The discipline of moral theology is undergoing noticeable self-evaluation. Moral theologians are exploring the connections between moral theology and Scripture, moral theology and virtue ethics, moral theology and Christology, moral theology and Patristics, moral theology and liturgy, and moral theology and spirituality. Moralists are looking for new conversation partners in order to stretch the discipline beyond the now familiar relations that once bore fruit between moral theology and philosophy, and natural law in particular. There are some stirrings to converse again with philosophy, but the noted activity most relevant to the intent of this essay encompasses the explicitly theological.

My own “Moral Theology and” discourse has centred on the theme of prayer. In so doing I am looking to reinvigorate a discipline that seems to be dying pastorally. I have come to the conclusion that the best way to form the conscience is not through formal moral theology courses and all the inner disputations that moralists have with one another. The best way to form the conscience is to teach parishioners to pray, to love God in prayer, to come to know God in prayer and worship. In this I would dispute the thematic ordering of the Catechism: the section on ethics should appear last, after a theology of prayer. In saying this, I am not arguing that moral dilemmas are immediately apprehended and solved in prayer. I am not saying that spirituality delineates specific steps to moral decision-making or that it clarifies a method to be used in such decision-making.

A bridging-passage in a piece of music can have several roles. One of them is to make us wish that we might fully appreciate the effect of the music’s ending when it comes. Able to hear the separate musical messages converge. In her great work The Dialogue, a complex meditation, Catherine of Siena speaks of ‘the lovely and glorious bridge’ of Jesus’ presence as having a similar role. Although ‘he was no longer with you’—and here, adding her own reflection to scripture, she adopts a voice as God’s own—‘his teaching remained.’ The reader is addressed as one of the disciples who, on the day of the Ascension, were ‘as good as dead, because their hearts had been lifted up to heaven.’ The bridge himself has ascended, and we, the reader-followers, must ask, ‘Where can I find the way?’ As we shall see, Catherine expects her metaphor of a bridge to play many parts in the dramatic speech patterns of conversion. It can stand for the reliable relationship we have with Christ through all our own difficulties. But it stands also for our vantage point of calmly casting nets to help others in trouble. Theological discourse has not often called on one symbol to be so versatile, although the image of each stone which contributes to a tower in The Shepherd of Hermas is similarly polyvalent. A recent translator of The Dialogue, Suzanne Noffke, suggests that Catherine may have had in mind the kind of walled bridge which was built over the Arno, containing shops. This was a route allowing concealment but could also mean sudden surprise for the traveller herself. It might indicate a suitable direction to evade severe pressures.

It has been remarked that the Israelis have a ‘slightly morbid fascination with things Roman Catholic, especially in relation to the Holy See’. Until 1993 a meeting between the Pope and the Grand Rabbi of Israel was vetoed because the leader of Catholicism was regarded as a ‘source of impurity’. Since Israel is the focus of one of the most combustible problems in the world, it is important to understand every filament of that beleaguered nation’s anxieties, one of which is its anxiety about Catholics. Well-known is its concern about the Church’s role during the Nazi era, and its historic contempt for Jewry. Perhaps less familiar is Israel’s anxiety about the Church’s supposed historic antipathy towards Zionism and the State of Israel. Such amorphous perceptions are the stuff of the Middle Eastern scene, which is a mirage built on sand, an ocean of propaganda, designed to conceal the drive for domination. Are there any grounds for Israeli suspicions that the Church has looked for a greater role in Israel/ Palestine without announcing it, and that it has been hostile to and worked to undermine Israel? Church policy towards Israel can always be presented by the Vatican in terms of true Christian concern; but the question here is: what do Jews see, and how do they see it?