These are two different realities. It’s good to know each of them, their nature and properties, and how they are related to each other. There’s a lot to gain from this knowledge, especially the light we need to cruise through our increasingly complicated times.
Morality is the objective quality of our human acts, starting with the internal ones like our thoughts and intentions, insofar as these bring us or not to our proper end. Thus, our human acts can be either morally good or bad.
Morality covers everything that can be called as a human act, one that is done knowingly and freely, and thus one for which we are responsible. The morality of our actions, good or bad, is most clear to the extent that our knowledge, consent and responsibility for such actions are also at their fullest.
That’s in theory and in principle. In practice and in real life, things are a lot messier, since assessing one’s knowledge, consent and responsibility for his actions is a very dynamic affair, often shrouded in mystery and beset by ignorance and confusion by the persons concerned.
In the end, morality depends on one’s self-knowledge and on God, who is the Creator of all things and continues to govern everything with his Providence. Thus, we can readily see how important it is to have good self-knowledge and clear and deep convictions about religion, our relation to God.
Weak and vague in this fundamental aspect, we may as well set off a course that later will turn to pure chaos and anarchy.
Thus, morality is based on our nature and dignity as persons and ultimately as children of God. It depends on our core ideas and beliefs about who and what we really are. These will ultimately define what our nature and dignity is, who we really are.
Legality, on the other hand, is a human construct made to promulgate and determine the content of morality. Its purpose is to regulate our life in society so that we can attain our common good.
Since our common good always include not only the material, social and political, but also the spiritual and personal, legality cannot get away from morality.
Legality can only have a very limited scope compared to the one of morality It cannot promulgate, determine and regulate everything in the moral law. But it cannot stay away from morality. It has to be the moon to morality’s sun. It can only reflect and work for morality, never against.
Thus, we can have the following principle to follow: no act morally bad can be sanctioned by civil law, and no act morally necessary can be prohibited. But not all morally good acts can be regulated civilly, nor can all morally bad acts be coercively prohibited, only the morally bad relevant to our social or political common good can be prohibited.
It’s this gap between morality and legality that we have to most cautious about these days. At the moment, many pieces of evidence all over the world point to how this gap is cleverly manipulated to pursue questionable objectives.
A case in point is the Reproductive Health Bill. Its good intentions are patent, but its means are immoral. Our local version may not yet include the clearly immoral abortion, but it promotes contraception and other things that are also clearly immoral, though not in the same category as abortion.
This is an example of how legality is made to go against morality. Of course, many justifications and rationalizations are now made, including rewriting Christian morality by those who claim to be Catholics but do not follow Christian moral doctrine. They look like mongrel Christians.
Of course, those who are not Christians or Catholics, not to mention, the professed atheists and non-believers, make their own version of morality derived from their own understanding of the natural moral law that highly favors what they want: contraception, sterilization, etc.
Fortunately, there are also many non-Christian people who follow the correct morality based on their own religion and their own efforts to know the contents of the natural moral law. This only shows that the natural moral can transcend religious differences.
Whatever the situation may be, we need to raise everyone’s awareness to work for an increasingly harmonious relation between morality and legality. Our leaders, especially Church and civil leaders and politicians and other people of influence, should be in the forefront of this effort.
How we behave in this gap will show the kind of persons we are!
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Email: roycimagala@gmail.com