Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the July 7, 2005 edition of Catholic Exchange.
Germain Grisez is an American-born moral theologian who teaches at Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland (a beautiful site, by the way, that is worth visiting if you are near DC and which also has a historic shrine to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton).
Grisez (pronounced “Grizzay”) has been a stalwart for decades in defending the Church’s teaching against contraception and in exposing the fallacies of the morally relativistic school of “moral theology” known as proportionalism. He is now working on the fourth volume of his systematic magnum opus on moral theology. Grisez happily follows the official teachings of the Church. Some even view Grisez as having the stature of a modern Aquinas. Grisez’s particular brand of moral theology is known as the New Natural Law Theory.
In volume one of his systematic series on moral theology, Christian Moral Principles (Franciscan Press, 1997), Grisez presents the fundamental principle of morality in the form of a moral imperative. That moral imperative is to will only acts compatible with “integral human fulfillment.” This “integral human fulfillment” refers to always respecting all the basic human goods, such as friendship, justice, life, religion, and truth.
Grisez then goes on to describe eight “modes of responsibility” to flesh out how we go actually about respecting the basic human goods. These “modes” are embodied in the traditional virtues.
Of the eight “modes of responsibility,” the sixth mode of responsibility is quite striking and, in my opinion, illuminates large swaths of behavior in our society and in our personal experiences. Here is how one of my seminary teachers paraphrased this particular mode of responsibility: Reality vs. Illusion: Do not choose and act for the sake of the experience of participating in a good in preference to the reality of doing so. Grisez links this particular mode of responsibility to the virtuous dispositions of sincerity and clearheadedness.
The example my teacher gave of a violation of this mode of responsibility is the now conventionally acceptable phenomenon of “shacking up” — pretending to be married in every aspect other than the crucially distinctive ones of commitment and procreation. I myself thought first of in vitro fertilization and other technologies which bypass natural procreation between husband and wife in favor of technological reproduction. But, as I thought more, I could see that this rule also encompassed all the myriad forms of substance abuse, legal and illegal, that permeate American society and lead so many to substitute illusion for reality. One could even include consumerism as a form of delusionary substance abuse, with material goods and money being the “substances” abused to create an illusion.
We can add to the list of behaviors that violate this particular mode of responsibility. In any dysfunctional situation, whether a family or even a parish, there is a sense in which people can conspire to have a particular experience without the substance or reality of that experience. So family gatherings with all the conventional trappings of domesticity can become in fact a grand illusion and deception. So can the workings of parishes or religious communities where administration, “business,” or even social services can displace spirituality. In fact, Grisez gives as an example of violating this rule the situation in which a bishop, in order to conjure up the experience of reconciliation, goes around giving general absolution to groups of people with no real contrition who have not experienced the reality of individual confession and absolution — apparently a practice that was popular in some places in the late seventies (Grisez, p. 214).
And of course we have obvious violations of this rule against substituting illusion for reality in the obsession with pornography (and by pornography I include what we see on network television, including the latest vulgarity involving Paris Hilton). I even recall one middle-aged woman writing that she had cosmetic surgery because she was so frustrated with males who spent their time drooling over pornographic images of young women on the Internet — a case of one illusion leading to another.
In Michigan, our state motto is a pleasant Latin sentence that I translate as follows: “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look around you.” If you seek to find violations of Grisez’s “reality vs. illusion” mode of responsibility, look around you.
