DOCTRINAL NOTE

1.General Evaluation

Moral de Actitudes is composed of three volumes. The first is devoted to fundamental moral theology.¹ The second is divided into two parts, the first on the morality of the person and bioethics,² and the second on the morality of love and sexuality.³ The third volume treats social morality.⁴ The Diccionario de ética teológica⁵ offers a more concise, but still sufficiently detailed study of the principal concepts and themes of Christian morality. 

Moral de Actitudes makes reference to the pastoral concern for dialogue with “autonomous, secular and contemporary man”.⁶ This dialogue is pursued with magnanimity and understanding, attentive to the gradual and progressive nature of life and of moral education. It also seeks to moderate positions considered to be extreme through a consideration of the data supplied by the human sciences and by contemporary philosophical currents. However, this praiseworthy concern often does not achieve its goal, because it is undertaken at the expense of essential aspects constitutive of an integral presentation of the Church’s moral teaching; in particular, correct theological methodology, proper definition of the moral object of an act, precision of language, and integrity of argumentation. 

The author states that his text is based on the “option for the paradigm of ‘theonomic autonomy’ reinterpreted through an ‘ethic of liberation’”.⁷ His objective is a personal revision of this paradigm, but he is unable to avoid some of the errors associated with his chosen model, errors which substantially correspond to those indicated in the Encyclical Letter Veritatis splendor.⁸ Indeed, insufficient consideration is given to the fact that faith and reason, while distinct, have a common source and end, and therefore do not relate to each other simply to delineate their respective areas of responsibility in an exclusive and excluding manner, or to expand these areas at the expense of the other, with a view towards emancipation. He does not conceive of “‘ratio’ normativa”⁹ as a link between man and God, which unites them,¹⁰ but rather as a partition which comes between man and God. Therefore, it is no longer possible to see “Divine Wisdom” as the ontological (and therefore objective) foundation of the moral competence which every person unquestionably possesses,¹¹ and there is a consequent failure to recognize that moral reasoning can be “enlightened by divine revelation and by faith”.¹² 

The author expresses more than once the determinative approach of Moral de actitudes: “The characteristic and specific quality of the Christian ethos is not to be found on the level of the concrete contents of the moral commitment”, but rather “on the level of the kind of world-view which accompanies” those contents.¹³ Only against the background of statements such as these can one understand the meaning of “the reference to Jesus of Nazareth as horizon or new sphere of understanding and of lived experience of reality”,¹⁴ or in what sense it can be maintained that faith offers an “influence”, a “context”, an “orientation”,¹⁵ a “new frame of reference” and a “dimension”.¹⁶ Although the author occasionally states that “Christ is the decisive norm of Christian ethics” and that “there is no other norm for the Christian than the event of Jesus of Nazareth”,¹⁷ nevertheless, his attempt at a christological foundation does not succeed at giving concrete ethical normativity to the revelation of God in Christ.¹⁸ The christological foundation of ethics is acknowledged insofar as it “re-contextualizes the secular imperatives of a personalism of political alterity”.¹⁹

The Christian ethic that results from this is “an ethic influenced by faith”,²⁰ but the influence is weak, because it is juxtaposed in fact to a secularized rationality laid out completely on a horizontal plane. Therefore, Moral de Actitudes does not stress sufficiently the ascending vertical dimension of Christian moral life. And the great Christian themes, such as redemption, the Cross, grace, the theological virtues, prayer, the beatitudes, the resurrection, judgment, and eternal life, are hardly mentioned and exert almost no influence on his presentation of moral teachings. 

As a result of the moral paradigm employed, an insufficient role is given to Tradition and the Magisterium’s moral teaching, which are filtered through the author’s frequent “options” and “preferences”.²¹ In particular, his commentary on the Encyclical Veritatis splendor manifests a deficient notion of the competence of the Magisterium in matters of morality.²² The author, while informing his readers about the teaching of the Church, critically distances himself from that teaching in the solutions given to various special moral problems, as will be seen below. 

Consideration must be given, finally, to the tendency to make use of a methodology of the conflict of values or of goods in the study of various ethical problems, as well as to the role played by references to the ontic or pre-moral level.²³ This leads to a reductionistic treatment of some theoretical and practical problems, such as the relationship between freedom and truth, conscience and law, fundamental option and concrete choices, which are incapable of positive resolution due to the inconsistencies in the position taken by the author. On a practical level, he does not accept the traditional doctrine on intrinsically evil actions and on the absolute value of the norms that prohibit such actions.