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 if we “act against this judgment or in a case where” we lack “certainty about the rightness and goodness of a determined act, still performs that act,” we stand “condemned” by our “own conscience, the proximate norm of personal morality.”

            The possibility of being condemned is acknowledged here by the Holy Father, even in a day and age which denies such a terrible outcome.  Sadly, this did not begin with Imagine (1971) of John Lennon (+1980)  While we should hope that all people will be saved, and while we believe that Christ died for all (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:15; 1 Peter 3:18), the Lord Jesus Himself insists that “wide is the way and many they who follow it to destruction” (Matthew 7:13).  The Greek word apoleia is translated here as destruction, but is sometimes rendered ruin, loss, damnable/damnation or perdition.  Saint Jerome (+420) prefers perditionem in the Vulgate.  The late Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar (+1988) and the Bishop Robert Barron (b. 1959) have both been accused of the heresy of “universalism” (everyone goes to Heaven) even though Von Balthasar insists that we are “under judgement” and Bishop Barron affirms that “immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell” (CCC, 1035).

            The twin aspects of a well-formed conscience and a doubtful conscience are touched upon here by the Holy Father’s reference to the “certainty” or lack of certainty “about the rightness and goodness of a determined act” and “still perform the act.”  When addressing a “doubtful conscience” Saint Alphonsus Maria de Ligouri (+1787) asserts that “it is never licit to act with a practically doubtful conscience” and that if we do we sin and “the sin is of the same species and gravity as the doubt”, this, under the heading of “The Indecisive Conscience.” (Conscience.  Liguori, Missouri:  Liguori, 2019, 30).  Liguori makes further distinctions between  “speculative and practical doubt” as relates to conscience, even citing Ecclesiasticus 3:27 “Whoever lves danger will die in the danger.”  The danger he is alluding to is the danger of sin and dying in sin.

            That conscience is the proximate norm of personal morality implies that there is a “remote norm of personal morality.”  If the conscience is within, then the Natural Law, Decalogue, teachings of the Church are the remote norms of personal morality.  The nearness or distance being proximate or remote.  

            God bless you!

            Father John Arthur Orr