This letter was sent to the editor of the Tablet, the Catholic newspaper, on January 9th 1965. Write a reply to it from a Roman Catholic perspective. source

Dear Sir,

Another of your correspondents deplore what they imply is the advocacy of a “new morality” and of ” situation ethics,” and they oppose any development in the interpretation of natural ‘law as this relates to marriage.

Yet, surely, situation ethics have always been with us both before and during the Christian era. The institution of slavery, to take a case in point, long outlived the Roman empire, and its formal and final rejection as intolerable had to await the nineteenth century.

We recall the familiar story of Pope ‘Gregory the Great who, seeing slaves from this country in the Roman slave market, declared that they should be called angels•rather than Angles, but did not proceed to secure their liberation.

In the opening chapters of his book, Adventures of Ideas, 1Whitehead deals at length with the moral aspect of the institution of slavery, and puts the case for the Roman empire that probably it was necessary at that time for the maintenance of an ordered society. Thus, for Gregory the Great it was presumably a situation ethic, tolerated so as to avert worse evils.

This was not the first nor the last situation ethic which after generations of acceptance and respectability was finally rejected as incompatible with wider views of natural law.

It is, of course, probable that in each ‘generation any proposed development of the precepts and formulae of natural law was opposed and impeded by the contemporary barnacles upon the hull of the barque of Peter on the plea that new moralities and new situation ethics were being introduced and were violating the ” immutability ” of current and past precepts. Yet development has never ceased, as Pope Paul’s recent pronouncement upon the freedom of the human conscience reveals.

Indeed, if the concepts of natural law of Pope Gregory’s day had then been decreed to be ” immutable ” and had never changed, we might well find Fr. Whatmore with one or more serfs to attend upon him, we might hear him righteously refusing to pay interest upon a■ loan he was seeking to raise in order to build a new church, and declaring from his pulpit that outside the Church there is no salvation. He has been saved from these errors by that sequence of situation ethics that is inherent in, any developing concept of moral law, yet he now thinks that all this must come to an end.

Another of your correspondents seems to think likewise, and suggests that small but vocal pressure groups are seeking to impose a crisis upon the Church, and this because they believe that the institution of marriage cannot alone be exempted from consideration within a developing framework of natural law.

I submit that the use of the terms “new morality” and “situation ethics ” in this relation is misguided and ignores the history of natural law. Also, it impugns the motives of those who think that some of the problems of the marriage relationship urgently demand consideration by the Vatican Council.

Those who think thus, and they include many Council Fathers, are not seeking to create moral chaos, but are hoping that in respect of the marital relationship a larger concept may emerge than the basically physiological, stockbreeding, anti-concupiscent idea of marriage that within recent centuries some moral theologians have formulated. Far from elevating our notion of human love and marriage, this concept debases it.

I am, Sir, yours faithfully,

London, W.I. FRANCIS WALSHE.