Moral Theology in Service of the Work of the Spirit: Synthesizing Pinckaers and Pope Francis Against the Moralities of Obligation

Abstract

In this essay, I proceed in four steps. One, I start with key claims from the documents of Vatican II about God’s action in each person’s life that connect the Council’s Christocentric anthropology with Francis’s broader commitments to discerning and accompanying God’s activity in the world, in less-overtly-Christological places. Second, in order to elaborate the Vatican II account with more precision, I turn to Pinckaers’s work, which offers two key ways of understanding God’s activity in the moral life: his focus on the promises of the beatitudes and the necessity of understanding humans as having an inherently spiritual nature. Thirdly, I turn to Francis’s work and suggest that there are two competing hermeneutics for understanding his critique of an excessive focus on the law, one of which explains him as a laxist, the other as promoting a distinctive account of lived holiness. I argue for the latter interpretation. In the final section, I suggest that this interpretation of Francis offers an understanding of his sense of God’s activity that complements and expands Pinckaers but is also helped by Pinckaers’s more specific claims.