ingredients in the way that we do now.
Not to be silly, but we too as humans are coming to understand ourselves better. Does it make sense to blindly follow the old recipe just because it was trusted for so long?
Catholicism has many ways to deal with these types of developments and always has. My hope is that we can continue to work on this in a unified spirit.
To become a theologian is to move beyond merely following the recipe. It’s also about understanding the nature of the ingredients—ourselves and our brothers and sisters. Each of us made in the Image of God and reliant on the graces freely given in the sacraments to help us in this process of transformation and conversion.
Sources:
Alonso-Lasheras, D. Moral Theology at the Dawn of Vatican II. A BRIEF PRESENTATION OF ARREGUI-ZALBA’S COMPENDIO DE TEOLOGÍA MORAL
Cesarale, E. «Figli della luce e figli del giorno» (1Ts 5,5): il fondamento kerygmatico dell’essere Cristiani. Studia Bobolanum. https://doi.org/10.30439/2020.2.10
