Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

236 MARTIN MCKEEVERHäring understood himself to be reforming the old system orfounding a new one (18). The essential characteristics of theinnovation concern the recognition of the relationship betweenreligion and morality and the role of values in moral life.Gallagher also offers a brief, more general, reflection on thenature of morality as “Service of God” (playing, as Häring does,on the German word for liturgy, Gottesdienst, which can be brokendown into “service” “of God”). This has the merit of emphasisingthe intrinsically theological nature of Häring’s project.Turning to the central substantive themes of DGC, Gallagherfollows the text more closely, while offering some illuminatingcomment. The first concerns the view Häring takes of the relationshipbetween freedom and law. This is shown to be intenselypauline, with an insistence on the liberating quality of thenew law in the person of Christ. Gallagher reminds us thatdespite the insistence on this point in the first part of the work,positive law in fact plays a prominent role in the second secondpart (27). Häring, then, clearly had no intentions of jettisoningpositive law, but rather of radically re-dimensioning its relativeimportance within moral theology.The second major substantive theme is the classic question ofconscience, a theme on which Häring is broadly recognised ashaving made an important contribution to Gaudium et spes.Gallagher does well to point out that what, on this score, withinmoral theological circles might have seemed revolutionary wasalready the order of the day in philosophical circles (31). The ‘turnto the subject’ was already in full swing, sometimes in ratherextreme forms. A key aspect of Häring’s contribution is to recognisethe importance of this development and attempt to integrateit into moral theology without abandoning all sense of objectivity.A third substantive theme is that of responsibility, a themewhich, Gallagher suggests (33), may well have been influencedby Häring’s personal experience in the Second World War.Whatever of that, Häring is quite explicit in acknowledging areligious understanding of the word ‘responsibility’ as the coreconcept in Catholic morality. The emphasis on the religiousdimension is important in the context of Häring’s determinationto construe moral theology in christocentric and dialogicalterms. Concluding this point Gallagher notes that this aspect ofHäring’s thought has not been taken up very broadly in subsequentmoral theological reflection (36).