Mission Week 2007:
Challenged To Choose: The Courage to Act
February 2 - 10

Mission Reflection - Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Dr. Ralph Del Colle
Associate Professor of Theology

To pursue the good is certainly a necessary and laudable goal for any human being. Without it we become something less than ourselves, and if Jesuit education is about anything, it is certainly to cultivate a deep sense that the true and the good belong together.Without the good, truth ceases to be truth. So how to choose the good? But is the telos, the purpose of human life just the good? And is moral reasoning, even good and sound moral reasoning, the limit of the human endeavor? Ignatius Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises speaks of three modes of humility with the third mode entailing choices beyond the good, i.e., beyond the avoidance of even the most venial sin. Here a person chooses to be a fool for Christ, embracing poverty and suffering with the poor and humble Christ. In the same vein Pope Benedict XVI in his Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) writes of the necessity of love even in “the most just society.” To eliminate love — even if one seeks justice — is to eliminate humanity. What would it be like if our moral horizon within which we seek the good, including the common good of justice, also embraced the humility and love of Christ? What then would our moral choices look like? Dare we ask?

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