Ultramontanism And Catholic Modernism: An Analysis of Political-Ecclesiastic Controversy in Germany of the 19th Century

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the roots of Catholic modernism in Germany from previous intellectual and theological movements such as Catholic Enlightenment Therfore this paper analyzes the internal and external conflicts of the Catholic Church in Germany during the process of consolidation of modernity in the 19th century until culminating in the modernist movement and its consequences in the beginning of the 20th centur

A reluctant pacifist: Thomas Merton and the Cold War Letters, October 1961 – April 1962

Thomas Merton believed nuclear war was the single greatest threat facing humanity, whereas American Catholic commentators considered that nuclear war was winnable or at least survivable. What made him a reluctant pacifist was the tensions he faced between speaking frankly without being partisan. Merton had an intellectual duty to his readers to both fairly and accurately set out his position on nuclear pacifism. In order to evaluate whether he did this with integrity as a writer it is necessary to set his declared motivations against his actions and to evaluate what the tensions between his views and his actions reveal about him as a writer. Merton’s pacifism is evaluated through archive research at the Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, and supported by a substantial secondary literature. Research for this dissertation highlights previously unacknowledged associations between Merton’s Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky and radical pacifism of the Catholic Worker movement. Merton’s pacifism is evaluated in five chapters through examination of his character, cloistered life, and correspondences within the institutional context of Merton’s tussles with his superiors and censors in reaction to the resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing by the Soviet Union in September 1961 and the U.S. in April 1962. He represented himself through correspondence as being a writer who was committed to a central American Catholic ideal that America was good for Catholicism and Catholicism could save America. He was committed to a consistent ethics of life. The few mainstream readers who engaged with Merton’s ideas were shocked and confused that he reduced political reality to symbols of moralism that rejected all war, not just nuclear war. The broader significance of Merton’s pacifist writing was as a bellwether of a broader cultural shift in American Catholic life from American Catholic triumphalism to prudential judgement in the responsible exercise of the democratic life

On \u27Synderesis\u27 and Moral Imagination: An Inquiry into the Beneficence of ‘Imaginative Prudence’ in Moral Development Via the First Principles of Natural Law of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Imagination Ethic Theory of Darcia Narvaez

he Thomistic habit of synderesis innately inclines moral agents to the first principles of natural law which state that good is to be done and pursued and evil to be avoided. Serving as an ethical foundation in moral development, these primary moral principles direct practical reason to those acts that actualise the essence of human nature. Since the act of synderesis involves pre-cognitive (intuitive) and cognitive (apprehensive) processes, moral formation is necessary for the formal knowledge of the primary moral principles to inchoately foment through virtue habituation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, virtues are habitual acts that form moral agents to become virtuous people and inform them, too, of which acts are morally apt for human flourishing. In this human process where ignorance, passion, weak will, vices, sin and concupiscence may vitiate the intended moral outcome, synderesis and moral virtues correlatively work together to set the ends to moral virtues and to determine which acts to do, pursue and avoid respectively. Specifically, the acquired moral virtue of prudence, which Aquinas considers as right reason applied to action, enables the proper discernment of the primary moral principles that temporally address the contingencies and particularity of everyday human historicity. A human faculty that assists in facilitating this discernment process is the interior sense called moral imagination (vis imaginativa). While Aquinas has considered imagination as one of the sources of human knowledge, his treatment of prudential moral inquiry, however, appears to be underdeveloped without the consideration of imagination as one of the quasi-integral parts of prudence. In view of developing the seed of insight which Aquinas has sowed into the reality of imagination, the beneficence of imaginative prudence will be argued on account of its capacity to dispose practical reason to synthetically evaluate (productive imagination) and to ingeniously explore (creative imagination) various facets of given moral situations while integrating the primary moral principles in prudential moral inquiries. Apart from considering arguments from the theological and philosophical perspectives, the Imagination Ethic Theory of Darcia Narvaez will be explored to demonstrate how modern scientific research in psychology affirms the integrity and indispensability of moral imagination in realising natural law’s ends via prudential moral inquiry