From the first epistle of St Paul to Timothy: Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared.
When I was young I remember waiting to see the latest Walt Disney movie. I had to wait until it came to what was called the second run theater near my house, where the price of admission was cheaper than in the grand movie houses downtown. And one movie I remember so well, partly because I had read the book before, was Pinocchio. The puppet who wanted to be a real boy. And it is the character of Jiminy Cricket who helps Pinocchio to be a real boy and tells him that what distinguishes a puppet from a real boy is that a real boy has a conscience. Jiminy sings that wonderful song: “ Give a little whistle and let your conscience be your guide.” Those Disney movies can be dismissed as cultural artifacts of another time, but for the Catholic, what Jiminy Cricket told Pinocchio is absolutely true: that what distinguishes men and women from animals and from puppets is conscience.
It is indeed fanciful to picture conscience as a cricket dressed up in pants and a top hat that sits on Pinocchio’s shoulder whispering in his ear the right thing to do in a particular situation. But what is even more fanciful is how this concept and word, conscience, is being used today, standing what conscience really means on its head. For the Catholic, and until not that long ago, for all Christians, the conscience is that part of man, given to everyone by God, that can discern right from wrong. When one follows one’s conscience one feels satisfaction, almost joy, that one has followed that given capacity in man to know right from wrong. When one decides to go against one’s conscience, the result is guilt, knowing that one has deliberately decided against what one knows to be good. But you see what this assumes is that what binds God and the thinking man is truth. And that conscience is an exercise of taking on the truth, of seizing the truth for one’s own. It not a matter of someone blindly following the laws of God, it is not the case of obeying what is in the end an irrational authority. It is the conscience that recognizes what is true and rejoices in that truth, even if that truth is difficult and goes against his personal desires. What is the middle man, so to speak, between God and the conscience of the individual is truth. Saint John Henry Newman talked of the conscience as man’s God given capacity for truth. When we forget that conscience is about truth, then we fall into either the abyss of irrational obedience or subjective selfishness.
The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, said that truth is subjectivity. Now this can be and has been and is tragically misunderstood as meaning that truth is defined as what I believe to be true. That in the end all truth is relative and therefore there is no truth in the absolute sense. But what Kierkegaard meant by truth is subjectivity is the courage for the individual subject, the individual man, to take on what is the objective, what does not depend at all on me, to take on that truth that is God and to make that truth my own. Kierkegaard in his way was talking about the relationship between God and man and the decision to make the truth of God my own. And that is always difficult, for the truth of God is not subject to my own inclinations, my own preferences. The truth of God is there before I existed, and goal of every man and woman is to take that truth that does not depend on me and make it my own.
So in this light, the conscientious act is that act that seeks truth as the basis of action. Now it is true that the apprehension of that truth even for the faithful Catholic is not always clear, is not always immediately apparent. It takes prayer and time and thought to come to that decision that is founded on the truth of God. The exercise of conscience is how I freely choose to live my life according to truth of the moral law of God. But there is another understanding of conscience that is quite different from that of Catholic teaching, and it is one that is now prevalent in our society. It is also prevalent among Catholics. And it is this: that conscience is the absolute freedom to judge God’s law by our own personal resources and the right to reject the notion or reformulate the law as we think best. Now I have framed this modern, post-modern understanding of conscience in the best possible way. For the fact is that most people now would deny that there is any such thing as conscience. The question of what I do boils down simply to what I want to do at the moment, as long—and this is the bow to the relic of conscience- as it does not hurt anyone else. The crassness of this attitude, its gross self-referential basis, is apparent. But what must concern us is the at least partial taking on of this gross selfishness among Catholics.
One of the mantras among those who call themselves liberal Catholics—their label, not mine—is that one’s conscience must be obeyed even if it goes against the teaching of the Church. Now this principle is sound. It is Catholic teaching that one’s conscience must always be obeyed. And there are no exceptions to this. One’s conscience must be obeyed even if it goes against the teaching of the Pope and the Magisterium. But what has happened is that this has become a mantra, and a sordid excuse to do whatever what one wants to do. Conscience can never judge the law of God written on the heart of man. The moral law does not bind us only if we are enthusiastic about it, only if it fits into our plans, only if it agrees with the consensus of the society, only if does not cause discomfort. If this were true, then there is no binding on the Catholic of the moral laws. Then what I am bound to is merely myself. I define what is good and even what is true by what I want and who I perceive myself to be and all of this guided by the contemporary norms and mores. This is a moral vacuum that many Catholics seem to be living in, and vacuums suck out life. Newman, in his letter to the Duke of Norfolk, distinguishes himself from those who equate conscience with integrity, or sincerity, or preference. He writes: “Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, Who, both in nature and grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ. “
Saint John Paul II reminded us in his encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, that because the Church teaches that one’s conscience must be obeyed, this does not mean that there is no moral difference between the act decided upon by a correct conscience, that is, a conscience informed and open to the truth of God; and the act decided upon by an erroneous conscience whose basis is a purely subjective understanding about what is good. A good conscience cannot be separated from hard work, from prayer, from thought, from humility. A bad conscience is cut off from the very source of truth, for it grounds itself not in the truth from God but in its own cut off self.
What lies at the heart of the spectacle of so many of our Catholic politicians supporting laws and policies that are contrary to Church teaching is this purely subjective understanding of conscience and its exercise. What lies at the heart of so many Catholics who pick and choose what moral laws to follow on the basis of their life-style or life-situation or preferences or whatever, is again this false and not Catholic understanding of the relationship between freedom and conscience. But it also lies at the heart of the terribly mistaken notion that Church authority, in the form of the Pope or the bishops, is a substitute for or an excuse for the abrogation of the task of the individual Catholic to use his conscience in a real way. The teaching of the Magisterium can only corroborate what is already true. They cannot invent new truths, nor can they impose in any way what is contrary to the individual conscience by which each of us is given by God to know what is true. Without the individual conscience there is no papacy, there is no need to remind us of what we should know. Pope Benedict XVI said: “One can only comprehend the primacy of the Pope and its correlation to Christian conscience in this connection. The true sense of this teaching authority of the Pope consists in his being the advocate of the Christian memory. The Pope does not impose from without. Rather, he elucidates the Christian memory and defends it.” And so Newman’s famous quote: “ Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink to the Pope, if you please—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”
