Recently I had an
interesting, more-heat-than-light interchange with an old friend who has, by
his own admission and choice, left the practice of the faith over issues of
women’s ordination, gay marriage, contraception, celibacy and, I gather, a wide
variety of the usual hot button social issues.
In the course of that interchange came the following missive, which
struck me as central to our discussion:
I am so
astounded by your lack of understanding. You have a limited understanding
of what being a Catholic is. It is not being dominated, it is love and
forgiveness…. it is sad to see so many who want to go back to a 1950's form of
religion, rather than the 'changes' which began opening our church up to
acceptance and love of all our brothers and sisters, (both in religions, races,
creeds and genders). The MAIN teaching of the church is to follow your
conscience, yet you deny that. Ask your priest.
He will say that is ALWAYS what you should do.
Actually, my priest tells me
to have faith and follow the teaching of the Church for she will never lead me away from God…just for the record.
But that viewpoint might be
the reason so many lapsed Catholics lapsed, whether they, like my friend, left
the communion of the Church or like others, stayed in the pews or in positions
of power. I think it’s another aspect of
the pervasive, pernicious Disneyfication of the world—that worldview that
thinks animals are people and people are the problem. The view that holds moral guidance comes
pre-fab in the form of a little guy standing on your shoulder, twirling a
walking stick, doffing a top hat, and singing “Let your conscience be your
guide.” The view that following the
teaching of the Church is somehow oppressive or shallow or mindless.
The Church does indeed put
great weight on conscience—that innate sense we have of the law of God written
on our hearts from the very beginning. I
find it an interesting coincidence that the discussion of conscience begins in
the catechism with section 1776. This is
what it says:
Deep
within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself
but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is
good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment.
. . . For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God.
. . . His conscience is man's most secret core and his sanctuary.
There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.
There is great freedom in that
statement: freedom from abandonment, for that we know that it is possible to
know God’s voice and encounter it deep within ourselves. God is not merely an external; He is
intimately involved with the deepest parts of our being, so much so that He has
given us a mechanism for understanding Him and His will. And my friend is partly
right: the Church does commend us to follow our consciences:
It is important for every person to be sufficiently
present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience.
This requirement of interiority is
all the more necessary as life often distracts us from any reflection,
self-examination or introspection:
Return to your conscience, question it. . . . Turn inward,
brethren, and in everything you do, see God as your witness.
So far so good.
But the modern notion that a reliable moral conscience is both entirely
personal and something we come fully equipped with is simply foolishness on its
very face. It never seems to occur to my
friend, for example, that though his conscience might lead him to oppose Church
teaching on birth control, mine might compel me to accept it. And given that artificial contraception
either is or is not gravely disordered, one of the two of us has a conscience
that is at best off the mark.
Spread the circle a little wider and the issue gets
more complex. There seem to be people
for whom adultery poises no moral qualm at all; or at least that is what they
assert. There are those that see abortion
not as a necessary evil but as a positive good.
Presumably, they have a conscience on which God wrote His law as well…
What seems to be lacking these days is a deep
appreciation of concupiscence, that deep tendency toward sinfulness that we
bear as a result of our fallen human race.
I know for my part, left to my own devices, I can justify anything in my
own mind. I’m a lawyer, after all. My working life revolves around making good, persuasive arguments and I am too willing an audience for them.
The conscience is a place of communion and dialog with God: we bring him a problem and He helps with the solution if we are willing to listen. As always, we must bring to that still and silent spot of
conscience all that God has said to us before if we expect to understand what He is telling us now.
God chooses in blessing us
with this conscience, to involve us in the actual operation of this amazing
gift; God always requires our
cooperation. Here He asks us not just to listen to our consciences but to form and
inform them with all that He communicates to us, especially that which he communicates through the Church. His voice is still and
so small and so easily drowned out by the din of the culture and by our own
pride in our intellect and judgment.
When we are surrounded by the whirlwind, we miss the whisper.
What saves me—saves us—is what follows in the
Catechism, something too often forgotten in the heat of passion and the
cafeteria Catholicism of the day:
Conscience must be informed and moral judgment
enlightened. A well-formed conscience is upright and truthful. It formulates
its judgments according to reason, in conformity with the true good willed by the
wisdom of the Creator. The education of conscience is indispensable for human
beings who are subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer
their own judgment and to reject authoritative teaching
The education of the conscience is a lifelong task.
From the earliest years, it awakens the child to the knowledge and practice of
the interior law recognized by conscience. Prudent education teaches virtue; it
prevents or cures fear, selfishness and pride, resentment arising from guilt,
and feelings of complacency, born of human weakness and faults. The education
of the conscience guarantees freedom and engenders peace of heart.
In the formation of conscience the Word of God is the
light for our path, we must assimilate it in faith and prayer and
put it into practice. We must also examine our conscience before the Lord's
Cross. We are assisted by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, aided by the witness or
advice of others and guided by the authoritative teaching of the Church.
I am ever so grateful for the Magisterium. It’s the reason I have been able to extract
myself in any small measure from the mire of my own sinful preferences, to see
with clarity—even when I cannot meet the bar—what is demanded of me as a
Christian. It’s not just me and Jesus or
me and my conscience—it’s me with two thousand years of experience, two
thousand years of some of the greatest minds in the world who have approached
all manner of moral problems, two thousand years of sinful and holy people to
help me. It exhilarates me and in the
same moment convicts me. I think that is
the way it’s supposed to work. Another
example of the great both/and…
Putting it in modern terms, a conscience is an
internal moral computer, something to help me figure out the best way to approach
the endless moral dilemmas I face every day (and every act is, after all, a
moral act in one way or another—some greater, some smaller, but all
moral). I can’t dial up my local
priest—let alone Thomas Aquinas—in an emergency, so I have to rely on that
internal moral computer called conscience.
I take it for granted that I am not nearly as smart as two thousand
years of great Catholic thinking, all available for my asking for it, and all
designed in one way or another to help me understand that mystery which is
God’s will.
I owe it to myself to make sure I have the best
quality computer available, with the best possible software running on it and
the best data to work with. And I would
rather form my conscience with two millennia of Church thinking, commissioned
by Christ, grounded in the love of God, formed by the Holy Spirit, than to
follow the spirit of the day.
If the Magisterim does not always articulate Truth in
the clearest, best and most timely fashion, neither does the Church lead us
away from God. And I am struck, again
and again by Christ’s own words: He who
hears you, hears me. Sometimes the
accent is a little thick, the language a little unfamiliar and stilted, and my
hearing a little off. Sometimes it takes
a couple of tries, even a couple of hundred years, for the message to get through loud and clear. But push come to shove, I’ll listen to the
voice of the Church. It is, perhaps, a
matter of faith.
Looking back over the great sweep of Church history,
it seems to me that the Holy Spirit, in His way and time brings the Church and
the sinners who compose her, ever close to God’s Truth in this complicated
world. Without fail and despite our best
efforts to thwart His work.
The modern sense that the Holy Spirit has it all wrong
and the Church cannot manage without our help or that she is clearly in error
when her Magisterium opposes our individual convictions or the fads of the day ultimately
gives rise to the Jiminy Cricket Catholic. The one who is passionately convinced that he is right and the Church is certainly, absolutely, terribly
wrong. And one for whom no amount of discussion will ever be enough; it is
necessary that the Church change, and change now, and in the exact manner he prescribes. I am reminded that Jiminy Cricket was a
character in a tale about stubborn and willful children.
We are, these days, not a patient people, content to
believe that what the Church can do better, she eventually will. We are not content to quietly and without
fostering division, bring our gifts and insights to the Church and let her, in
her wisdom, decide what to do with them and when to do it. We are not content to believe that, under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit, what can be changed and should be, will, in God’s
good time. We, like Paul, tend to boast
of our pugnaciousness. And we are not
willing, even for a minute, to consider that our Mother might be a little wiser
than we are… especially given that the moral choice is not always obvious and
is often counter-intuitive and that there are so many others to consider besides our own selves.
The moral choice may not be safe, or rewarding, or
politically expedient, or politically correct.
The moral choice may not be popular and it is—these days, anyway—not often
socially acceptable. That is, I think,
why the Church commends us to examine our consciences before the cross, which
is where the moral choice inevitably leads.
And Mary—our other Mother and the icon of the Church, is always right
there at the foot of it, waiting, watching, joining herself to Christ,
suffering with Him and pondering all things in her heart.
I have found a great deal of freedom and love and pain
in the task of forming my conscience with the mind of the Church. Pain, because it means I had to change and
give up some cherished beliefs and acquire some patience (and not right now,
either…). Pain because sometimes the
Church lags behind in correcting the sins of its members—and my own as well. Freedom because I know that—however
imperfectly—I am trying to live out my life within the community of faith Christ
established, in its present moment and understandings and imperfection; I am
not alone with my deficiencies and my trials.
Love because that is where the Church always leads us, always, when we
listen to what she teaches and do not focus on what we-all of us, every one--as
sinners do.
So, despite the opinion of my friend, I don’t deny my
conscience at all. In fact, I count on
it to keep me at the table, in the boat, at the foot of the cross, where love
flows into the Church and into my life.
Where, ultimately, with God’s grace and the Church’s help, I hope to
become, because of all that love, at long last, the real, live person God
intends me to be.
Rather like Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket. Only better.
Well said, Barb. Educating conscience IS a lifelong task, the lifelong task of growing in holiness --- "guided by the authoritative teaching of the Church." To ultimately "be who I was meant to be."
ReplyDeleteIt's the Circle of Life.
As for your friend, I have spoken to similar-minded people. "Your truth is your truth, and my truth is my truth." And so I ask them if they have a right to interfere with my understanding of truth? Their reflexive response is no, at which point I say my conscience says I should rid the world of stupid people, and so I trust they won't object while I throttle them. (I think I also told someone my conscience was okay with my sleeping with his wife: "Is she home now?" He didn't take that response too well, as I recall)