My dear parishioners,
Peace! In other bulletins (4 December, 2016-11 June, 2017) we have considered the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on “conscience.” We then turned to Saint John Paul II’s encyclical letter Veritatis splendor (6 August, 1993) which addresses fundamental moral issues, including “conscience” more than one hundred times. These reflections were begun earlier (6 April, 2018-30 May, 2018). Here we now consider a passage from Veritatis splendor, 60.
Saint John Paul II (+2005) when considering the “judgment of conscience” reminds us that “Conscience is not an independent and exclusive capacity to decide what is good and evil.”
In this way the Holy Father is presenting a via negativa, what conscience is NOT. Msgr Charles Pope (b. 1961) of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, reminds us that “our conscience is not merely what we think or what it please us to think.” Charles Colson (+2012) who upon conversion to Evangelical Christianity established the Prison Fellowship insisted even a year before he died that “conscience is not a feeling.” Adam Smith (+1790) in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (III-III) contrasts “the soft power of humanity” and the “feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart,” with “a stronger power” “capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love” namely “reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.” That there are various “notions” of conscience does not mean that they are all mutually exclusive. To consider the conscience as relating to the truth of things, what is in fact good and should be done is incompatible with a relativistic approach which would accept that the only truth claim out there is that there is no truth, it would follow that if there was no truth in general there would be no moral truths which ought to be acted upon (or not). For those who would assert that the conscience serves as a motivation to act with moral integrity they would also see conscience as related to the truth of things but not in any relativistic way. Libertines who may be characterized as claiming to not be bound by conscience or moral norms whatsoever would stake their identities upon such licentiousness, while those who see a well-formed conscience as the middle term between the Natural Law from God and ourselves would identify themselves accordingly.
It is one thing for us to recognize good and evil in ourselves, it is another thing for us to act accordingly, and still yet another for us to recognize our triumphs and failures in relation to the good we have done or failed to do or the evil we have done or refused to do or repented. If conscience is “not an independent and exclusive capacity to decide what is good and evil” it is because conscience is dependent upon reality, the truth of the matter, even Sacred Scripture, including the Cross.
God bless you!
Father John Arthur Orr