A code of conduct for clergy: why bother?
Moral identity develops when what is perceived as a “good” determines the details of one’s life and commitments. However, more is required of us than personal ethics, notions of the good need to be translated into organisational as well as personal behaviour. Paul Ricoeur wrote that the good life is one lived “with and for others in just institutions”. His definition spans the spectrum between personal goodness and institutional engagement. If faith is limited to personal piety and integrity and remains detached from the broader ethical questions of the institutions to which we belong, it will recede into that privatised domesticated realm of societal irrelevance. We will then have little to say in a society that is experiencing an almost cathartic crisis of trust in organisational behaviour.
* Full article available in printed copies.
Maria Jansson
recently retired as Dean of Waterford.