Fulfillment in Christ
A Summary of Christian Moral Principles
After The Way of the Lord Jesus, volume one, Christian Moral Principles was published in 1983, various professors told Grisez they would have used the book but for its size and difficulty. This feedback convinced him that a shorter and more easily read volume was needed for the one-semester courses in Christian ethics common in most seminaries and many Catholic colleges.
In 1984–85—when for the last time Grisez taught the two-semester course in fundamental moral theology to the first-year theological students in Mount Saint Mary's Seminary—he lectured on each chapter and recorded those lectures. Jeannette Grisez transcribed the lectures, including class discussions, and delivered the transcripts, along with Germain’s lecture notes, to Russell Shaw.
Working from that material, Shaw drafted a very readable summary tracking the original volume chapter by chapter, so that those using the summary can easily go back to the fuller treatment. Shaw and Grisez then worked over that manuscript until both were entirely satisfied with it. Because both had many other resonsibilities, work on this project proceeded very slowly. There were other delays in obtaining the permission of Franciscan Herald Press to publish the volume and then in arranging publication with the University of Notre Dame Press. But the book finally appeared in 1991.
Fulfillment in Christ: A Summary of Christian Moral Principles is copyright © 1991 University of Notre Dame Press; all rights reserved. Still in print, the book may be purchased at the link below.
Charles J. Merrill translated Fulfillment in Christ into Spanish: La Vida Realizada en Cristo. The publisher is Ediciones Palabra, Madrid, and the book is on their website at: