Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

486 REVIEWS / RECENSIONESauthoritative exponents of the results of the Council. Not only didboth contribute to some of the important Council documents(notably Optatam totius and Gaudium et spes) but they were bothactive participants in the debates around the initial reception of theCouncil. Niemira’s concern to link theological anthropology andmoral theology has an historical relevance. The poor link betweenthese was an obvious lacuna in the casuist manuals, and the contributionof Häring and Capone towards a more comprehensive articulationof the relationship is amply demonstrated. Of particular noteis the way Niemira traces the threads of continuity in both hisauthors. Häring’s published doctorate (Das Heilige und das Gute,1950) as well as Capone’s (Intorno alla verità morale, 1951) are shownto be seminal in the later development of both. The fact that Häring’sexpression of the religious – christological nature of morality is moremarked by the category of responsibility, while that of Capone iswoven through an original insight into the prudential expression ofthe person existing in Christ, is less significant than the fact that bothwere attempting a refoundation of religious morality in anthropologicalcategories that were explicitly Christian. In this sense,Niemira offers an original contribution.Solid and original though the thesis of Niemira is, it needs to becomplemented by other considerations to catch the full significanceof Häring and Capone. Neither of these theologians was particularlyinfluenced by the theoretic debate on the specific nature of Christianmorality or autonomous morality, which is clearly a concern inNiemira’s assessment of both of them. This debate is a particular one,linked to a line of thought that was much discussed in the periodafter 1968. The attempt to locate the thought of Capone and Häringin the restricted list of ‘autori recenti’ in Chapter 5 is rather forced.The authors chosen (Goffi, Böckle, Fuchs, Demmer and Bastianel)are indeed substantial, even if the choice seems too biased in favourof one tradition of thought and one continent of provenance. Myquery is related to how the nature of religiosity and morality isunderstood by Häring and Capone, which Niemira deals with inChapters 2 and 3. I was surprised that little attention was given tothe ecclesiological and ecumenical concerns of Häring and the pastoraland spiritual concerns of Capone. Though not absent inNiemira’s research, the attention given to them is peripheral. Theintertwined relationship between religion and morality comes outvery clearly in both of these authors’ writings, for instance, on the