Conscience

There are those who think the moral issues of the day, like abortion, birth control, and all issues related to sex are best left to the personal conscience.  In fact, they will tell you the Catholic Church has always taught the "primacy of conscience."

The sad reality is that these people ignore the distinction between being wrong due to ignorance vs. being wrong due to rebellion, and willful ignorance.  They fail to see how a choice to "sin" darkens the conscience and makes living a fruitful life impossible.

What people often miss is the "obligations of conscience" to right living.

It is very important to make the distinction between the "conscience" and "personal preference."  The conscience is placed there by God, and any choice of personal preference that goes against what is put there by God darkens the conscience.   The more you go against the conscience the more of a relativist you become.  You have been judged by the Church as "wallowing in the luxury of a merely individualistic morality."

Conscience is at the very core, the deepest part of you, where you are both obliged and compelled to seek out truth.  The objective standards of moral conduct and God's laws are found there.  It can be said of those who seek out the truth, they are not judged by the "sincerity of the goodness of their motives" but by "objective criteria."

No one is born like a clean slate with nothing written on it.  You do not find yourself in a "situation" where the situation determines the ethics, for that is "situational ethics."  It's the other way around where the "ethics" determine how you respond, your behavior, to any given situation.  It's the objective truth that determines the behavior.  Each person, at their core, discovers a law which they have not laid themselves, a law which must be obeyed.  It is the voice of conscience, the voice of a friend.  It calls you to love, to do what is good and right, and to avoid evil.  It is within you in each moment ready to guide you and light the way, to behave this way, and to shun that way of living.

The law is put there by God.

If conscience is put there by God, how can we go bad?

We can go bad if we take little trouble to seek out that which is true and good.  The conscience can move away from the moral law step by step, by degrees, downward, blinding itself through the habit of sin.  That is how the conscience is darkened.

We can avoid a "deformation" of conscience if we avail ourselves of right living according to reason, and revelation according to the mind of the Church.

So, if a Catholic disagrees with the Church when it teaches on abortion, or any other moral issue, there is a point where they have turned from the right path.

Remember, the Catholic Church is Christ's instrument by which He continues to teach the world.  It is the Church's duty to proclaim and teach with authority that which is Divinely taught, and that which is consistent with reason according to the moral order.

When a person publicly dissents from Church teaching on a matter of life, on the matter of abortion, they can no longer be considered a "Catholic."  They are at odds with reason, and they are dissenting from a grave teaching of the Catholic Church.

Roger L.

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