Suchergebnisse

Collation of two lectures presented to theological students' fellowship meetings in Dublin and Belfast, Oct. 1975.

Given the nature of the decision-making process in modern institutions, those concerned with normative questions must sharpen these questions. And they must learn to express them in terms which will be meaningful to those concerned with the technical aspects of the policy and planning process and also to the experienced concerns of the polity. This translation of ethical questions into political form requires that ethics take its place in the dialogue which already is going on in the disciplines of the social sciences. The task for ethics in this conversation is to be able to maintain its own integrity—its own agenda—without falling victim to the illusion that integrity means autonomy.

There is a dimension of Catholic thought rooted in the Vatican Council that extends beyond it in a way that could have significant implications for the Church's role in the political order. The basis for a political theology lies in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modem World; the purpose of this document was to reformulate the perspective in which the Church understood and evaluated contemporary culture and defined her rote in it. Many observers have singled out this document as the one with the greatest potential for shaping the long-range development of the Catholic Church.