Lesson 23: Moral Theology (Part 2) BY FATHER ROBERT ALTIER

Moralists emphasize that there are two fundamental norms of morality to which all other things can be reduced. One of these norms is said to be objective, and the other is subjective. The objective norm of morality is law in all of its ramifications, and the subjective norm of morality is the conscience. We have to look very carefully at those two points.

What do we mean when we talk about law? The definition given by Saint Thomas Aquinas is that law is “an ordinance of reason for the common good made by him who has care of the community and promulgated.” We see there are four basic elements that are common to all true laws. First of all is reason; it has to be something reasonable. Secondly, it has to be for the common good. It cannot be some self-serving thing that some lawyer determines. Third, it must be done by the lawful authority. In other words, you and I cannot decide to change the law; that has to come depending on who it is from, the mayor or the governor or the president or whomever they put in charge to determine the laws. Fourthly, it has to be promulgated. If there is a new traffic law that will go into effect next week and it is going to raise the speed limit ten miles per hour, and tonight you get pulled over for going ten miles an hour over the speed limit and you say, “But next week they’re going to change the law,” that is right. So next week you will not get a ticket if you go this fast, but tonight you will because it is not promulgated yet.

Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier

Lesson 23: Moral Theology (Part 2)

The other thing we have to recognize is it always has to be in conjunction with the divine law. That is the highest of all laws. It is the divine law or the eternal law. This is God’s divine plan by which all things are directed from all eternity to one supreme end. This eternal law is in the mind of God; therefore, it is actually identified with God. God’s will in this way is made known in a variety of different ways. There are physical laws of nature, for instance, the laws of gravity and so on. There are natural moral laws that are known through the function of the conscience, things that all people know to be right or wrong. There are positive divine laws like the Ten Commandments, where God has laid them out, and things that are known through revelation. He can also make His will known immediately through positive laws, whether those be civil or ecclesiastical. These laws must follow the four points we talked about and be proper and just.

The laws of God, the laws of nature, and good human positive laws are all reflections of the eternal law which is in God Himself. To the extent that they manifest in one way or another the divine plan for us, they must be seen as being holy. They point the way to fulfillment and happiness, and ultimately to eternal salvation. We know that we need to have laws; we all recognize that. We do not always like the laws, but we know we need them in order to have a proper ordering of society. There has to be someone in charge and there have to be laws. At the same time, the laws have to be proper. If we can see the laws as being good and for the common good, then our choice to follow those laws, to be obedient to them, actually becomes part of the means by which we grow in holiness, because obedience is ultimately the way that Our Lord chose to bring about our salvation. In that case, if we are willing and able to be obedient to a just law, then that becomes part of our growth in holiness.

On the human level, not only do we need good laws, but those laws must be in conformity with the divine law in order to be good, and they must be framed and promulgated by good and wise legislators. That, of course, brings one to an obvious point of concern: to have good and wise legislators making the laws. It is rather interesting to see some of the twists that are there. We have the interest groups with all of their things, but the important point here is that it must be in conformity with divine law. If it is not, it is an unjust law, and an unjust law does not have to be followed. In fact, if it is an unjust law, it must be disobeyed. That is a point people do not always understand. For instance, people would say it is okay to kill babies because the Supreme Court said it is. Well, it goes directly against the Fifth Commandment; it goes against what God has made clear in Scripture and through His Church, and therefore we have an obligation to disobey the law. We cannot hide behind the law and say it is okay because the Supreme Court said it is okay. We actually have a moral obligation to be disobedient in that case, to obey the higher law and disobey the lower law, because the lower law is not in conformity with the higher law. We need to also be careful that we do not try to pick and choose the laws we like and do not like. They have to truly be unjust laws in order to be disobeyed. They cannot be something that we simply do not feel like doing, or that we do not like ourselves. It has to truly be an unjust law.

One thing I have noticed with some of the laws is that the more ridiculous and unjust the law is, the more severe the penalty is for disobeying it – because that is the only way they can get anybody to obey it since it is unjust. I have found it to be an interesting pattern the way these guys operate. They know the thing is a worthless law, and the only way they can make anybody conform to it is to make the penalty for disobeying it so ridiculously severe that you have no choice, even though it is not just.

As I mentioned, there was the obedience of Jesus to the will of His Father that accomplished our salvation; therefore, we in our turn have to follow His example. And if we are going to follow His example, it is to be obedient even if it means going against our own will. Obviously, Jesus never had to do anything against His own will because His will is the will of God and that was not an issue. For us, sometimes it is a problem.

On the subjective end, the conscience is the supreme subjective norm of morality. In our day, the conscience is frequently appealed to as an absolutely autonomous principle within the person, almost something which is not supposed to be challenged by anyone, including the state or the Church. In order to know how to deal with this, we need to know, first of all, what the conscience is and what it is not.

Let us start with the negative. The conscience is not an inner voice telling us what is right or wrong. The conscience is not an emotional feeling produced by the way we were raised or by peer group pressure. The conscience is not a special faculty that we possess separate or apart from the mind and the will that tells us what to do and what to avoid. It is not a little angel sitting on one’s shoulder and a little devil sitting on the other one talking in our ear. If you are hearing voices in your ears, we need to look into that. There is some professional help that may be necessary if you are having a little problem with somebody talking in your ear. That is not what the conscience is all about.

In Catholic tradition, the conscience is a function of the human intellect to be able to make moral judgments. It is part of your mind. When the mind judges on the basis of general principles that a particular action should be done or avoided in the here and now, that practical judgment of the mind is called the conscience. In other words, remember that I mentioned how we need to know general principles. The most general is to do good and avoid evil. Then we have the Ten Commandments. We have basic principles that we have all been taught about what is right and wrong, but the difficulty is that we do not make most decisions in the abstract and we do not make them in the general. We make particular decisions in the present. So we have to take those general principles and apply them to the present situation, and that particular judgment we make is what the conscience is. Through reason and revelation, the mind is conscious of many general abstract principles, such as the Ten Commandments. Since we live in time and space and have to make decisions all day long, we have to apply these principles to concrete situations. It is the application, as I mentioned, of these general norms to concrete situations that we mean by the conscience.

Conscience both precedes and follows concrete moral actions. Beforehand, the conscience will urge me to do some good action and to avoid an evil action. The judgment of the conscience after an action is either approving when the action was good, or it is condemning when the action was bad. The latter is said to be a bad conscience, and it is accompanied with a sense of guilt. If you listen to some of the people in psychological circles these days, they have a term they like to throw around called “Catholic guilt.” It is a crock of rot, but that is what they like to call it. They say if you feel guilty because you committed a sin it is because the Catholic Church told you how wrong it was, and you should not feel guilty about it. Well, there is a reason why you feel guilty about it: because it is wrong, and God has put it into us as human beings to feel guilty when we have done something wrong.

Of course, what we can do is to numb our conscience. We have all experienced that. If there is some sin that you commit, you may have started out fairly small and you knew it was wrong and felt guilty about it, but then you did it again and did not feel quite as guilty the second time. The third time, not nearly as guilty. The fourth time, it was not a big deal. So then you went on to the next level and committed a bigger sin. Initially, you felt kind of badly about it. But you did it a few more times and did not feel so bad about it, so then you went on and commited something even bigger. After a while, you are so far strung out on these things that you look back to the sin you originally committed and felt guilty about and say, “That’s not even a big deal. I don’t know why I felt guilty about that; compared to what I’m doing, that’s nothing.” That is the point: “compared to what I’m doing.” That does not mean it was not a sin to begin with; it just means that the sins you are committing in the present might be so much worse that it makes the other one look small.

That is a problem most of us run into. We like to compare ourselves to other people and we like to compare our sins to those of others. But we cannot. Maybe we have not committed the most heinous sins in the world, but that does not mean the ones we have committed are any less serious just because we have not committed anything worse. We need to be grateful that we have not committed something worse, but we also need to recognize that we certainly are capable of committing those same sins as anybody else is. We need to make sure we are looking at ourselves in the light of God, not looking at ourselves in the light of somebody else’s sin, because it is an inappropriate comparison. The only thing appropriate is for us to look at the Lord and look at our own sins in His eyes.

At any rate, if our conscience tells us we have done something wrong and we feel guilty about it, that is appropriate. There are some people who would have some psychological problems where they are feeling guilty about things that were not sins and they may be overblown on the guilt. That is a problem. But the fact that you do something wrong and have a sense of guilt about doing it means your conscience is working properly, not that you have “Catholic guilt” and so you should let the psychologists kill your conscience so you can get rid of that guilty feeling. That is the way they basically condone the evil actions they are doing. They kill the conscience. We cannot do that. We need to form the conscience.

Since the conscience involves a judgment, there a couple more distinctions we need to make. The conscience is said to be correct when the judgment corresponds to the objective norms of morality, and it is said to be erroneous if it does not correspond to the objective norms of morality. We have a correct conscience when our decisions are in conjunction with the Ten Commandments, for instance. It is an erroneous conscience when we are trying to convince ourselves that doing something which violates the law of God is okay. Subjectively, a conscience is said to be certain if an individual has no doubt about the morality of the action that he or she is performing, and the conscience is said to be doubtful if the person is undecided regarding what to do. If one is not sure that an action is the right thing or the wrong thing then it is a doubtful conscience. Obviously, the ideal conscience to strive for is one that is both correct and certain, that there is absolutely no doubt about what you are doing and that it is in conformity with the will of God.

We oftentimes hear people say, “Let your conscience be your guide.” On one level, this is absolutely true because the conscience is the ultimate guide for each person in making moral decisions. We absolutely must follow the dictates of a certain conscience, even if the conscience is erroneous. So if you are absolutely convinced the action is the right thing to do, even if it is in fact the wrong thing to do but you are absolutely convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is the right thing to do, then you need to follow your conscience. Saint Thomas would even go so far as to say, “If your conscience leads you outside of the Church, you have to follow it. That is, if you are absolutely certain that is the right thing to do. The only person you are ultimately have to answer to is God. We could look at it and say, “That’s not the right decision to make,” but we are not the judge, only God is. One day we will all stand before God, and if we can honestly look at the Lord and say, “This is what I did and this is why I did it,” and He says, “You’re right. You made the wrong decision, but you were absolutely certain it was the right decision to make,” then you are not going to be held responsible for it. If you knew it was a wrong decision and you made it anyway, that is a different matter. But we absolutely must follow the dictates of a certain conscience, which is why we need to make sure we know those general principles of morality so that we know what we are doing is right.

On the other hand, we should never act on a doubtful conscience. To do so would be to affirm that we are actually willing to do something evil. “I’m not sure if this is right or wrong, so I’ll just do it anyway.” Basically what you are saying is “It might be wrong, it might be sinful, but since I’m not sure that it is, I’ll just go ahead and do it even if it is.” What we should do instead is try to resolve the doubt. We should try to refrain from acting if we have the opportunity to do so. There are some times when you have to make a decision; you have no choice but to make a decision and you do not know what to do. But if you have the opportunity to look it up or to ask somebody who might know (there are good moral theology books out there or you can ask somebody with a background in these things to be able to help you), that would be the better thing to do.

Since each person must follow his conscience, it is absolutely crucial that the conscience is well formed. That is what we have to do. Conscience is not something that just happens, and it is not something you are born with. It is formed by parents, by peers, by the school, by the Church, by the media, and so on. It used to be that the principle formation of the conscience of children was family, church, and school. Now it is the media, the media, the media, and then a little bit from the family, and of course less than one hour a week of church by all means. That is what is happening these days. I still cannot grasp this concept at all, but they tell us that the average American spends more than six hours a day in front of the TV set. Who even has time to turn the stupid thing on, let alone spend six hours in front of it?! And who would want to? Some of us are not spending any time in front of the TV set, so that means somebody else must be spending twelve hours a day in front of the stupid thing in order to make up for the rest of us. That is a scary thought.

But think of what is being shown to your children. Think of what is being demonstrated as being normal. I remember a couple of years ago there was a friend of mind who came up to me and said that they had just read something about the prime time shows, and the vast majority of the prime time shows were all homosexual. They were all demonstrating the same thing. If you put your kids in front of the TV set from 7 to 8 in the evening, what are they going to get? They are going to get things which actually violate the teachings of God, but they are being taught that this is normal and good. I understand that now they present men on TV as being just a bunch of buffoons, a bunch of bumbling idiots who sit in front of the TV and drink beer, while the woman is running circles around him. She is out working, taking care of the family, and doing everything while the guy sits there like a moron. What are we teaching our kids? That men are a bunch of morons who sit around and drink beer and use women, and women are supposed to be the super heroes that do everything. It is presenting things wrongly. Men are the ones who are supposed to protect and provide; it is not the other way around. Both have their proper roles, but the media is demonstrating something very different and it is teaching our children, because we are putting them in front of the TV for hours at a time and that is what they are learning.

Even worse are these stupid video games they play, because it is just killing people. Pretty soon, they cannot make the distinction between reality and the video game. The police will tell you that one of the really scary things happening these days is that these young people have no conscience at all. They murder people and they have no remorse. They do not even realize, or so it seems, that they have done anything wrong. Just think, if we were to murder somebody, we would be devastated by the fact that we would actually do something like that, but these people do not care. I remember a few years ago there was a kid riding his bike down River Road and a group of teenage kids was driving down the street and shot the kid dead. When they took them to the police station, they asked them why they did it and they said, “We were practicing.” Practicing what? There was no remorse. They did not think they had done anything wrong. They killed somebody in cold blood and they did not care. They were just practicing. Just think what would happen when it was not “practice” anymore. It is a scary thought when our young people do not even have a conscience. And why? Because they are constantly being shown things that are immoral and it has become the norm to them, so they do not see that it is a problem. You put them in front of movies day after day after day where people are being killed, you put them in front of video games where they get points for killing people, and the more people you kill, the more points you get, so what are they going to do? They are going to go out and kill people. They are going to do stupid things.

In California a few years ago there was a group of boys that had given point values to different girls. The whole idea was to seduce them. If there was a girl who was known to be kind of immoral, that was only one point. But if there was a girl who would be a little more difficult, then it might be ten points. At the end of the year, they would calculate it out and whoever had the most points got a prize. Somehow or another, this was found out. They took one particular kid who was the leader of this whole thing and suspended him. Three days later when he came back to school, the students gave him a standing ovation. He was violating girls and giving point values to girls, so they were just objects for him to violate, and the kids gave him a standing ovation because he was a hero. What is going on? You can see the problems we have when we do not have a conscience. We need to make sure we are teaching our kids and that we are teaching them the right things. That means the Church and the family have to get back as the primary means of the formation of conscience.

You have to recall that we are fallible, we are prone to error, and we err even at times in matters of conscience. A person may think he is justified in doing some evil act, even though he might be quite sincere. That is what we hear all the time. “But, Father, he’s so sincere.” You know what? He is sincerely wrong, if that is the case. I do not care how sincere the person is. If it is wrong, it is wrong. Even if they are trying to be nice or trying to be sincere about it, it is still wrong. The fact that we might be sincere does not make something evil into something good. This is a huge problem today where the conscience has become the absolute norm, not just the subjective norm for the individual, but it has become the absolute norm for all morality. To neglect the objective norms and to claim that an action is good or bad just because a person thinks it is, is precisely the problem we are dealing with and it is the destruction of society. Look around and see the problems we have: the breakdown of public morality, violence, promiscuity. All the problems we are dealing with are because we think we can decide for ourselves what is right or wrong. There are no objective norms. There is nothing that I have to conform myself to, rather everything must be conformed to me.

The other part of that problem is what happens when my determination of what is right and wrong conflicts with your determination of what is right and wrong. If I decide that it is a good thing to kill you, and you decide that that is not a good thing for me to do, then who is right? When you have two subjective ideas that are in conflict and there is no objective norm to rely on, how do you determine what is right or wrong? What we have is anarchy. It is a complete rejection of all laws and a complete rejection of all order. Everybody can do whatever they want to do. That is what we are dealing with in certain areas of our world today.

As Catholics, then, we need not only to try to cultivate a good moral conscience, but we need to try to cultivate a Christian conscience. This means that in addition to reason we can add grace, revelation, the teaching of the Church, and the example of the saints. We have Jesus and Mary. We have two thousand years of saints who have lived good, upright, and moral lives. They teach us what the truth is. Ultimately, what we need to do is learn to judge all things in the light of salvation. Is this thing going to lead me closer to Christ? Or is it going to lead me away from Him? One basic principle you can always keep in mind is that there is absolutely nothing in this world that is worth losing heaven over. Ask yourself: What is worth going to hell for? NOTHING. Why would you want to miss out on heaven in order to do something immoral? Remember what Our Lord said: What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul in the process?

About 15 or 20 years ago, this guy named Forbes (from Forbes magazine; he is a multibillionaire, I suppose) was giving a talk. In his talk, the guy actually said, “Where I’m going, I’m going to need an air conditioner and a really long extension cord.” I thought, “Why don’t you repent and change your life? Don’t sit here and brag about the fact that you’re going to hell!” Why would you want to go to hell for a billion bucks? Who cares? You cannot take it with you anyway. Satan is not going to be impressed by your billions of dollars, and I can guarantee you that neither is God. What difference does it make? If we gain the whole world and we go to hell, what have we gained? Nothing, because you ultimately leave this world behind anyway. Why would you want to go to hell?

We need to look at salvation. We need to look at eternity and ask ourselves that simple question: Is this going to lead me closer to heaven? Or is it going to lead me away from heaven? Is it going to lead me to Christ? Or away from Him? One aspect of Catholic moral teaching that distinguishes it from most other moral systems is its emphasis on objective moral principles. We believe that the basic principles of morality are God-given, that they are embedded in human nature, that they are recognizable by human reason, and that they are valid for all people at all times. It does not matter what culture you live in, it does not matter what century you live in or what society you live in, the basic moral principles are true for everyone. It is wrong to murder. It is wrong to steal. It is wrong to adulterate. It does not matter what culture you are in, these things are wrong – and we all know it. We can try to numb our conscience and even kill it so we can convince ourselves that doing these things is right, but the reality is we all know they are completely wrong.

Now this emphasis on objective moral principles has led to a lot of conflict with many people in our own day. There are some who want to deal with what they call “situation ethics.” It is sometimes also known as “consequentialism.” What this means is that a concrete act, no matter what it is, can be just and good depending on the intention of the agent and the circumstances of the act. In other words, what these people will do is to say that you cannot put a title on a particular act. We were saying in the previous lesson that there were three things we needed to look at: the object, the circumstances, and the intention. They have thrown the object out and it is just the circumstances and the intention. For instance, they would say that you cannot use terms like adultery or fornication because you have already put a moral tone on the action, so what you have to use are terms like “consensual sexual relations between adults,” or something like that; otherwise you are making distinctions. If it is just a consensual sexual act, that could be two teenage kids, it could be somebody married with a secretary, it could be two married people with somebody else’s spouse, or it could be two persons of the same sex. If it is just a sexual act, it could be somebody violating a child, or it could be somebody doing something disgusting with an animal. All you are doing is saying it is a sexual act, and so there is no moral quality to the act itself.

Then you look at the intention and you look at the circumstances. What these people would say is that as long as nobody got hurt, it was okay – as long as they were sincere and no one got hurt. As long as your wife does not find out that you committed adultery, it was okay. Well, try to convince your wife of that. Go home and explain to her: “Honey, as long as you don’t know that I did something wrong, is it okay for me to do it?” I think she will have something to offer you about that, and you are not going to be too pleased with what it is. It is something we need to look at and realize where the fallacy is: “Well, I was away from my spouse for a week and this person just happened to be there. I was lonely and they were lonely, so it was okay for us to do.” No, it was not, and everybody knows that, but you see how they try to justify it. “Look at the intention, look at the circumstance, we weren’t trying to do anything wrong. We weren’t trying to hurt anybody. As long as nobody got hurt and we were trying to be sincere, then it has to be okay.” That is a pretty convenient way to justify most anything.

The subjective positions always deny that there is a law fixed by God and it is binding always and everywhere. They completely reject that. They would say that all human acts are indifferent in and of themselves; therefore, the morality of an act is based solely on the circumstances and on the situation. Again, we can see how this just feeds right into the human ego because it means that “I become God.” I can determine what is right and wrong. I can decide for myself in any and all situations what is good and what is bad. In other words, there are no objective moral principles. This is something the Church has always rejected, but if you look carefully at it, it is exactly the lie that Satan told our first parents: “You can be God. You can decide what’s right and wrong in any and all circumstances. You can be the one who is the objective judge. You are the one who decides all things.” That is exactly what the devil has tried to convince us of since the beginning of human history. Of course, the Church has always rejected this position, not because the Church wants to try to control people, but the Church is mother and teacher. The Church has to teach and She protects Her children, just like any other parent. There are rules in your house and your teenage kids do not always like them either, do they? But you have to stick to the rules because you know what is right. And sometimes you have to tell your kids, “No, you will not do this,” or, “Yes, you will do this even though you don’t want to,” because you like them, not because you want them to be angry, not because you want life to be miserable for them, but because you love them. So too with the Church. She lays out these rules and we have to follow them, not because the Church wants to keep us under thumb, but because the Church loves us and wants only what is best and right for us. That is the point we have to understand.

It is Satan who wants to drag us down, and he has lots of ways to do it. One of the easiest ways is to reject the objective reality of God and make yourself god, put yourself in His place instead. That does not work very well. It is like the story of the person who came into the confessional and said, “Well, it’s been about ten years since I’ve been to confession, and I haven’t done anything wrong.” The priest asks, “Really?” (By the way, that does happen. It always makes me laugh when I hear people. They’ll come in and say, “Father, I’m really a good person and I really haven’t done anything that’s too serious.” I say, “That’s fine. Let’s just go through your confession.” My heavens, I wonder what it is that they consider serious when you listen to their confession. Holy buckets! What do you think is serious if these things aren’t?) So the priest says, “How about this?” The person says, “No.” “How about this?” “No, no, no. I haven’t done anything. I haven’t been impatient. I haven’t said anything wrong. I haven’t had a bad thought about anyone. I haven’t speeded on the freeway. I haven’t done anything!” The priest finally says, “Do you know where the statue of Our Lady is up there on that pedestal?” And they say, “Yes.” “When you leave the confessional, I want you to take the statue of Our Lady down and then you stand up there.” That is basically what these people are saying: “I am without sin.” Would that we were! Unfortunately, we know better than that. But if you can make all the rules and you decide what is right and wrong, then you have never done anything wrong because you decided in that particular situation that it was right to do that. That is a pretty slick little system, isn’t it? Until it comes to having to deal with God, and even with trying to deal with ourselves because we all know it is wrong, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that it was right. And it will catch up eventually.

Anyway, this eternal law of God, which is reflected in human nature, is called the natural law. Certain aspects of it are easily recognizable to anyone of sound mind. Those would be things like prohibitions against lying, murder, stealing, and so many of the other things that we could just go right down the list of, these sins that we all know are wrong. Anyone in any age in any culture can recognize that these things are wrong. They are natural law. They are part of our nature. God promised us through the prophet Jeremiah that He would write His law in our hearts and on our minds, and that is exactly what He has done. They are there. It is not written on stone; it is written on hearts of flesh. We know what the truth is. It is in our nature to be able to know in some of these instances what is right and wrong. There are certain things which, of course, we need to learn, the distinctions we need to make, the particular things, is this correct or is that correct, but the general principles of things we all know.

Even if you try to think it is okay and suggest that it is okay, what happens when somebody does it to you? It is an interesting thing when you have somebody who is a thief and then somebody steals from them. Oh, do they get angry that somebody violated their stuff! But it was okay for them to violate everybody else’s stuff. There is still a point when you have been treated unjustly that you recognize this action is completely wrong. We know it, it is there. It is in our hearts, and we cannot get away from that.

This point of natural law is the basis of all the Church’s moral teaching. This is why the Church has never infallibly stated any moral teaching – because She does not need to. In essence, the teachings are all infallible because they are all part of divine law. They are part of natural law, so they are infallible by nature. People will say things like, “Is Humanae Vitae infallible?” No, not in and of itself. But what is contained in there certainly is because it is part of divine law. So it is these sorts of things we have to keep in mind. If we are simply looking for what has been infallibly defined, that is the wrong way to do it, especially when it comes to morality, because these things are not infallibly defined by the Church. The Church is simply presenting the principles that God has given to us, not only in Scripture but in our own human nature. These things are not infallibly stated because based on natural law, which is the foundation of all the Church’s moral principles and teaching, these are the things that are laid out for us and they become, in essence, infallible for us.

Something we need to understand is that there is a basic difference between Catholic teaching and most others. Catholics do not teach values. The Catholic Church teaches principles. Values change with culture and generation. Those of you who were alive in the 40s and 50s can look back and ask, “What were the cultural values?” For a while, it was rolling up a pack of cigarettes in your shirtsleeve and walking around like some sort of he-man. Now if you are seen with a cigarette, it is the worst sin you could think of in this society. Well, polluting is even worse, I guess. You look at things the way they are and you see that the values of the culture change. The values we might have here are different from the values they might have in other parts of the country, and the values we have here are going to be different from the values they have in other parts of the world. But the values are not what we are about. We are about principles. Principles remain the same always and everywhere. They are the same for everyone in every part of the world in every age, and they will never change. That is the beauty of what we have. The values are going to change with individuals, with society, with generations. Principles remain always the same for everyone in every society and in every generation. What the Church teaches are moral principles, not moral values. That is something you can think about in our society because what we hear about constantly is values, values, values. Something can be said about values, but when it comes to morality it is principles that we have to be about, and that is what the Church teaches. The foundation of all the moral teachings of the Church is natural law, and the practicalities of it are all based on moral principles.

[End of Lesson 23]

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