Historically, casuistry arose with the Council of Trent’s institution of the seminary as the standardized means of priestly formation. First, it was an attempt to make the character and requirements of the Christian moral life intelligible through an emphasis upon the law of God and the precepts of the Church. Second, casuistry was a method employed by moral theologians and priests for adjudicating between divergent positions about specific moral questions. It inadvertently resulted in the reduction of the Christian life to the conflicting interplay between law, human freedom, obligation, and conscience. Casuistry ceased to be endorsed as a method of moral theological discourse and pedagogy with the Second Vatican Council. In his 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor, Pope St. John Paul II provided the Church with a constructive and alternative vision of moral theology and Christian living framed around beatitude, virtue, Jesus Christ, and human flourishing.
“How far can I go?” “My conscience says it’s okay to do this.” “I believe that this law (or rule) of the Church will change one day.”
This question and these statements are common. They all reflect sentiments that remain deeply embedded in Catholic culture. Even nonpracticing Catholics retain an awareness of Christian prescriptions and proscriptions as significant directives of Christian behavior—law-based directives that limit and restrict human freedom.
In brief, it is often thought that the Christian life is something like a sparring match between what God and the Church require and what human persons, in their most fundamental desires, wish to do. Many people think that the attainment of true holiness is impossible because they are too attached to their own liberty. Saints are those who concede to the will of God and the Church, rather than allowing their freedom to run free. Most people cannot do this, much less even want to submit in this manner.
Perhaps surprisingly, however, these sentiments do not capture the fullness of Christian faith and morals. Sentiments like these about law, freedom, conscience, and holiness like these reflect the lingering influence of a way of conceiving and teaching the Catholic life no longer endorsed by the Church. This way of thinking about the moral life is called casuistry—a movement that enjoyed enormous influence in Catholic catechesis and theology for almost five hundred years (from roughly the mid-sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth century).
In this “Response,” we will look at the roots of this type of thinking in their historical context, as well as briefly articulate the vision of the Christian moral life that the Church presently endorses.
Casuistry is commonly misunderstood, or, more precisely, it is only partially understood.
“Casuistry” comes from the Latin word “casus,” which means “case,” and it does consider the moral character of different and specific instances of human action. Nonetheless, this is not the full story. Casuistry is not only about individual and specific ethical cases. The moral quality of human action—even discrete human acts—is inherently relevant to all human persons. It is not a concern exclusive to casuists ( those who undertake casuistry).
Precisely speaking, then, casuistry is an elaborate method of ethical and moral analysis and instruction that arose in the sixteenth century. It was historically linked to seminary formation and to the culture of theological writing known as “manualism.” Casuistry, in the fullest sense of the word, refers to the method by which theologians and priests could identify a “safe” course of action in an instance about which the moral manuals did not fully agree.
Casuistry emerged as a method of Christian instruction during the very particular complexities of the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformation effectively reshaped Europe—not just religiously but also politically and socially. The Church convened the Council of Trent (1545–1563) both (1) to clarify Catholic doctrine in light of Protestant objections as well as (2) to formulate a systematic method of teaching and defending the Catholic faith.
Priestly Formation, Parish Life, and the Sacrament of Penance
One of the chief priorities of the Catholic Church during this period was that of seminary formation. Before the Council of Trent, future priests were not prepared for pastoral ministry through a specific program or curriculum. Clerics generally received their preparatory instruction according to something akin to an apprenticeship model. The complexities of the sixteenth century inspired the Church to begin standardizing priestly formation so that all priests would be equipped to serve the sacramental and spiritual needs of their parish communities. “Clerical education took the form of seminaries as we think of them at Trent in 1546.”{1}
The purpose of seminary formation was directly ordered to the needs of parish life. Although priestly ministry—then as now—comprises many aspects and activities, the sacraments reside at the heart of the Catholic parish. And among the sacraments, the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation (“confession”) was and is paramount.
Consequently, one of the prominent emphases within seminary formation was the requisite preparation necessary for the priestly work of hearing confessions and offering spiritual counsel about the moral life.
The Moral Manuals
Along with the rise of seminary formation also rose an instrument of theological education: the moral manuals. Seminarians could not be expected to master all of the large and intricate tomes of the Church’s Doctors and theologians. Nonetheless, they needed to know the essential principles of Christian faith and morals. As the word suggests, the manuals were “handbooks” (from the Latin word, manus, meaning “hand”) that provided theological students with a concise account of the essential principles of the Catholic faith and morals. They were textbooks that could offer theological students a distilled presentation of what priests needed to know in order to effectively carry out pastoral ministry.
Over time, however, the moral manuals began to assume for themselves a unique literary genre within Catholic philosophy and theology and took on a culture of their own. Originally, the manuals all shared an identical pedagogical purpose. Because of the complexities of human life and experience, however, the writings of the “manualists” (those theologians who wrote the manuals) eventually became quite vast and extensive. They were no longer concise books that presented the Christian doctrine and practice.
The casuist manuals oriented their writings around the law. The opening section of the casuist manuals was, almost always, the Ten Commandments. The requirements and obligations of the law stood in central and governing place.
In opposition to the law and its requirements, the casuists placed human freedom. Human freedom was restricted by legitimate laws instituted by God and the Church. Human persons were free to act within the parameters of what the law allowed. Thus, human sin was framed in reference to both the law and human freedom. The casuistic conception of sin was more about illicit human autonomy and broken rules than it was about harm to human nature and frustrations to human flourishing.
The casuist presentation of the moral life emphasized the fact that all human persons had the obligation to submit their wills and freedom to divine and ecclesial precepts. Conscience was the principle that determined which laws applied to which human persons and to which human actions. To conscience was entrusted the task of knowing what the law demanded and identifying the degree to which human freedom suffered legitimate restriction.
These elements profoundly shaped the preaching of priests, the catechesis of the faithful, and the interior reflection of individual Catholics. So central were these elements to Christian life that Catholic culture eventually began to be defined in relation to them in a reductionist manner.
This brings us to the formal definition of casuistry. Casuistry as a discipline is something that is quite elaborate. The essence of casuistry is its connection to the process by which determinations about concrete moral cases are determined. This is where the schools of casuistry have emerged. They are roughly divided into the following schools: probabilism, aequiprobabilism, probabiliorism, and rigorism.
These different schools arose from the fact that different moral authorities can draw different conclusions about different ethical situations. The manuals are here important. There are different schools of moral manuals. The differences precisely as different led to the distinctions between the different types of casuist schools.
Casuistry perdured for five hundred years. Through casuistry, Catholic faithful were able to learn the basic requirements of Christian life—and with great precision and clarity. This pedagogical success is significant insofar as it extended beyond the seminary classroom to the ordinary layperson. Within the practice of casuistry, Christians were able to appreciate the ethical directives that God had instituted in the orders of nature and of grace.
Because casuistry was oriented around ethical obligations, however, it is not surprising that many Christians began to reduce the Christian life to the mere adherence to moral precepts. The law became the supreme and defining principle of Christian thought and life. Additionally, because the law seemingly arose from outside of the Christian believer—as something imposed upon human persons by God and by the Church—a dialectical relationship emerged between divine and ecclesial law, on the one hand, and human freedom on the other hand. The moral life began to be regarded as an exercise in conflict.
Because conscience is inherently linked to the awareness that human persons have (or do not have) about the requirements of the law, it is also unsurprising that the dynamics of ignorance began to be a major factor in the application to or exemption from laws of various persons. Moral truth, unfortunately, began to cede to subjective ignorance.
Ultimately, thus, the casuist presentation of the moral life began to emphasize restrictions, conflict, and ignorance rather than beatitude, happiness, virtue, and perfection.
The Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) effectively brought casuistry to a close. Specifically, the Vatican II document Optatam totius called for a renewal of moral theology. Veritatis splendor by Pope St. John Paul II (1993) proposed the positive alternative to casuistry. Veritatis splendor oriented the pedagogy of the Christian moral life around God as the supernatural end of the human person. Thus, divine finality is the overarching formality of the Christian life. This supernatural cast informed the entirety of the Christian life—everything from human thought, to human action, to human emotions.
One of the elements within Veritatis splendor that most surprised moral theologians was its explicit return to the presentation of the Christian life articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa theologiae. Aquinas’s influence is explicit throughout the encyclical. The vision of renewed moral theology, thus, was linked to the moral theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, who never forgot that the truth liberates human persons (Jn 8:32).
{1} Christopher M. Bellitto, “Revisiting Ancient Practices: Priestly Training before Trent,” in Medieval Education, ed. Ronald B. Begley and Joseph W. Koterski (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 44.
Cajetan Cuddy, O.P. is Assistant Professor of Dogmatic and Moral Theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.
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