CONSCIENCE AND MORAL LAW

September 19, 2008

This Sunday Catholic parishes in the Valley and across the nation will recognize and ask God’s blessing on all who serve the Church’s catechetical mission, that is, the mission to form the faithful in the faith. This work of formation is particularly important for the young, but it needs to continue throughout life, because we’re never too old to learn, and never so rich in the faith that we cannot become richer. I wish to personally praise and thank all who sacrifice themselves to help others grow in the faith, and I pledge my own prayer for them, that God strengthen, enlighten, and protect them.

The content of religious instruction involves faith and morals, that is, what God has revealed, and the moral law he has commanded us to obey. In this column, I wish to focus on the particular matter of the formation of our consciences.

Anyone who owns a pet dog knows you can teach it rules of behavior. A dog can learn to obey. In a similar way, our parents trained us in our early years how to behave. They did so for our good, understanding that we had not yet acquired the thinking powers or judgment necessary to be our own guides. They also knew we had not yet developed the self-discipline needed to act according to reason and right order, instead of impulse and selfish want. They knew, in other words, that our consciences needed to be formed.

By the time we became adults, we had already been greatly trained in our ways of thinking and acting, but even so, we remained, and will remain throughout life, vulnerable to the influence of friends and popular culture. Each of us, then, at every stage of life, tends to act according to our acquired sense of what is proper or improper, right or wrong.

At the same time, it is inherent in our human nature to always seek to rise above conformity to the expectations of others. Each of us desires autonomy. We want to arrive at our own judgments and decisions, and be free to act on them. At the core of our being is our conscience, which the Catholic Catechism defines as “the interior voice of a human being, within whose heart the inner law of God is inscribed. Moral conscience is a judgment of practical reason about the moral quality of a human action. It moves a person at the appropriate moment to do good and to avoid evil” (1777-1778).

Today, the notion of personal autonomy is greatly emphasized. We hear it said, “I disagree with you, but I defend your right to hold your opinion.” In all aspects of life, society says, our own independence requires that we be accepting of others’ choices and preferences. In this environment, the Catholic Church is sometimes portrayed as intolerant for teaching that some moral choices and actions are always wrong.  

This is not so. There is a great difference between personal preferences and moral judgments. Much of what we have learned from our parents and others amounts to personal opinions or preferences. We, in turn, are free to hold different opinions and make our on choices. What we prefer in food and entertainment, for example, will vary greatly, as will the value we attach to various possessions or to the use of our time. These matters are subjective. Moral matters are different. They are matters of law.

The Church defends freedom of conscience, and affirms that at the end of life we will be judged by God according to whether or not we acted in conformity with our conscience. We have not just a right and freedom to follow our conscience, but we have a duty to do so.

Too often, though, freedom of conscience is used to justify immoral conduct, or, in the case of Catholics, to claim a false autonomy from Church teaching. Those who do this portray themselves as being respectful of, but in disagreement with, the Church’s teaching authority.

What is too often left unstated, when claims of freedom of conscience are made, is that we have a duty to form our conscience by a responsible process, which involves much more than thinking a matter through on our own.

The “voice of conscience” within us is the voice of God, but God could never contradict himself by saying one thing to us through our conscience, while having said something else to us through public revelation, as in the case of the Ten Commandments or the moral teachings of Christ. Nor could God ever guide our conduct through our conscience, when our conduct is not in accord with the human nature God gave us.

What we must see is that, because of the mystery of sin, our conscience has been damaged. We may see wrong where none exists, or vice versa. What our conscience needs is proper formation. They need to be formed not by culture or popular opinion, but by what is in conformity with human nature, and in reference to the commandments God has given us which stand as binding moral law.

One cannot simultaneously claim to be a faithful Catholic while dissenting from essential Catholic moral teaching, because the pope and bishops do not teach our own doctrine, but what God has revealed for our salvation. We are servants of the truth, not its creators or arbiters. We teach in obedience to Christ, not in order to impose personal opinions or preferences.

Conscience is not above the moral law. It is not above the truth. Conscience only acquires its morally binding character when grounded in the objective moral truth based on reason and revelation.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 11-Jan-2010 8:22 sitemap