Liberating Conscience by Anne E Patrick

...Its appeal to the true as absolute, universally applicable, and unchanging provided a structure of mutual support for the ec-clesiology that proposed it...

...Consult the approved authors," was a standard phrase by which bishops and popes remanded inquiries...

...That turmoil is best understood, I think, not through particular issues like sexuality, birth control, or reproductive technology, but rather through something more fundamental, that is, the ec-clesiological function of moral theology...

...and a regard for moral truth not as already-out- there-revealed-given, but as the object of a lifelong quest of critical inquiry...

...In these past centuries, moral theology was marked by an intolerance of circumstances, subjectivity, particularity, and doubt...

...a sensitivity to the function of language and narrative in our lives...

...After decades of moralists writing essays (Joseph Fuchs and Richard Mc-Cormick, for instance, each pens articles and after several years collates them), Patrick's work gives us a sense that the extraordinary turmoil that has marked moral theology might be coming to an end...

...My only complaint is that she settles for the classical virtues without proposing new ones...

...James Keenan, S.J., teaches at the Western Jesuit School of Theology...

...They occasionally commented on some neuralgic issues like birth control, abortion, and homosexuality, but for the most part they dealt with fundamental questions, reconstructing their own field of inquiry...

...Those priests recognized in their moral theologians an extension of the hierarchy, for the moralists applied the teaching of the tradition to the contemporary situation with the same public sense of power and certainty as the latter...

...That complaint aside, Patrick makes a compelling case...

...Moreover, it advanced a profile of the virtues suitable for the structure: obedience, constancy, humility...

...Patrick proposes to liberate the conscience from this classical paradigm and from its own consequent dormancy and to locate it within an egalitarian-feminist paradigm...

...Really only a few Germans have written sustained, original, integrated book-length works in fundamental moral theology, and only Franz Boeckle's Fundamental Moral Theology was translated into English...

...Her prose is as attractive as her pedagogy...

...And she presents conscience not as some-thing worth observing, measuring, and forming...

...To promote an understanding of conscience as pro-active, the latter paradigm demands certain characteristics for one's conscience, for moral theologians, and for the church's leaders...

...an appreciation of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and plurality...

...Teacher rather than judge and arbiter captures the new ecclesiological vocation of the moral theologian as we finish the twentieth century...

...For its uniqueness alone, Anne E. Patrick's Liberating Conscience is a work of considerable moment...

...Understanding the reader as moral agent, Patrick proposes and pursues the shift in paradigm emerging in moral theology...

...She presents those truth-tellers throughout the work by culling narratives of both those church members who confront the old paradigm and those fictional yet all too familiar heroes and heroines of the new dispensation...

...Her call to be attentive to narrative, ambiguity, and language is modeled by her own eloquent storytelling...

...otherwise the former will be held captive by the latter two...

...In fact, the entire work is extraordinarily well written...

...And, instead of giving readers answers, they raised questions...

...In her work, she abandons the old regime's singular concern to measure the object of the moral action, and replaces it with the conscience of the moral subject...

...Authors like Lisa Sowle Cahill, Christine Gudorf, Patricia Beattie Jung, and Phillip Keane have written on sexuality, while others like Edward Vacek and Stephen Pope have written on love...

...Lay readers will find equal access by clear explanations and by great cases that illustrate her argument with brevity and exactness...

...In sum, Patrick charges every reader to appropriate an egalitarian-feminist model as well as the liberating dispositions that constitute it...

...She recognizes the double task of proving the present paradigm irredeemable and of offering a worthy competitor...

...But in our fragmented and conflicted world, the virtue (justice) for treating everyone equally competes with both the virtue (fidelity) for treating special relations particularly and the virtue (self-care) for responsibly recognizing the self as worthy of moral attention...

...Reading her book, however, we become convinced that a theology of moral truth is only as valid as the ecclesiology that proposes it...

...With Plato, she is satisfied with justice as the virtue that prudence determines and temperance and courage help realize...

...Moral theologians can read a page of Patrick, begin to recognize the thought of a particular author, and turn the page to find the right quote that perfectly summarizes the writer's work...

...As teacher, Patrick brings the reader to another foundational shift transforming fundamental moral theology...

...These characteristics must be shared...

...These virtues are clearly internal and personal, and for that reason she constantly presents their embodiment in those whom she calls "truth-tellers...

...These traits, which Patrick treats throughout the text, are an attentiveness to the voices of all, particularly those marginalized and oppressed...

...They also invited readers to see how those trained in moral theology reason, so that the reader, in turn, could learn about the complexity of moral reasoning...

...rather, she views conscience as "simply a dimension of the self, one central to our experience of moral agency...

...Thus, highlighting the ecclesiological function of moral theology, she describes the outgoing paradigm as basically a patriarchal instrument of social control...

...With Vatican II and Humanae vitae, moral theologians abdicated their arbitrating roles and began entertaining questions like what constitutes authority and what accounts for moral decision making...

...Until Vatican II, moral theologians settled questions...

...In the long run, moral theology was less interested in considering the specifically morally right response to a particular situation and even less concerned with training the laity to develop their own unique consciences to make specific decisions: rather like the ecclesiology it embodied, classical moral theology promoted a universal conformity as normative for moral conduct...

...Though at times her argument seems as combative as that of her opponents, she is singularly interested in replacing the overarching paradigm and that is, as so many Catholics know, a painful process...

...Richard Gula and Timothy O'Connell have given us superb textbooks for moral theology, but Gula, with his typical modesty, points out that his Reason Informed by Faith was basically a synthesis of contemporary writings...

...With finesse, she weaves in the characters from works by George Eliot, Elie Wiesel, Robert Bolt, Mary Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Alan Paton, Joseph Heller, and Carlos Fuentes...

...But those who asked were mostly priests looking for answers to questions about the sins of their penitents...

...James F. Keenan Since Vatican II there have been relatively few books on fundamental moral theology...