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A Catholic is a person who, beyond any way of life or moral or spiritual practices, follows Christ in accordance with the teaching of the Catholic Church. Catholic theology shows how this influences the life of the Christian. Even in today’s secularized society, the Christian is seen as a person with a distinctive view of life and goals. Yet when we see the Christian, and more specifically the Catholic, as an entrepreneur or manager – i.e., engaged in the task of creating and managing companies – his outward activity seems no different from that of other, non-Christian entrepreneurs. The purpose of this chapter is to understand what makes the Catholic who works as an entrepreneur different, in order to try to answer the questions we may ask ourselves about the advantages and disadvantages of being a Catholic. We argue that religion provides to managers a wider view of business and helps them to understand reasons for ethical behavior. At the same time, it gives him or her spiritual and ascetical means for good behavior.

While the first chapter of this study focused primarily on the historical origins of informed consent and its second on the articulation of this concept in human-rights documents, the purpose of this chapter is to trace the issue of informed consent throughout the Magisterial teaching of the Roman Catholic Church (first section) and its treatment in relevant philosophical and theological literature (second section). This will provide grounds for comprehensive analyses of proxy consent. Space limitations require that the second section include only the most representative and recognized authors. Thus, the virtue ethics applied to the medical realm by Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma will be contrasted with the four-principle approach characteristic of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, enriched by psychological insights provided by Ruth Faden. The account of Paul Ramsey, rooted in the biblical notion of covenant and classic for the topic, will open the section, while the analyses of Germain Grisez, grounded in Catholic theology and emphasizing the weight of conscience, will close it. Furthermore, the contributions of authors such as Benedict Ashley, Kevin O’Rourke, Robert Veatch, Jessica Berg, Paul Appelbaum, Charles Lidz, Lisa Parker, and Robert Levine will be recognized as appropriate throughout this section.

My purpose is to try to understand a little better the condemnation of Copernicanism in 1616 and of Galileo in 1633 by paying special attention to the theology upon which these judgements were based. I approach this task by studying the reply of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) to the letter of Father Paolo Antonio Foscarini. Though Bellarmine replied briefly and in some haste, he provided a comprehensive exposition of the basic points of the Roman theology that conflicted with the Copernican system, consequently his letter to Foscarini furnishes valuable indications of the theological motivation behind the actions of the Roman authorities in the Galileo affair. Surprisingly little attention has been given to the theological issues of what was at least as much a theological event as a scientific one, while the historical and philosophical aspects have been thoroughly explored: Francois Russo, Ernan McMullin, Richard J. Westfall and Richard J. Blackwell are among the few scholars who have discussed the theological questions at any length.1 i shall draw together a few strands of the discussion as it stands, make a few precisions of my own along the way, and move more expressly than hitherto beyond the particularities of the early seventeenth-century conflict in order to explore its significance for our understanding of the relationship between Catholic theology and the natural sciences.

In order to appreciate the role of phenomenology at the Council, we must remind ourselves that it was a pastoral Council. Unlike certain previous councils (e.g., Lateran V and Trent) there was — by definition, at least — no ad intra “crisis” in either Catholic theology or morality. Pope John XXIII presented a worldwide summation of Church life in Humanae Salutis, and there he judged it as “in great part transformed and renewed.” There was, however, a serious world crisis ad extra which in the context of European intellectual history I have chosen to call the “crisis in human beings.” This “crisis” at the socio-cultural level reflects the ad intra psychoethical confusion stemming from a good century of intellectual and moral subjectivism, and this is further compounded by the ad extra collapse of global social and economic structures which can no longer handle the explosive growth of new global interdependencies.1 As Gerald and Patricia Mische have wisely perceived, this is a Crisis of Growth related to structural lag.2 This structural lag, however, presents not so much a technological or political challenge as it does a moral one.3 In such a dislocated situation Pope John saw the need for a pastoral Council intent on moral renewal.

At the end of his 1975 Pere Marquette lecture on the “The Contributions of Theology to Medical Ethics” [2], J. M. Gustafson comes to the conclusion that these contributions are not particularly great. The volume Theology and Bioethics: Exploring the Foundations and Frontiers[3], edited by E. E. Shelp, confirms this conclusion. It follows that we can hardly expect greater things when we deal here specifically with the contribution of Catholic theology to medical ethics. Nevertheless, reference is made frequently to Catholic medical ethics, presumably because Catholic moral theology and the Catholic Church have dealt more frequently in the past with questions of medical ethics than have other religious institutions.