“Which of these three, do you think, was a
neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one
who showed him mercy.” St. Luke 10:36-37
The
book was called “The Casuist: Cases in Moral and Pastoral Theology,” and
because it was published in 1906, I was able to download it onto my Kindle for
free. In the little town where I last
served as rector, they gave free gym memberships to the local clergy, so I took
my exercise on the elliptical machine, and for about six months, “The Casuist”
kept my mind occupied as my arms and legs ran through the machine’s monotonous
courses.
I don’t know if any of you read in
the gym or not, but I’ve found that books with short chapters and relatively
punchy content works best. And “The
Casuist” filled the bill in spades. Over
several volumes, it collected hundreds of “hard cases,” moral quandaries that
had been sent to the author, a certain Stanislaus Woywod, OFM, by puzzled
priests who ran across them while hearing confessions and giving spiritual
advice.
Fr.
Woywod’s cases tend toward the curious and the colorful. There’s Mary, who lays dying and would like
to make her confession to the priest over the telephone because her antireligious
husband forbids him from entering the house.[1] John, who becomes engaged to a (presumably
different) Mary, and then breaks it off without any good reason and marries
Martha in a civil ceremony needs to sort out what he owes to his jilted.[2]
And there’s a certain Father X, who
because of his scandalous conduct, has been forbidden by his bishop to enter a
saloon for a full year except to administer the last rites. If he is vacationing in another diocese, the
good father wonders, does the prohibition still apply?[3]
