This is the last in a series of essays dealing with moral theology on which I have been working for some time. Other installments (the first of which is a preliminary of sorts, more devotional and specifically Marian than the others) can be found here:

1. “To Harbor Guide Me By Thy Mercy,” May 31, 2023
2. “Theology of Sexuality after Amoris and Fiducia: Some Tentative Notes,” February 19, 2024
3. “Poachers in the King’s Domain: A Humane Environmental Theology,” July 14, 2024
4. “Conscience without Grace Cannot Be Free,” October 4, 2024

In addition to these essays on Where Peter Is, two on my personal website that bear mentioning are:

1. “Mr. Miyagi’s America,” June 3, 2024
2. “The Crabbing Excursion,” September 29, 2024

I would recommend reading all of these in the order given, although there is not necessarily a single through-line of arguments; generally I think these essays are all best understood as feeding into this one, more like an endorheic lake than like a river with reservoirs on it. A thousand thanks to Where Peter Is and in particular our managing editor Mike Lewis for supporting and hosting this project.

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With this essay I hope to conclude, and establish within the theological tradition, points made in the previous essays that I have written on this subject, broadly in this “series” of arguments or meditations on morals. I have established that we may often feel, and indeed often be, forced into actions that are inadmissible or cannot legitimately be undertaken by us in themselves (legitimacy here meaning that the action may be moral if undertaken by someone else, such as God, but not by us); failure to understand this clouds our moral will still further. In establishing this I have entertained some outré or seemingly outré ideas that now must be connected with and grounded in orthodoxy.

Once deprecated in the strict folk morality of Early Modern Catholicism,[1] the general view that there are such limits or brakes on the moral will has since leavened the received wisdom of the Church, more regarding some categories of sins than regarding others. Suicide is an especially good example; the usual view before the twentieth century was that its unique character as a sinful deprivation of one’s own life foreclosed opportunities for repentance and thus almost invariably condemned one to hell. “Suicides,” a word that one saw and sometimes still sees used as a noun for people in an implicitly judgmental and almost dehumanizing way, were generally not permitted Catholic funerals. This view changed upon the adoption of modern medical findings about mental illness and psychological distress.[2] The current Catechism tells us that “Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide. We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance”[3]—a position reflected in current funerary practices and in the attitudes of most rank-and-file Catholics today. The other well-known list of potential mitigating factors in the Catechism, concerning masturbation, is worded in a more psychological-medical way: “affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety, or other psychological or social factors that lessen or even extenuate moral culpability.”[4]

These are just two recent movements within a broad and deep history of Catholic reflection on subjective culpability, one that comes down to Amoris laetitia and its progeny all the way from Jesus’ “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” on the Cross (Lk 23:34). I propose incorporating real or perceived necessity—the experience of being a person in a concrete setting in life with specific circumstances that force, or seem to force, certain actions—into such lists of factors, either as an item in them or even as their organizing principle.

Other religions, and philosophical traditions represented mostly by non-Catholic thinkers, have their own—in some cases more ingrained or more consistent—ways of acknowledging this insight. I have discussed this in previous essays; illustrative here might be Tanaka Mitsu on abortion, but also my point about “concreteness” in “Mr. Miyagi’s America,” an essay, published on my personal website, about the Karate Kid movies.[5] Buddhist theology has a long tradition of understanding this set of considerations a bit better than Christian theology does, which might be why this “concrete” attitude seems to crop up again and again in thought and culture dealing with a specific East Asian country. Obviously it has its own limits, where it is used in moral licensing, something that conservative critics of Pope Francis have assiduously pointed out when it comes to how this concept is drawn out in documents like Amoris laetitia and Fiducia supplicans. Even so, I think this series of points bears repeating and reiterating until it takes root in the Catholic understanding of the conscience: God gives us a lot of autonomy over these things. We never seem to use that autonomy quite right. There are reasons for that, and a key part of moral reasoning has to be the process of parsing out what those reasons can and cannot explain or excuse. There have to be guardrails, in particular, against extending an “ecological” view of morality into denials of human rights or moral agency, like the ones associated with “human biodiversity” and eugenics thinking.[6] All of this I have covered or at least touched on in the previous essays that I have written on these topics.

These practical limits on the conscience do turn up in the traditions of Christian Christology, the theology of Christ. However, other problems quickly emerge with the customary formulate of many of these traditions. Christ’s “grace” redeems us “from” the “law,” generally associated with the religious law, halakha, of the Old Testament and of rabbinic Judaism. The problem here, from a perspective involving a deeper understanding of Judaism, is that in Jewish thought this isn’t actually necessary (because observant Jews know perfectly well that observing halakha can be difficult, and Jewish religious practice has opportunities that have nothing to do with Jesus one way or another for atonement and reconciliation with God after moral lapses). The prayer “Unetanneh Tokef” said on Yom Kippur is possibly the most powerful expression of the ideal of repentance and atonement in current Jewish liturgical practice. In an English translation we read, in part:

On the first day of the year it is inscribed, and on the Day of Atonement the decree is sealed, how many shall pass away and how many shall be born; who shall live and who shall die, who at the measure of man’s days and who before it; who shall perish by fire and who by water, who by hunger and who by thirst; who by earthquake and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning; who shall have rest and who shall go wandering, who shall be tranquil and who shall be harassed, who shall be at ease and who shall be afflicted; who shall become poor and who shall wax rich; who shall be brought low and who shall be upraised. But Penitence, Prayer and Charity avert the severe decree.[7]

The “law” as discussed in books of the New Testament such as Galatians is thus, looked at in comparative theology, a Christian-specific problem to which the death and resurrection of Jesus make up a Christian-specific solution. Jews, and for that matter Buddhists, from within the theologies of their own religions really do not need to worry about it.[8] What we all need to worry about, however, is this general issue of constraint and of necessity, which is not religiously specific. We aren’t always empowered to understand what even our own consciences are doing, and why; why we do the things we do, still less why and when we might critique or upbraid others. This is a human difficulty, not a difficulty where one has to have a particular set of religious beliefs to see that there’s a problem. It makes sense, then, that different systems of thought and belief and practice go their separate ways in addressing it.

Yet potential pitfalls and semantic traps remain in all this for a Catholic. I have been avoiding, among other things, using the word “situation” to describe the circumstances that constrain one’s actions, so as to avoid the appearance of a lapse into situational ethics, the idea that these circumstances actually change the moral character of an action. Circumstances can influence how we look at an agent without influencing how we look at an action, because of the dignity that we hold over and above our actions or choices or behaviors, and that dignity derives from our relationship with God; thus, this is an issue into which divine grace itself comes in. God’s help, through repentance (which, again, exists conceptually in Judaism and in other religions as well; I really do advise all readers to give the Yom Kippur liturgy a look or a listen), clears the thickets that spring up between our blundering consciences and the needs that press on us. It can clear even thickets that we do not know are there, and it works to our good even if it is not always obvious how, exactly, it saves or spares us.

How exactly grace operates here brings us to the final barrier that I would like to overcome, or propose a potential way to overcome, in this series of essays. It is a matter of dogma for Catholics that God’s grace is always sufficient to preserve the baptized from mortal sin. Thus Catholics who sin mortally have no “the devil made me do it” or “nature red in tooth and claw made me do it” excuse for doing so.[9] No small amount of angst about Amoris laetitia centers around its teaching that there are, in spite of this, objectively and gravely sinful situations into which people get through no fault of their own. The law of gradualness that supports so much of Amoris’s most controversial contentions would seem to depart from, modify, or nuance Trent somewhat as well, as with the point in §303 in which Amoris speaks of “recogniz[ing]….what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God” (emphasis mine). It is not at all clear that either the Trent council fathers or someone like Vianney would have recognized or been comfortable with this wording, but Liguori might have been (see footnote 1, above). This aspect of gradualness is what our general experience of the world tends to imply or suggest to us as well. The “human difficulty” I describe above is obviously not a difficulty that can be overcome by denying that evil exists or that sin matters; but it is also, as I have demonstrated and will now defend, not one that can be overcome through the position that grace suffices to preserve the faithful from all moral stain.[10] I do not think these problems are insurmountable, but some amount of harmonization between different points of belief—the sufficiency of God’s grace and the reality of concupiscence, the inevitability (especially the coerced inevitability) of certain moral lapses or lacunae—is needful here.

I believe that we might harmonize these points by saying that God’s grace is always sufficient to move our conscience rightly against sins, even grave sins, that we commit, and thus to ensure that venial grave sins do not become mortal sins. The resulting moral and emotional state in especially serious cases will for most people probably look a great deal like Tanaka’s “swaying of the confused self,” because one is aware, consciously or not, of being forced into doing something agonizing—and this too is venial sin.

Venial sin is, of course, still sin. When we bring concerns of repentance and atonement into this discussion, we have to talk also about the limits to our abilities to reasonably claim necessity or inability-to-do-otherwise. The genocidal thought experiment described in footnote 6, above, is an extreme example of this, but everyday examples abound. Let me, in fact, choose an example that non-Catholics will likely not perceive as morally problematic at all. I have in two periods of my life missed Sunday Mass because I was in a country in which Christians make up well under 5% of the population and it would not have been easy to find, and get to, a church.[11] Yet a period of six weeks in Japan is not the same as a period of a few days in Tunisia.[12] In both cases I was making an active choice not to prioritize church attendance because my travel situation made church attendance difficult, but the level of difficulty was not the same and thus the level of choice was not the same (just as neither was the same as if I had been safe at home in the Northeastern United States and decided not to go to Mass because it was too hot outside). Part of God’s grace working in our souls might, then, precisely be the ability to distinguish between genuine duress and mere excuse-making; and indeed this is exactly what old-school confessors advise when it comes to looking at the “free consent of the will” prong of the criteria for mortal sin during an examination of conscience.

There are also, despite the point I made above about how non-Christian religions often have their own theologies of repentance and reconciliation, countless people in religious settings, some at least nominally Christian,[13] that do not have a robust sense of divine forgiven-ness that is mediated publicly through theology and liturgy. Some such people, even though they are obliged to arrive at an understanding of grace exclusively via the internal forum, manage to do so very well. Others, however, either presume on or despair of the mercy of God, treating serious-but-commonplace sins—such as racism, drunkenness, reckless driving, premarital sex, or wage theft, to name just a few—as either

1. Permanent blemishes on their souls despite the banal contexts in which these sins tend to be committed; or,

2. Fodder for rationalizations, excuses, or outright adoption of very lax positions in moral theology, partly so as to avoid the despair and self-hatred that generally accompany 1.

The religious settings here under discussion need badly to develop theologies and liturgies with moral dimensions that prize grace, mercy, and repentance when dealing with persons, but retain vigorous critique and avoid laxity and complacency when dealinag with actions.

There could be other ways to frame or to argue the final point that I am teasing out, particularly for those (like Cardinal McElroy) who are less committed to the usual venial-grave-mortal framework.[14] I would prefer to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, because I think that the traditional and orthodox teaching on subjective culpability suffices to solve this problem if only we apply it compassionately, consistently, and clemently. Fundamentally this is a matter of inviting people to prayerful trust in God and receptivity to His will and His working in changing and healing one’s life. My decision to connect this theology of culpability to a theology of God’s grace owes much to Cardinal Fernández’s work on soteriology in his essay “Romans 9-11: Grace and Predestination,” written in 1995 when he was still a young priest.[15]

We might conclude that in some sense “the devil really did make us do it” about some of the sins that we commit and some of the hard choices that we make—but what of it? A well-formed conscience does not use that as carte blanche because to use that as carte blanche is eventually to consent to the situation as it is and thus to, indeed, spurn the grace that God has shown us.

The end of this exploration of the conscience, of its viceroyalty under God, and of the abuses of conscience and bad conscience at which we arrive either voluntarily or under duress, is, then, a reaffirmation of a generous and merciful teaching on culpability. This is the teaching favored not only by Pope Francis but by much of our theological and philosophical tradition.[16] Yet to discuss culpability is to discuss something that relates to and points to contrition. By no means should we be comfortable in the positions into which we are forced or believe ourselves to have been forced. We should always pray for God’s grace and mercy to save us even from those sins into which—or, at any rate, towards which—we are hemmed or crowded by the harshness of fallen nature and the vicissitudes of the world.

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[1] I specify “folk morality” because this does not necessarily reflect the careful, measured, and generally relatively lenient moral theology of scholars of the period like St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori. An anecdote about Liguori related in Frederick M. Jones’s Alphonsus de Liguori: Saint of Bourbon Naples, 1696–1787, Founder of the Redemptorists (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1992), 244, has it that he temporarily withheld absolution from a woman who had consulted a fortuneteller (Liguori only ever delayed absolution, rather than denying it outright), only to absolve her immediately after her daughter came to the church to bawl him out. Liguori reasoned that as a confessor he was obliged to relent due to the likelihood that, if he did not, the woman and her family would hold him to blame, probably deterring her from seeking reconciliation in the future. It seems unlikely that this is how someone like St. Jean-Marie Vianney would have handled the situation, and priests like Vianney were often upheld as noble and heroic figures in the Catholicism of the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries, precisely because of their greater strictness and willingness to be severe with penitents.

[2] As Ranana Leigh Dine points out in “You shall bury him: burial, suicide and the development of Catholic law and theology,” Medical Humanities 46-3 (September 2020), 299-310, https://mh.bmj.com/content/46/3/299, the contemporary practice of assisted suicide might present new challenges for this more generous understanding of the past several decades—then again, it might not, depending upon one’s understanding of the kinds of psychological and physical pain involved.

[3] CCC §§2282-2283.

[4] CCC §2352.

[5] Nathan Turowsky, “Mr. Miyagi’s America,” Silicate Siesta, June 3, 2024, https://www.silicatesiesta.com/nonfiction/mr-miyagis-america. Accessed December 17, 2024.

[6] The diversity of the human race is, in any case, a cultural technology, or something that cultural technologies allow us to further without resorting to a hypertrophied understanding of environmental ethics in which we have to physically, biologically, immorally prune or cultivate ourselves. If a racist wizard were to cast a spell that made everyone on Earth who had the genetic expression that makes one “look Italian” drop dead, it would be a cataclysmic crime, the worst in history, both because of the sheer number of dead and because of the magnitude of the cultural and economic loss. Yet much of Italian culture would in one form or another survive—among people groups closely related to Italians, among non-Italian people living in and familiar with Italy or its neighboring countries, among scholars of and enthusiasts for Italian culture worldwide, and in the form of art and literature and music created prior to the genocide. So we have no excuse for worrying overmuch about this sort of thing except on the levels of 1. human rights and 2. cultural and historical preservation. Treating the diversity of humanity in a purely biological way involves, indeed, consistently, massive violations of precisely those rights on which expression of the human personality, and of the “cultural” personality, is based.

[7] Emphasis in the original. Herbert Adler, ed., Service of the Synagogue: Day of Atonement (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1910), Part II, “Morning, Additional, Afternoon and Concluding Services,” 150. Other translations are readily available online and in books on Jewish practice. There is a widespread and longstanding conventional wisdom both in some Christian circles and in some Jewish circles that the Jewish understanding of atonement is very exacting and the Christian understanding is very lax. This is not necessarily what we see when we look at Christian and Jewish theology, liturgy, and history more closely.

[8] Thich Nhat Hanh held to a version of the Buddhist teaching on delusion or ignorance, a concept that for purposes of our analysis here is roughly analogous to lack of full knowledge and lack of full consent in Catholic moral theology, that could be applied even to extraordinarily grave transgressions such as sexual abuse. His exposition of this is worth considering as an example both of the potential and of the limits of this kind of assessment of culpability, since as Catholics we have very good reasons, both theological and cultural, to avoid applying it to abuse cases. Thich Nhat Hanh, “Dharma Talk given by Thich Nhat Hanh on July 20, 1998  in Plum Village, France,” https://www.abuddhistlibrary.com/Buddhism/G%20-%20TNH/TNH/Questions%20and%20Answers%20July%2020th%201998/Dharma%20Talk%20given%20by%20Thich%20Nhat%20Hanh%20on%20July%2020.htm. Accessed January 5, 2025.

[9] Council of Trent, “First Decree on Justification,” Chapter XI.

[10] This idea logically implies the notion that to err morally in a way that one feels constrained or forced to do is somehow either a failure of faith or a deliberate sabotage of a person’s soul by God.

[11] I am simplifying a bit here because my religious commitments were somewhat different in 2013 than they are now; regardless, we are talking about regular Sunday attendance at public liturgies.

[12] I visited Japan in 2013; in 2012, there were 993 Catholic churches in the country. Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan, Statistics of the Catholic Church in Japan 2012 (Tokyo: Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan, 2013), 2. I visited Tunisia ten years later, in 2023; figures on number of Catholic churches in the country currently vary but converge on the high single or very low double digits, and the local Church has been described in terms such as “demographic collapse.” Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière, “The Catholic Church in Tunisia: a transliminal institution between religion and nation,” The Journal of North African Studies vol. 25, issue 3 (March 2020): 415, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13629387.2019.1611428. This is a massive difference even relative to the roughly tenfold difference in the countries’ overall populations!

[13] I am told that this is a particular problem in some currents of Evangelical Protestantism. Meredith Dawson, oral conversation with author, December 15, 2024.

[14] For analyses of Cardinal McElroy’s currently out-of-fashion way of discussing sin, vice, and mitigations thereof, see Nathan Turowsky, “Cardinal-designate McElroy and Intrinsic Evil,” Where Peter Is, June 1, 2002, https://wherepeteris.com/cardinal-designate-mcelroy-and-intrinsic-evil/; Mike Lewis, “Reflections on the McElroy Proposal,” Where Peter Is, March 10, 2023, https://wherepeteris.com/reflections-on-the-mcelroy-proposal/; McElroy himself, “Cardinal McElroy responds to his critics on sexual sin, the Eucharist, and LGBT and divorced/remarried Catholics,” America, March 2, 2023, https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2023/03/02/mcelroy-eucharist-sin-inclusion-response-244827. All accessed December 15, 2024. I believe that my analysis is “more orthodox than” Cardinal McElroy’s in terms of accepting the current usual Catholic terms of engagement for discussing moral failings: venial, mortal, culpability, matter, knowledge, consent; but this is not to say that I am more knowledgeable about moral theology than Cardinal McElroy or that I am trying to imply his way of assessing these things is outside the bounds of legitimate Catholic thought. I do not believe either of those things. McElroy has just been appointed or is just about to be appointed to the see of Washington; this brief discussion of his ideas was written weeks ago and is not intended to be “topical.”

[15] Víctor M. Fernández, “Romanos 9-11: gracia y predestinación,” Teología Vol. XXXII, No. 65 (1995): 1-49. (In Spanish.) I refer especially to Fernández’s observation at 32-33, discussing Aquinas on grace, that “We are not denying that ordinarily grace leaves humans free to choose evil. We refer to the final effect of predestination, which one cannot carry out oneself, given the infallibility of the positive election of God.” Discussing the later period in which Liguori lived and wrote, Fernández evocatively and pungently describes Jansenism as exceeding and distorting Thomism in that it “rejected, not without irony, the current doctrine of the existence of ‘sufficient grace,’ understanding these sterile graces as the ones that God has granted to those who are not predestined to salvation, just to be able to say that God grants everyone a supposedly ‘sufficient’ grace that is in fact sterile.” Ibid. 43. (Meredith Dawson’s translations.) The dead wood of such an understanding certainly cannot stand up to the buzzsaw of Amoris.

[16] Stephen Walford, Pope Francis, the Family, and Divorce: In Defense of Truth and Mercy (New York: Paulist Press, 2018) fn. 14, cites Liguori’s doctrine of “good faith” expounded in his Guide for Confessors. Liguori in his Guide for Confessors himself cites his previous work on the same and related subjects in his Moral Theology. “Good faith” is a controversial point, above and beyond the general teachings on knowledge and consent that we find in CCC §§1859-1864. This section of the Catechism in turn cites St. Augustine’s commentary on the First Epistle of John; Pope St. John Paul II’s documents Reconciliatio et paenitentia and Dominum et vivificantem; and various episodes in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Image: “The Tears of St. Peter” by Luca Giordano. From Wikimedia Commons.