Critical Calling: Reflections on Moral Dilemmas Since Vatican II - Hardcover

McCormick, Richard A.

9780878404636: Critical Calling: Reflections on Moral Dilemmas Since Vatican II

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0878404635 ISBN 13: 9780878404636

Publisher: Georgetown Univ Pr, 1989

When Richard A. McCormick's The Critical Calling was first published, Andrew M. Greeley commented that "in years to come scholars will look back on Father McCormick's work and say, 'This was a man who knew what he was talking about!'" In this reissue, with a new foreword by Lisa Sowle Cahill, both first-time readers and those opening the pages for a return visit with an honored friend will find Greeley's characterization remains valid.

Father McCormick begins The Critical Calling with his personal affirmation of the work of Vatican II: "I believe the Council was a work of the Spirit―desperately needed, divinely inspired, devotedly and doggedly carried through." Yet, he stresses this was no uncritical endorsement of everything the Council did and said. Part One includes a discussion of fundamental moral theology that looks at the relationship between the church hierarchy and individual moral decision making and several chapters addressing issues precipitated by actions involving Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Part Two focuses on practical and pastoral questions that touch on contemporary concerns ranging from abortion to AIDS, divorce, homosexuality, and teenage sexuality.

Cahill suggests that "those who lived through the tumultuous 1960s and '70s" as well as "those who came to maturity after the Council" will find this book to be an accurate and evocative reflection of the passions that imbued all those early debates and a helpful explanation why those passions ran so high. All readers will benefit from the wise insights into the controversies of that era and the more recent struggles, challenges, and debates that confront today's church.

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About the Author:

Richard A. McCormick, SJ (1922-2000) was one of the leading U.S. Roman Catholic moral theologians of the 20th century. He was the John A. O'Brien Professor of Christian Ethics in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame until his retirement in 1999, and a former senior research scholar of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Father McCormick was well-known for his annual Moral Notes published in the Jesuit quarterly Theological Studies from 1965 to 1984.

Review:

To die extent that moral theology may not be construed a direct interest or concern of the average human being, this book should riot be construed of direct concern to or appeal for the average reader. For the professional ethicist, the Roman Catholic physician, or the critically trained and alert layman or woman, however, The Critical Calling could be an instructive overview Erom the last two and a half decades. This period marks the shifts in the Roman Catholic perception of the interaction of morality and theology as well as the Church's political role in shaping social policy and its doctrinal role in shaping individual believers. Part One, the volume's first eleven chapters, covers such selected fundamentals of moral theology as pluralism, individualization, authoritarianism, dismt, pedagogical responsibility, and so on. In Part Two, the concluding eleven chapters, the volume applies these fundamentals to practical and/or pastoral questions like AIDS, homosexuality, nutrition-hydration, and others. Readers seeking answers to moral dilemmas will be sorely disappointed, for Fr. McCormick offers instead the paradoxical virtue of the "maybe" and "in which case" by which he, like many ethicists, sees each human being as matured by the quest rather than relieved by the absolute. There are no brilliant arguments here or scintillating insights into either the moral difficulties of our time or the progress of the Church in the twentieth century. There are, however, the gentle, quiet, and reassuring words of a man who has been in the heat of the fray for more than thirty years and has gained not only the shield of faith but the advantages of patience and the strength of an informed and informing optimism. -- From Independent Publisher

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