Transcript Document

Moral Formation of
Secondary Students
In the Dominican Tradition
Charles Bouchard, OP
Aquinas Institute of Theology
Dominican Association of Secondary Schools
Institutions and Catholic Identity
• Our commitment to institutional ministry is
vast, and it has undergone the most
profound leadership transition in history.
• Our identity as Catholic and Dominican
cannot be merely nominal, nor even just in
theology and campus ministry. It must
permeate the entire curriculum.
“This is not a question of something we
have lost and must retrieve. It is a matter of
discovering how to do something we have
never done before…” (Monika Hellwig)
“Do we have the people who are capable of
doing this? Who are they, where are they,
and how are we making sure that we are
tending to the stream of human resource
capacity?” (Sr. Patricia Vandenberg, CSC)
Why is moral formation an issue?
• Misunderstandings of “morality” – negative
and focused on sin and obedience
• Psychology and relativism
• Cultural individualism: loss of a common
moral narrative
• Fundamentalism
• Do schools still function “in loco parentis?”
• Do we have personnel to do moral
formation?
Basic Overview
1. “What is morality?”
2. What is morality in the Catholic tradition?
3. Why was this Catholic view neglected or
lost?
4. What is the relationship bteween morality
and spirituality?
5. Elements of a distinctively Dominican
approach to the moral life
What is morality in general?
• Morality is a special kind of knowledge –
knowledge about two questions:
– “What ought I to do?
– “Who ought I to be? What kind of person do I
want to be?”
– As we grow older, the second question becomes
more important.
How do we answer these questions?
• Non-rational or pre-rational approaches
– Intuitionism and emotivism
• Rational approaches
– Deontology: based on duty and obedience
• “Because I said so!”
• Teleology: based intelligent pursuit of a
goal
– “Do it because it’s good for you.”
What is the goal?
• Short-term goals: consequentialism
• Long-term goals: “happiness” and
“Happiness.”
• In the Catholic moral system, we become
fully human – moral – by doing what is
truly fulfilling, or what brings us deep and
profound happiness.
How do we discover this happiness?
• Scripture and Revelation
• Church Tradition
• Human Experience, especially
relationships
• Reasonable reflection on experience
What does it mean to be a saint?
• “The seeds that are planted in my liberty at
every moment, by God’s will, are the seeds
of my own identity, my own reality, my own
happiness, my own sanctity. For me to be a
saint means to be myself. Therefore the
problem of finding out who I am and
discovering my true (i.e., already graced)
self.... (Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, p.
25)
“Why Did God Make Me?”
Our two-fold destiny
• One goal, finality or purpose to our lives is
natural – to live in the world and seek
sanctity, to help bring about the reign of
God.
• The other is supernatural. God planted
within us a desire or instinct to be with him,
to share God’s own life.
So what happened to
all this happiness?
• After the Council of Trent (1560), various
factors led to development of modern moral
theology
• Individualistic, legalistic, focused on
individual sins
• Purpose was to help confessors, but it had
unintended consequences.
Unintended consequences
• Morality became a discipline of pathology
(sin)
• We lost sight of virtue and happiness
• Excessive focus on individual sins caused
us to lose sight of continuity in the moral
life
• All sins seemed to be equally serious
For most of us, “Just getting by”
• “As a consequence of this commitment to spiritual
pathology, the discipline of moral theology was to
relinquish almost all consideration of the good in
man to other branches of theology, notably to what
became known as spiritual theology...but
inevitably this study of Christian perfection was
pursued in a rarefied and elitist atmosphere more
suited to those few who aspired to the counsels...
(29); sin was domesticated and trivialized.”
Loss of narrative and continuity
• [Confession] led to "an approach to the
moral life as discontinuous; freezing the
film in a jerky succession of individual stills
to be analyzed and ignoring the plot.
Continuity was discounted or at most was
seen only as a circumstance, and the 'story'
of the individual's moral vocation and
exploration either unsuspected or
disregarded." (31)
Discussion Questions
• Is moral formation part of the mission of
secondary schools?
• Is moral formation possible?
• What kind of moral awareness and
development do you see in your
students?
• Can moral formation be integrated
across the curriculum?
Part II
Spirituality and the Virtues:
Recovering the
Best of the Tradition
The Relationship Between
Morality and Spirituality
• [Spirituality is] “The human movement
toward God revealed to Israel and through
Jesus Christ that is manifested in greater
wholeness of life through communion with
others. It is the recognition that Christian
life is a response to the divine grace and
holiness offered to us through Jesus
Christ…” (Michael Duffy)
Spirituality and Culture: The good
news and the bad news
• “There is no spirituality that is not
embedded in a culture. If spirituality wants
to be in contact with the living God, then
those who espouse it must work and beg
God’s help to free themselves from the
cultural biases which make it almost
impossible to find God…” (William Barry,
SJ)
“Virtue is not a habit”
• Virtues (and vices) are habits – moral
qualities or moral skills
• Like musical or athletic skill, they are
acquired through deliberate, intentional
actions and they can be lost
• They are not “habits” in the usual sense of
the English word.
The Four “Cardinal” Virtues
• Fortitude: not just the virtue of heros
• Temperance: personal as well as
political
• Justice: it is always “social”
• Prudence: that certain something that
enables us to do just the right thing.
The Virtue of Prudence
• Deliberation
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Knowing present situation
Knowing applicable general principles
Recalling past experience
Taking counsel from others
Willingness to learn (docility)
Intuition: Grasping non-rational truth
-Prayer
-Foresight
• Judging
• Action
The Virtue
Of Prudence
In Art:
Sculpture from
A tomb in
Nantes, France
Friendship, Morality and Spirituality
• Moral maturity is never a solitary
pursuit
• We only become who God intends us
to be with the help of others
• The centrality of friendship is reflected
even in the inner workings of the
Trinity
Friendship in the Trinity
• “The perfect goodness of divine happiness and
glory postulate friendship WITHIN God. It
appears that God’s charity would not love to the
utmost were he only one person. Nor even if he
were only two, for with perfect friendship the
lover wills that what he loves should also be
equally loved by another. To be unable to receive
love’s intercourse is a mark of great weakness. To
be able to bear it is a mark of great strength... (St.
Thomas Aquinas)
Friendship as a “school for virtue”
• “Good friendships are schools of virtue. Friends
practice their love on us, and thus bring us into
being in a way we could never have accomplished
ourselves. A good friend is someone who draws
the best out of us, someone who creates us in the
most promising way. In this sense, friendship is a
moral reality, and perhaps the constitutive moral
activity of our lives, because through it we receive
from another the good we most devotedly love.”
(Paul Waddell, The Primacy of Love)
The Gifts of the Holy Spirit
• These gifts “look like” virtues, and even
have some of the same names, but they
differ in their origin
• They are “supernatural promptings” that
enable us to reach our Ultimate Goal
• They are so subtle that we sometimes are
not attuned to them
The Gifts in Literature
• Flannery O’Connor
describes the Gifts in
several stories:
• Mr. Head in “The
Artificial Nigger”
• Mrs. Turpin in
“Revelation”
• Asbury in “The
Enduring Chill”
The Gift of Understanding
• “Whether it [the Gift of Understanding] comes
through terrible suffering or develops gradually, it
makes us aware that we are capable of any evil
and that only God is our strength. This is not a
morbid meditation upon our own sinfulness, but a
process of awakening to the realization that we are
not all that we should be and with God’s grace
could be” (Thomas Keating, OCSO)
Yves Congar on the Holy Spirit
• “The Holy Spirit acts within us or penetrates into
us like an anointing. He makes us conscious of
the sovereign attraction of the absolute and of our
own wretchedness and of the untruth and
selfishness that fills our lives. We are conscious of
being judged, but at the same time we are
forestalled by forgiveness and grace, with the
result that our false excuses, our self-justifying
mechanisms and the selfish structure of our lives
break down.” (I Believe in the Holy Spirit)
The Seven Quiet Gifts
• “What the Holy Spirit contributes in Aquinas’
theology is a perfecting of the whole process of
decision making. The Spirit does not substitute
her activity for ours, but complements and perfects
ours (2-2, q. 42). The Spirit does the latter very
subtly. The seeming absence of the Spirit working
in our lives may not be an absence at all, but a
presence so subtle that we do not recognize it.
Part of our Christian discipleship ought to be
learning to be more sensitive to the Spirit working
in us...” (Christopher Kiesling, OP)
Theological and Spiritual Formation for
Leadership in Sponsored Institutions
•Two year program that includes six online courses
Plus spiritual formation for leadership
•Periodic Meetings in St. Louis
•Study with a cohort of peers
Contact
Celeste Mueller, The Vocare Center
314-256-8870 email: [email protected]
www.ai.edu