A call to reform Catholic health care ethics, inspired by the teachings of Pope Francis Since its first edition in 1948, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERD) has guided Catholic institutions in the provision of health care that reflects both the healing ministry of Jesus and the Church's understanding of human dignity. However, while the papacy of Pope Francis and the clerical sex-abuse scandal both profoundly impacted the Catholic Church, the latest edition of the ERD does not address or reflect these transformations. Now for the first time, Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler present an extended critical commentary on the 2018 ERD. They argue that it is problematic in a number of ways. First, the revised ERD continues to prioritize a rule-based over a personalist-based ethical method, with an emphasis on absolute norms that proscribe specific medical acts. Further, it does not take into account Pope Francis's transforming ecclesiological, methodological, and anthropological visions, neither internally in Catholic health care institutions nor externally in collaborations between Catholic and non-Catholic health care institutions. Finally, the revised ERD provides no evidence that the bishops grasp how the clerical sex-abuse scandal and its cover-up have fundamentally undermined episcopal authority and credibility. Salzman and Lawler propose new ways forward for US Catholic health care ethics that prioritize human dignity as their guiding principle. As there is pluralism in Catholic definitions of human dignity, there must be pluralism in the norms and directives that facilitate realizing human dignity. Pope Francis's emphasis on the virtues of mercy and care should move the ERD forward from a focus on absolute norms in medical ethics to a focus on virtues and principles to guide both patients and health care professionals in their discerned conscientious health care decisions.

This book explores the normative implications for both general and sexual ethics of the methodological and anthropological developments in Catholic tradition. It also attempts to stimulate dialogue in the Church about ethics, particularly sexual ethics, a dialogue that must necessarily include all in the communion-Church, laity, theologians, and hierarchy.

Two principles capture the essence of the official Catholic position on the morality of sexuality: first, that any human genital act must occur within the framework of heterosexual marriage; second, each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life. In this comprehensive overview of Catholicism and sexuality, theologians Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler examine and challenge these principles. Remaining firmly within the Catholic tradition, they contend that the church is being inconsistent in its teaching by adopting a dynamic, historically conscious anthropology and worldview on social ethics and the interpretation of scripture while adopting a static, classicist anthropology and worldview on sexual ethics.While some documents from Vatican II, like "Gaudium et spes" ('the marital act promotes self-giving by which spouses enrich each other'), gave hope for a renewed understanding of sexuality, the church has not carried out the full implications of this approach. In short, say Salzman and Lawler: emphasize relationships, not acts, and recognize Christianity's historically and culturally conditioned understanding of human sexuality. "The Sexual Person" draws historically, methodologically, and anthropologically from the best of Catholic tradition and provides a context for current theological debates between traditionalists and revisionists, regarding marriage, cohabitation, homosexuality, reproductive technologies, and what it means to be human. This daring and potentially revolutionary book will be sure to provoke constructive dialogue among theologians, and between theologians and the Magisterium.

Two principles capture the essence of the Catholic tradition on sexual ethics: that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life, and that any human genital act must occur within the framework of marriage. In the Catholic tradition, moral sexual activity is institutionalized within the confines of marriage and procreation, and sexual morality is marital morality. But theologians Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler contend that there is a disconnect between many of the Church's absolute sexual norms and other theological and intellectual developments explicitly recognized and endorsed in the Catholic tradition, especially since the Second Vatican Council. These developments include the shift from a primary static worldview to a historically conscious worldview, one that recognizes reality as dynamic, evolving, changing, and particular. By employing such a historically conscious worldview, alternative claims about the moral legitimacy of controversial topics such as contraception, artificial reproduction, and homosexual marriage can faithfully emerge within a Catholic context. Convinced of the central role that love, desire, and fertility play in a human life, and also in the life of Christian discipleship, the authors propose an understanding of sexuality that leads to the enhancement of human sexual relationships and flourishing. This comprehensive introduction to Catholic sexual ethics - complete with thought-provoking study questions at the end of each chapter - will be sure to stimulate dialogue about sexual morality between Catholic laity, theologians, and the hierarchy. Anyone seeking a credible and informed Catholic sexual ethic will welcome this potentially revolutionary book.

It is an open secret that marriage is in crisis in the United States and that the marriages of Catholics are not significantly different from other marriages. In "Marriage and the Catholic Church" Michael Lawler confronts the difficult questions in the Catholic theology of marriage.

Lawler, among the leading Catholic voices on the theology of marriage, does not shy away from the difficult questions, but confronts them honestly, historically accurately, and pastorally. He highlights a Catholic approach to premarital relationships, to marriage, to divorce, and to remarriage. He examines the relationship of marriage and sacrament, faith and sacrament, friendship in marriage, divorce and remarriage, cohabitation, family, interchurch marriages, and the changing models of marriage in the Catholic tradition. The whole offers a fresh look at the Catholic theology of marriage for a new millennium.

Chapter 1 looks at marriage as a sacrament. Chapter 2 then asks what models of marriage function in the contemporary Catholic Church. Chapter 3 considers what it takes to transform the social reality of marriage into the Catholic sacrament and answers that it takes personal faith. Lawler looks into the bonds or relationships in marriage in Chapter 4. He offers an extended consideration of divorce and remarriage in the Catholic Church in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6 he offers theological and pastoral reflections on interchurch marriage. He analyzes the Christian reality and value of friendship and reflects on its contribution to the stability of marriage in Chapter 7. Lawler inquires, in Chapter 8, whether cohabitation could, again as in the past, be counted as a step in the process of becoming married in the Catholic tradition. Finally in Chapter 9 he seeks to construct a theology of Christian family and reflects on what that theology, and the families rooted in it, can contribute to American families in their present crisis.

Chapters are Marriage and the Sacrament of Marriage," "Catholic Models of Marriage," "Faith and Sacrament in Christian Marriage," "On the Bonds of Marriage," "Divorce and Remarriage in the Catholic Church," "Interchurch Marriages: Theological and Pastoral Reflections," "Friendship and Marriage," "Cohabitation and Marriage in the Catholic Church: A Proposal," and "Toward a Theology of Christian Family."

"Michael G. Lawler, PhD, is the Amelia B. and Emil G. Graff Chair in Catholic Theological Studies and Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He directs the Center for Marriage and Family, whose studies of marriage preparation, interchurch marriages, and the first five years of marriage have gained international acclaim.""

"Gaudium et Spes," Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, marked fundamental shifts in ethical methodology, in how we do ethics in the Catholic tradition, and in how we think about ethical and ecclesial issues in the Catholic Church in the modern world. On the document's fiftieth anniversary, this book explores the historical origins of "Gaudium et Spes," its impact on the Church's ecclesial self-understanding, and its implications for doing Catholic theological ethics for the specific ethical issues of marriage, social justice, politics, and peacebuilding.The book engages in the ongoing communal discernment of the "aggiornamento "sought by the council's convener, Pope John XXIII, seeking to bring the Church up to date in the twenty-first century.

A call to reform Catholic health care ethics, inspired by the teachings of Pope Francis Since its first edition in 1948, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERD) has guided Catholic institutions in the provision of health care that reflects both the healing ministry of Jesus and the Church's understanding of human dignity. However, while the papacy of Pope Francis and the clerical sex-abuse scandal both profoundly impacted the Catholic Church, the latest edition of the ERD does not address or reflect these transformations. Now for the first time, Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler present an extended critical commentary on the 2018 ERD. They argue that it is problematic in a number of ways. First, the revised ERD continues to prioritize a rule-based over a personalist-based ethical method, with an emphasis on absolute norms that proscribe specific medical acts. Further, it does not take into account Pope Francis's transforming ecclesiological, methodological, and anthropological visions, neither internally in Catholic health care institutions nor externally in collaborations between Catholic and non-Catholic health care institutions. Finally, the revised ERD provides no evidence that the bishops grasp how the clerical sex-abuse scandal and its cover-up have fundamentally undermined episcopal authority and credibility. Salzman and Lawler propose new ways forward for US Catholic health care ethics that prioritize human dignity as their guiding principle. As there is pluralism in Catholic definitions of human dignity, there must be pluralism in the norms and directives that facilitate realizing human dignity. Pope Francis's emphasis on the virtues of mercy and care should move the ERD forward from a focus on absolute norms in medical ethics to a focus on virtues and principles to guide both patients and health care professionals in their discerned conscientious health care decisions.

The genesis of this book was sown in 1961 in a seminar on theological method under the guidance of Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan was convinced that something new was happening in history, and that a living theology required a new theological approach. In this book, Michael Lawler is concerned with three characteristics of this new approach: that theology must be historical, empirical, and in interdisciplinary collaboration with the social sciences. The book thus explores the relationship between practical theology (which is concerned with the church as it is and as it ought to be) and sociology, and specifically the theological realities of sensus fidei and reception. The exploration is concretized by a consideration of the sociological data and theology of two Catholic moral doctrines: artificial contraception and divorce and remarriage without prior annulment. In addition to being a useful primer on the relationship between theology and sociology (both theoretical and empirical), the book provides a wonderfully clear description of the sea-changes that have occurred in Roman Catholic theology worldwide over the past 70 or so years. Among those elements are the turn to the subject; the sociology of knowledge; the distinctions between uncreated and created grace and between original and dependent revelation; a complex, non-fundamentalist understanding of Sacred Scripture; the preferential option for the poor; the notion of the church as communion rather than hierarchy; and, finally, the necessity for church teaching to be "received," accepted, by the whole church. If a Catholic Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep 40 or 50 years ago, he would read this book, upon opening his eyes, with amazement.

It is taken for granted today among theologians that the principal achievement of the Second Vatican Council was its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. It is beginning to be equally taken for granted that the core of this central document is its vision of Church as communion. "Communion," Pope John Paul II has said, "is the very mystery of the Church." Church: A Spirited Communion grows out of the ecclesiology of the Council as a systematic treatment of this notion of communion. Church: A Spirited Communion is not, however, a book only about the Church. It is a book about the God whom Christians confess as Triune, who calls the Church into existence and who seeks its commitment in every age. It is a book about the Church only to the extent that the Church is in communion with this God. To the extent that it is a book which is primarily theo-logical and only secondarily ecclesio-logical, it is a book which adheres to God rather than to men and summons the Church to do the same.