Search results for ""Author John S. Grabowski""

In calling for a renewal of moral theology, the Second Vatican Council also charted a course for the Church’s future. The Decree on Priestly Formation specified the need for “livelier contact with the mystery of Christ and the history of salvation” and called for the discipline to be “more thoroughly nourished by scriptural teaching.” To this can be added the teaching of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church, which found the mystery of the human person disclosed in the person of Christ, and the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church’s recovery of the universal call to holiness. The essays in this volume reflect an effort to explore and respond to these hallmarks of renewal indicated by the Council fathers. They therefore treat topics of theological anthropology, the use of Scripture, and growth in holiness through the pursuit of virtue, and also engage the increasingly important question of the role of Scripture in moral theology. These sources of Catholic moral teaching are brought to bear on a variety of pressing contemporary issues: sexual difference, the relationship of sexual expression to marital commitment, methods of family planning, reproductive technologies, and public moral discussion of abortion. Important figures of this postconciliar renewal—such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Servais Pinckaers, OP, Benedict XVI, and particularly John Paul II—figure prominently in this volume. Drawing on these outstanding thinkers, these essays seek to follow the course of renewal illumined by the Council so as, in the words of Optatum totius, no. 16, “to shed light on the loftiness of the calling of the faithful in Christ and the obligation that is theirs of bearing fruit in charity for the life of the world.”

Read more less

Contemporary western culture is awash with ideologies that reduce sexuality to an outlet for pleasure, an ecstatic form of release needed for personal fulfillment, or a commodity to be bought and sold. Many Christians living in such a culture find themselves uncertain as to how to respond from within churches torn by controversy, embarrassed by scandal, and thus driven into uneasy silence on sexual matters. Catholic moral theology, itself at the epicentre of this controversy over sexual issues since ""Humanae vitae"", has struggled to respond to the call for renewal issues by the Second Vatican Council. This book provides a theological foundation for consideration of the moral dimensions of human sexuality from a Roman Catholic perspective. Drawing upon key biblical themes such as covenant, discipleship and beatitude, it proposes an understanding of covenant fidelity wedded to the virtue of chastity that provides a suitable framework for a Catholic and Christian approach to issues of sexuality in a contemporary context. What is needed to counter dominant cultural ideologies is a vision of sexuality as integral to the human vocation to communion as well as attention to the specific practices that enable persons to grow in moral goodness. This work represents an original synthesis of biblical categories, the tradition and language of virtue, and a theological understanding of the human person. It is also among the first systematic applications of the renewal of virtue theory in recent decades to issues of sexuality.

Read more less