Challenge of a tradition
Hehir, J. Bryan
Church/world watch Challenge of a tradition J. Bryan Hehir Anniversaries CAN BE observed in strikingly different ways; the quality of the celebration tests a community's understanding of what it...
...The latter attitude implicitly or explicitly attributes to the content of the tradition a degree of specificity or sophistication which is simply not in the texts...
...Examples abound in the tradition of both ethical and empirical complexity and ambiguity...
...The reason may be the lack of adequate analytical tools...
...David Hollen-bach's superb study, Claims In Conflict (Paulist Press, 1979...
...The moral principle of noncombatant immunity, threatened by both superpowers, is clear...
...As Coleman observed, taking history seriously means more than being aware of the socio-political setting in which the encyclicals were written...
...Following the lead of biblical scholars, systematic theologians and moralists are developing interpretive methods for a critical understanding of church documents...
...On the question of human rights the strength of the Catholic moral vision is manifested in an endorsement of a spectrum of both political and economic rights...
...they are, after all, documents designed for a worldwide community which encounters "the social question" in radically diverse forms...
...Such a test is with us in 1981, the ninetieth anniversary of the first social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, and the corresponding anniversaries of the contributions of Pius XI, John XXIII, and Paul VI to the tradition begun by Leo XIII...
...The paper was printed in the June 4 Origins, the documentary service of NC News...
...Such a critical theory should be addressed to the moral concepts used in the encyclicals and to the empirical assessments implied in or required by them...
...How one evaluates the role of this empirical judgment can shape the ethic of intention derived from the traditional moral principles...
...J. BRYAN HEHIRJ...
...the quality of the celebration tests a community's understanding of what it is commemorating...
...As a guide for celebrations, the paper given in May at Catholic University by John Coleman, S.J., sets a very high standard and provides a challenging perspective...
...Recognizing this fact does not necessarily lead to a plea for more specificity from the encyclicals themselves...
...BRYAN HEHIR...
...The framework is an extraordinarily rich and resilient one...
...It will be strengthened not diluted by critical commentary...
...Each of the specific claims is valid in itself, but there is little guidance about how a society is to be structured to guarantee these valid but competing moral claims...
...in the process he articulated a set of principles for assessing the assets and limitations of the Catholic social vision...
...Here again the social teachings provide a framework for debate but hardly an explicit answer...
...Official Catholic teaching, e.g...
...The debate on nuclear deterrence, now being revived in church circles in the United States and England, illustrates how empirical data must be assessed if moral judgments are to be made...
...Sensitivity to history requires the development of a body of critical commentary for the social teaching comparable to the role played by form criticism in biblical studies...
...The example of how a critical commentary can enhance the tradition is fortunately available on the human-rights question in Fr...
...The relationship between a threat to use the deterrent, the intention to use it, and the consequences of whether a credible threat really may prevent its use is not explored in the official Catholic teaching . The judgment of whether the threat does help prevent use is an empirical judgment...
...Also clear is the moral rule of practice, that a firmly held intention to do wrong, even if not executed, is blameworthy...
...One of the many points of the Coleman address worth pursuing is the need for a greater sense of the relativity or contingency of the social tradition...
...Commenting on his a'ssignment to use an historical perspective, Coleman notes: "History is notoriously a rel-ativizer of absolute values, authorities, and our often cherished myths and idealizations...
...As a consequence the reception of this material in the Catholic community too often is marked by disregard of its contents on the one hand or by literalism on' the other...
...Indeed if one looks at the spectrum of theological disciplines, the absence of a critical perspective is striking...
...The standard commentaries on the encyclical tradition seldom manifest sensitivity to this reality...
...This year's anniversaries remind us of the tradition's possibilities and challenge our use of it...
...Gaudium et Spes, is less than lucid on the moral details of deterrence...
...Few comparable studies exist for the social teachings...
...History is a locus of inconsistencies and compromises as often as of logical coherence...
...The need is for a body of interpretive and applied theory which uses the social teaching as a framework for social policy but not a blueprint...
...Coleman was assigned the task of providing an historical context for understanding the teaching of the social encyclicals...
...Activists and academics alike have the opportunity to show how we hold and are held by the social tradition...
...Hollenbach shows the strength of the moral vision in the tradition, but also moves to the question of how vision becomes policy in specific choices among rights...
...The trade-off between freedom and order, liberty and justice, and even between justice and peace is seldom explicitly acknowledged and never specifically adjudicated in the encyclicals...
Vol. 108 • September 1981 • No. 17
