This is the eighth installment of my commentary on The Human Body: a sign of dignity and a gift by Fr. Richard M. Hogan. For publication details, see the blog for September 9, 2007.
On page 27 of his 38-page booklet, The Human Body, Fr. Richard Hogan begins a section titled “Formation of Conscience.” In the five pages of this section, Fr. Hogan weaves together ten quotations from Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of the Truth), an encyclical of Pope John Paul II. This section with its heavy use of the words of John Paul II has the drawback of being somewhat difficult to read—a characteristic of the late Pope’s style of writing. The substance requires several readings but it is sound.
After the last quotation, Fr. Hogan takes up the issue of acting in good faith but with an erroneous conscience. That is, the person thought that an objectively evil action was a good action and did it. He puts it this way: “In other words, if we honestly judged an act morally acceptable and did it, and then later discovered it was morally unacceptable, the goodness of the act we did does not change.” That’s not a good choice of words. The action was objectively an evil action. The evil of the action remains. The issue here is personal culpability. The person who does an evil action but thought it was a good action does not incur the personal culpability of sin at the time of the action. Nor does he incur it when he later learns that the action was evil.
That raises the question, “How can a person think that an evil action is a good action?” That, in turn, introduces the issues of vincible ignorance and invincible ignorance, and Fr. Hogan did not address those issues; after all, he wrote a booklet, not a book. “Vincible” is a Latin derivative meaning “conquerable,” so invincible ignorance is the sort of ignorance you can overcome in your circumstances and therefore you should overcome it. Invincible ignorance is the sort of ignorance that you cannot overcome in your circumstances at that time.
In my Sex and the Marriage Covenant, Chapter 6 deals with “Fundamentals about Conscience” and gets into these matters in some detail. Chapter 7, “Forming a Correct Conscience” explores this more fully and then applies the principles to the issue of forming a correct conscience on birth control. In it you will find significant documentation showing that Pope John Paul II amply fulfilled the requirements of Vatican II for teaching in such a way as to require “religious submission of will and of mind . . . to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra” (Lumen Gentium, The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, n. 25 ).
The last section of The Human Body is titled “Marriage as a Sacrament.” Here Fr. Hogan uses the fivefold description of love used previously in the booklet. “As we have seen, love always is 1) a choice 2) based on knowledge. This choice is 3) a self-gift and this self-gift is 4) permanent and 5) life-giving.” It’s easy to see how that applies to marriage itself; it is not so clear how that applies to other individual acts of love such as serving in a soup kitchen. That sentence led me to search the booklet, and in my hasty review of underlined passages, I couldn’t find any sentence in which Fr. Hogan clearly teaches what the individual marriage act ought to be. That’s a great advantage of the covenant theology of human sexuality. It has no problem in teaching that each and every marriage act ought to be a true marriage act, at least implicitly a renewal of the marriage covenant.
In this section, Fr. Hogan does a nice job of weaving together eight quotations from the Catechism of the Catholic Church and two from the Catholic Church’s Rite of Marriage. He concludes with a teaching that needs to be repeated over and over again, namely, that marriage is the normal way in which spouses are called to help each other on the way to heaven.
Overall evaluation. While this booklet has its good points, I think its negatives are sufficiently strong that it should be withdrawn from circulation. It would benefit by a careful review by an ecclesiastical reader in an official, canonical procedure to secure a diocesan “Permission to publish.” In addition, I think the author would do well to read these commentaries. I am sure that Fr. Hogan meant well in writing this booklet, just as I hope that he would grant that I have meant well in writing these commentaries. Still, good intentions do not guarantee excellence, and I realize that applies to my comments as well as to his writing. I am happy to state that these commentaries are now completed.
In these commentaries, I have several times referred to Sex and the Marriage Covenant for further reading. If you are interested in the faith and theological issues involved in the birth control question, please read it. Ignatius Press graciously published a second edition in 2005, and you can order it through our home page. Tracy Jamison, Ph.D., has astutely taken issue with one of my conclusions in the book in an article published in Homelitic & Pastoral Review.
Next week: A Special Message from Sheila
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius, 2005)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, readable, and free e-book available for downloading at www.NFPandmore.org .