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Many Catholic ethics courses are badly organized. If the end of Catholic ethics is to make people virtuous, teachers would do well to put the “hot button” issues on the backburner and bring the daily, commonplace virtues to the fore.
A high school teacher and tenured associate professor, I taught ethics for over fifteen years, until the multiplication of my children and the consequent poverty pushed me into law. Now more seasoned, better read, and enjoying a second conversion, I would focus my ethics course on the “little virtues,” those regarding speech, wealth, food, sexual desire, and humility.
Thérèse of Lisieux is justly famous for her “little way” of practicing “little virtues”—“making some small sacrifice” and “always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.” Catholic ethics teachers should also follow the “little way,” urging students to fight for the daily good with seriousness and rigor.
The first half of my course covered the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Catholic ethics—anthropology, divine revelation, natural law, the natural and theological virtues, the parts of the moral act, and so on. I would not change that, and that should not change. No moral issues are adequately evaluated outside a comprehensive framework.
The second half of the year, I would wade into the raging controversies of abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, and so on, as do most courses. Although well-motivated by a desire to spark interest in weary, wary, and leery teenagers, that approach was a young man’s mistake. I should have started with the little virtues. They are of primary importance, but not only because they are common. Without battling to acquire the little virtues, the war against the “big” issues cannot be won, intellectually or affectively. Abortion, euthanasia, surrogacy, and gender ideology should be a coda rather than the usual attention-grabbing openers.
Take speech, for example. Raised in a culture where no thought, especially the self-referential, is left unspoken, students may be surprised to learn that Scripture addresses speech perhaps more than any other moral issue. Wisdom literature is profuse with counsel about speech. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” proclaims Proverbs 18:21. Even more daunting, Sirach 20:9 admonishes, “Let anything you hear die within you; be assured it will not make you burst.” And Christ famously observed, “[F]rom the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks” (Lk. 6:45). (And the relationship is reciprocal—the heart becomes full of what the mouth speaks.)
An exploration of the philosophical and theological foundations of proper speech unearths nearly every vein of Catholic ethics. Proper speech means serving the truth, shunning the futile and joyless competition game, loving one’s neighbor, harnessing one’s passions, and killing self-love through humility. In short, proper speech is a route to genuine happiness.
After students are taught the intellectual foundations of proper speech, they should be challenged to speak (and not speak) well. Everyday good is attractive, not mundane. The Letter of James (3:13) declares, “If anyone does not fall short in speech, he is a perfect man, able to bridle his whole body also.” The man who loves and only speaks the truth, never speaks evil of others (even when true), and knows when and when not to speak is admirable, noble, and most likely happy. Don’t you want to be him? Students should be challenged to stop gossiping, refuse to receive gossip, and forgo self-referential speech, including as St. Josemaría Escrivá (Furrow, 263) insists “letting drop words of self-praise in conversation” and “mentioning yourself as an example in conversation.”
If they accept the challenge, they will fail—badly and repeatedly. But then the real conversion begins and the foundations for addressing the hot-button issues are laid. If they take the challenge seriously, students will experience the truth of Christ’s jarring claim that “apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn. 5:15). They will find that progress turns on grace, they are radically dependent upon Christ for moral progress, and gratitude is due for this unmerited and reckless outpouring of love. And they will experience joy in this unmerited progress.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J., explains the process:
When it pleases God to grant us by his holy grace this clear knowledge of ourselves [as corrupted by self-love], accompanied by feelings of humility, then we no longer expect anything more from self, but everything from him alone. No longer do we count on our good works, but solely on the mercy of God and the infinite merits of Jesus Christ; this is the true Christian hope which will be our salvation. (Letter to Sister Marie-Antoinette de Bousmard (1734))
And a similar analysis and challenge can be made regarding wealth, food, and sexual desire. The generous woman, the temperate man, and the happily married spouses with children are appealing targets to strive for.
Fast forward to abortion. Without the foregoing experienced and appreciated insights and joys, the intellectual arguments stall. That abortion is homicide, the killing of an innocent person, is easily shown. Pro-lifers won that argument decades ago, especially with the advent of sonograms. But abortion advocates are undeterred, acknowledging abortion is murder but arguing it is the cost of doing business. As leftist comedian Bill Maher, to his credit, admitted, “[Pro-lifers] think [abortion] is murder. And it kind of is. And I’m just okay with that. There are eight billion people in the world. I’m sorry, we wouldn’t miss you.”
To know and feel the truth about abortion requires prior dependence on and gratitude toward God, humility, joy in self-sacrifice, and liberating self-control. Those gifts are granted through the little virtues. Without them, the abortion arguments gain little traction. With them, abortion becomes unthinkable.
To be sure, a Catholic ethics course should teach the divisive cultural issues. But the course will make little headway down this path unless the little virtues have already paved the way. Or, to put the matter conversely, “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much” (Lk. 16:10).
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
