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Following Christ: A Handbook of Catholic Moral Teaching

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This book has many excellences and it does make a sufficient introduction to its subject, i.e. Catholic moral and ethical teaching in a 20th century context. This edition, the first, has been followed by a subsequent one, so I shall not write at too great length about Daniel L. Lowery's work here, not yet having read the revision of it (which has variant subtitle wording) which was published in 1996. The ISBD bibliograpical citations of the 1982 edition and also of the 1996 edition also are as follows:

Following Christ : a Handbook of Catholic Moral Teaching / Daniel L. Lowery. -- Liguori, Mo. : Liguori Publications, cop. 1982. -- 159 p. -- ISBN: 0-89243-173-3 (pbk.). -- Includes index.

AND

Following Christ : Referenced to the Catechism of the Catholic Church / Daniel L. Lowery. -- Rev. ed. -- Liguori, Mo. : Liguori Publications, cop. 1996. -- xi, 177 p. -- ISBN: 0-89243-850-9 (pbk.). -- Includes bibliography and index.

The book's author is a Redemptorist priest and he displays the loyalty to genuine Catholic teaching that prevailingly characterises members of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, a religious order that has suffered rather less from the wild excesses of post-Vatican II chaos than most priestly orders have, certainly restrained compared to the Paulist, Maryknoll, or Marist Fathers, examples of male religious orders which in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council ("Vat-2"), to a large extent, "went berzerk", as all too many priestly, monastic, and women's religious orders did in the sorry and confused aftermath of Vat-2.

Nonetheless, there is an air of decidedly Vat-2 sensibilities in Lowery's book. There is a crying absence of pre-Vat-2 statements from the many, many Church councils that preceded Vat-2 way back in a succession of them that, after all, go back to the Apostolic and Patristic eras. The initial oecumenical council, after all, was one held in Jerusalem, the dealings of which St. Luke himself reported in the Book of Acts in the New Testament (N.T.). At least Lowery uses the conciliar documents of Vat-2 responsably, without distorting their genuine intentions to any irritating degree.

There is the advantage, at least, in quoting only from the conciliar documents of Vat-2, the most recent of Roman Catholic Church Councils, which the Catholic Church (but not the Eastern Orthodox Church nor many others) consider to have an oecumenical conciliar status, in that the kind of scrupulosity that so beset earlier Catholic literature on these matters is set aside, for the most part, apart from such an issue as masturbation, about which Lowery is as "hung-up" as ever a Catholic moralist of the past was about this peccadillo, so prevalent and inevitable in (and irresistible to) male adolescents (and men notably older than that), of Catholic or any other faith, or of none. However, the documents of earlier councils, and the writings and transmitted sayings of Catholic saints and theologians too, did regard moral purity and social fairness between classes with a dignity and sense of "The Holy" that merit more than being shoved entirely aside in favour of Vat-2!

At least Lowery quotes from some of the pre-Vat-2 saints of the Church, e.g., St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Alphonsus Liguori (of course! since Liguori was Redemptorist, but also welcomely), as well as from a few popes before the overrated and over-quoted John Paul II, namely from Popes Leo XIII, Pius XII, and (in Vat-2 times) Paul VI. He should have quoted the words of many more pre-Vat-2 saints, popes, and others than he chose to do so. The same applies to theologians. The words of such among them as Bernard Haering (a Redemptorist, but one of at times quite questionably modernist tendencies), Timothy O'Connell, Kevin O'Rourke, and others, among post-Vat-2 theologians, are well chosen for the quotations, and Lowery does quote from earlier Catholic theologians and scholars at times, but the bias really is too excessively in favour of very recent Catholic thinkers.

Typical of his (and others') Vat-2 preferences, Lowery resorts to the often banal New American Bible translation (N.A.B., to the 1970 first text of it in this edition of Lowery's book) of Holy Scripture, for the numerous Bible quotes that welcomely pepper this study. Lowery made use of the unworthy N.A.B. rather than of several far better 20th century Catholic versions to which he could have resorted, especially the much superior Confraternity Version (O.T. from no edition or printing later than 1969, N.T. of 1941), which the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine forced into disuse when its catchpenny New American Bible (N.A.B.) version appeared, or the Knox Version, Revised Standard Version (First Catholic Edition), or Jerusalem Bible translations, all of which had appeared prior to 1982 and any one of which Lowery much more advisedly could have used as preferred text.

Well, there is little point to continue at greater about Lowery's book along these lines than would appropriate here for a book which, after all, has gone on to a readily available and slightly preferable revision. Alas, that 1996 revision of his book did no better than Lowery's 1982 first edition in those regards that I criticise here. Nonetheless, as studies of Catholic morality and ethics go, especially those intended (as Lowery's book is) for the laity, "Following Christ" makes for a balanced and sane point of departure. The lay reader, or his clerical or otherwise professional guide, himself can supplement Lowery's tome with earlier books, published before the 1960s, on these matters, to give a more balanced view of the riches that Catholicism over the ages has provided in treatises and Church documents for readers at all levels and of all ages.