Using concrete examples, John T. Noonan, Jr., demonstrates that the moral teaching of the Catholic Church has changed and continues to change without abandoning its foundational commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Specifically, Noonan looks at the profound changes that have occurred over the centuries in Catholic moral teaching on freedom of conscience, lending for a profit, and slavery. He also offers a close examination of the change now in progress concerning divorce. In these changes Noonan perceives the Catholic Church to be a vigorous, living organism answering new questions with new answers, and enlarging the capacity of believers to learn through experience and empathy what love demands. He contends that the impetus to change comes from a variety of sources, including prayer, meditation on Scripture, new theological insights and analyses, the evolution of human institutions, and the examples and instruction given by persons of good will. Noonan also states that the Church cannot change its commitment to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Given this absolute, how can the moral teaching of the Church change? Noonan finds this question unanswerable when asked in the abstract. But in the context of the specific facts and events he discusses in this book, an answer becomes clear. As our capacity to grasp the Gospel grows, so too, our understanding and compassion, which give life to the Gospel commandments of love, grow. "Having been an office neighbor of Judge John Noonan at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress while this book was developing, I am delighted to see it in print. It is a careful and yet bold application of the concept of 'development of doctrine' to morals rather than to dogma, and a brilliant taxonomy of Christian attitudes toward slavery. The result of Judge Noonan's research is a deeper, if more complex, understanding of just what the continuity of the Orthodox-Catholic tradition implies. I look forward to discussing it with the author at greater length, and I cannot imagine any serious person who would not benefit from reading it."―Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale University

Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (Erasmus Institute Books)

History

John T. Noonan, Jr.

World

University of Notre Dame Press

Legal thought in this country has always focused on the rules rather than on the persons affected by the rules. Persons and Masks of the Law restores the balance by taking a person-centered view of the law. The author shows how even great jurists have chosen the "masks of the law" over persons, his surprising examples being Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, Benjamin Cardozo, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--four of the greatest lawyers of the United States.Noonan discusses how the concept of property, applied to a person, is a perfect mask since no trace of human identity remains. An auction of slaves in Virginia, the takeover of a banana plantation in Costa Rica, and an accident on the Long Island railroad are the famous cases involving these four legal giants. The stories of the litigations at three different periods of our history provide and new and powerful analyses of American law. This book, breaking through the formalism in which jurisprudence is enshrined, offers a new vision of law and represents a call for reform in the education and even behavior of lawyers.

Persons and Masks of the Law : Cardozo, Holmes, Jefferson and Wythe as Makers of the Masks

Criminal Law

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; The Noonday Press

Traces the history of bribery from ancient Egypt to ABSCAM, examines changing perceptions of bribery, and discusses the legal, ethical and religious injunctions against bribes

Bribes: The Intellectual History of a Moral Idea

Reference

University of California Press

The Antelope - The Ordeal Of The Recaptured Africans In The Administration Of James Monroe And John Quincy Adams

Univ. of California Press

Legal thought in this country has always focused on the rules rather than on the persons affected by the rules. Persons and Masks of the Law restores the balance by taking a person-centered view of the law. The author shows how even great jurists have chosen the "masks of the law" over persons, his surprising examples being Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, Benjamin Cardozo, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--four of the greatest lawyers of the United States. Noonan discusses how the concept of property, applied to a person, is a perfect mask since no trace of human identity remains. An auction of slaves in Virginia, the takeover of a banana plantation in Costa Rica, and an accident on the Long Island railroad are the famous cases involving these four legal giants. The stories of the litigations at three different periods of our history provide and new and powerful analyses of American law. This book, breaking through the formalism in which jurisprudence is enshrined, offers a new vision of law and represents a call for reform in the education and even behavior of lawyers.

Persons and Masks of the Law: Cardozo, Holmes, Jefferson, and Wythe as Makers of the Masks

Americas

Originally published in 1965, Contraception received unanimous acclaim from all quarters as the first thorough, scholarly, objective analysis of Catholic doctrine on birth control. More than ever this subject is of acute concern to a world facing serious population problems, and the author has written an important new appendix examining the development of and debates over the doctrine in the past twenty years. John T. Noonan, Jr., traces the Church’s position from its earliest foundations to the present, and analyzes the conflicts and personal decisions that have affected the theologians’ teachings on the subject.

Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, Enlarged Edition (Belknap Press)

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Harvard University Press

In his introduction to this compelling study, Mr. Noonan writes that Power to Dissolve "looks to the role of the law within a religion founded on commandments of love; it looks to the place of love in an institution molded by law. Jurisprudentially, it is the examination of a legal system, arguably the oldest and certainly the most universal in the world. Theologically, it is an investigation of the contents of Christian marriage." 
Six principal case studies dramatically illustrate the legal process through which Catholic petitioners have sought papal annulment of their marriages. Spanning the years from 1653 to the present, ranging geographically from the Old World to the New, involving such dissimilar characters as Charles, Duke of Lorraine, and his Duchess Nicole, Governor Parkhurst of Maine, and the Rospigliosi of Rome, they resulted in a series of often surprising decisions which help illuminate the history and meaning of marriage in Western society, while suggesting lines of future development. 
Power to Dissolve has three themes: the theory of marriage as it is fashioned by the interplay of theology and society; the policy of the Roman Curia as it balances the demands of theory and the needs of administration; and the impact of theory and policy on individual persons. In focus, it is a book about the persons in whom the law lives - the married couples themselves, their lovers, their lawyers, and their judges. 
This intriguing analysis is strengthened by the author's ability to obtain access to the files of the Roman Rota, the records of the Congregation of the Council, and the contents of the Secret Archives of the Vatican. His intensive examination of this information and other such raw material of litigation as the briefs of the parties' own advocates and interoffice correspondence within the Curia itself has enabled him to form this cogent account of a legal system at work.

Power to Dissolve: Lawyers and Marriages in the Courts of the Roman Curia

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

A Private Choice: Abortion in the America in the Seventies

Life Cycle Books

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Books by John T. Noonan, Jr.