By David Carlin, The Catholic Thing, Sept. 3, 2021
David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.
I know of no public opinion polling data to support me in this belief, but I believe, and have believed for many decades, that many American Catholics, perhaps most of them, equate the Christian moral law with the natural law of morality. What the Christian law proscribes and prescribes, they believe, the natural law proscribes and prescribes.
But this equation seems to me to be highly unlikely. For it would mean that the rule of morality that Jesus Christ delivered to us was simply the same law that we already knew. He was telling us nothing new. He was simply republishing what humans had always known. He wasn’t giving us a moral revelation; he was simply giving us a reminder. ….