Bernhard Häring
Bernard Häring was a German moral theologian and a Redemptorist priest in the Catholic Church. The national Catholic Reporter, upon his death, called him "the foremost Catholic moral theologian of the 20th century and a leading advocate for church reform before, during and after the Second Vatican Council."
Life
Häring was born at Böttingen in Germany to a prosperous farmer. In 1934, he entered the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, was ordained a priest in 1939, and completed doctoral studies moral theology in obedience to his superiors at the University of Tübingen.During World War II, he was conscripted by the German army and served as a medic. Although forbidden from performing priestly functions in public by the Nazi authorities, he brought the sacraments to Catholic soldiers.
In 1954, he came to international fame as a moral theologian with his three-volume work, The Law of Christ. The work received ecclesiastical approval but was written in a style different from the manual tradition. It was translated into more than twelve languages. The Reverend Richard A. McCormick of Notre Dame called this work,
Between 1949 and 1987, he taught moral theology at Alphonsian Academy in Rome.
He served as a peritus at the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, and was the chief architect on the mixed commission which prepared the pastoral constitution, Gaudium et Spes. He was a prominent dissenter of Humanae Vitae, the minority report drafted by four people out of 68 on birth control, and was investigated by Pope Paul VI.
Häring taught at various universities, including the University of San Francisco, Fordham, Brown, and the Kennedy Institute for Bioethics at Georgetown. His approach was ecumenical, and he also taught at Yale, Brown, and Harvard, universities with protestant origins.
A prolific writer, Häring produced about 80 books and 1,000 articles.
He died of a stroke at the age of 85 at Haag in Oberbayern, Germany.
Häring established himself as a leader in moving Catholic moral theology to a more personalist and scripture-based approach.
Dialogical approach to Catholic moral theology
Häring presents a dialogical approach to Catholic moral theology in his trilogies The Law of Christ and Free and Faithful in Christ. In this approach, morality follows the pattern of faith necessitating a dialogue. This approach to morality rests on the person's conscience that acknowledges God as basis of value; he writes:Selected works
- . 3 Vols.