Moral Formation of Secondary Students

In the Dominican Tradition

Charles Bouchard, OPAquinas 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

– 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 VirtueOf Prudence In Art: Sculpture fromA tomb inNantes, 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)

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