The Pope of Moral Theology

What’s so great about Pope Saint John Paul II? Beside the fact that he is extremely consistent with the teachings of the Popes who came before him—which truly ought to be the modus operandi of every Pope—and beside many other pertinent facts of his papacy, there is the fact that he has almost single-handedly renewed the face of moral theology. Somehow, moral theology—it seems—had become an adjunct, an accessory, merely one of those “required courses” at Catholic colleges and seminaries. But now, every Catholic student and seminarian who knows the mind and heart and legacy of Pope John Paul II will want to study and implement moral theology, that is, the moral teaching of Christ and the Catholic Church, into his life and the life of each one whom he serves by offering the Gospel of Jesus the Christ. He will not need a requirement to motivate him in the matter. He will be like St Paul, who is morally compelled to preach the Holy Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The point of the Holy Father’s renewal of moral theology is well-made by Monsignor William B. Smith:

Conventional Catholic moral teaching was for some time seen as almost indistinguishable from canonical discipline. In many seminaries, both subjects were taught by the same teacher. During his pontificate, John Paul has overseen the promulgation of a new Code of Canon Law for the Western Church—Codex Iuris Canonici (1983). … It is thus all the more remarkable that amid the canonical achievement, John Paul II did not leave moral theology as an adjunct of canon law but renewed it by returning to the “sacred sources” of sacred theology, especially Sacred Scripture. [William B. Smith, "John Paul II's Seminal Contributions to Moral Theology" in Geoffrey Gneuhs, editor, The Legacy of Pope John Paul II: His Contribution to Catholic Thought(New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2000) 40-41]

Pope John Paul II says so himself in Veritatis Splendor, his “moral masterpiece on fundamental moral theology”(Ibid., 40). The saintly Pope writes:

The specific purpose of the present encyclical is this: to set forth, with regard to the problems being discussed, the principles of a moral teaching based on Sacred Scripture and the living Apostolic Tradition, and at the same time to shed light on the presuppositions and consequences of the dissent which that teaching has met (Veritatis Splendor, no. 5).

Indeed, the Holy Spirit is renewing the face of the earth.

The Ineffable Mercy of God

Western Civilization is toppling because she has abandoned her roots: “public and private moral virtue and respect for the natural [moral] law” and a belief—at time implicit and at other times explicit—in the one and only God. Governments would do well to look to ancient Rome for guidance:

Meanwhile Rome had developed a remarkably well constructed system of checks and balances to prevent the domination of their government either by the patrician class … or by the kind of popular assembly whose inconstancy had doomed Athens. As we shall have more than ample opportunity to see in the course of this history, even the best political structure is of very little value without public and private moral virtue and respect for the natural law; but all this the people of the Roman republic had, in an impressively high degree (Warren H. Carroll, The Founding of Christendom, 216, Emphasis mine.).

God watches over his worldwide family and allowed the Romans a chance to develop their potential and set the stage as it were for the Incarnation of the Son of God in the fullness of time.

These early Roman moral qualities and the system of government of the early Roman republic, complementing each other, laid the foundation for their eventual dominion over the Western civilized world, though not until Rome had been tested and annealed in the crucible of the Punic Wars with sinister Carthage could this potential be realized (Ibid.216).

In his monumental work, The Everlasting Man, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, points to the magnificence of Divine Providence in the struggle that left its mark on the rest of history:

It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic wars if, in after ages, things divine descended at least upon human things and not inhuman. … -- G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 154-155, Emphasis mine.