Liberating Conscience: Feminist Explorations in Catholic Moral Theology.

Since Vatican II there have been relatively few books on fundamental moral theology. 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. 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. 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. For its uniqueness alone, Anne E. Patrick's Liberating Conscience is a work of considerable moment.

After decades of moralists writing essays (Joseph Fuchs and Richard McCormick, 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. 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 ecclesiological function of moral theology.

Until Vatican II, moral theologians settled questions. "Consult the approved authors," was a standard phrase by which bishops and popes remanded inquiries. But those who asked were mostly priests looking for answers to questions about the sins of their penitents. 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. 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. 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. And, instead of giving readers answers, they raised questions. 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. Teacher rather than judge and arbiter captures the new ecclesiological vocation of the moral theologian as we finish the twentieth century.

As teacher, Patrick brings the reader to another foundational shift transforming fundamental moral theology. 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. And she presents conscience not as something worth observing, measuring, and forming; rather, she views conscience as "simply a dimension of the self, one central to our experience of moral agency."

Understanding the reader as moral agent, Patrick proposes and pursues the shift in paradigm emerging in moral theology. She recognizes the double task of proving the present paradigm irredeemable and of offering a worthy competitor. Thus, highlighting the ecclesiological function of moral theology, she describes the outgoing paradigm as basically a patriarchal instrument of social control. In these past centuries, moral theology was marked by an intolerance of circumstances, subjectivity, particularity, and doubt. Its appeal to the true as absolute, universally applicable, and unchanging provided a structure of mutual support for the ecclesiology that proposed it. Moreover, it advanced a profile of the virtues suitable for the structure: obedience, constancy, humility. 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.

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. 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. These characteristics must be shared; otherwise the former will be held captive by the latter two. These traits, which Patrick treats throughout the text, are an attentiveness to the voices of all, particularly those marginalized and oppressed; an appreciation of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and plurality; a sensitivity to the function of language and narrative in our lives; 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 sum, Patrick charges every reader to appropriate an egalitarian-feminist model as well as the liberating dispositions that constitute it.

These virtues are clearly internal and personal, and for that reason she constantly presents their embodiment in those whom she calls "truth-tellers." 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. 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. Her call to be attentive to narrative, ambiguity, and language is modeled by her own eloquent storytelling.

In fact, the entire work is extraordinarily well written. Her prose is as attractive as her pedagogy. 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. Lay readers will find equal access by clear explanations and by great cases that illustrate her argument with brevity and exactness.

My only complaint is that she settles for the classical virtues without proposing new ones. With Plato, she is satisfied with justice as the virtue that prudence determines and temperance and courage help realize. 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.

That complaint aside, Patrick makes a compelling case. 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. Reading her book, however, we become convinced that a theology of moral truth is only as valid as the ecclesiology that proposes it.

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