**[
The Inconvenient
Conscience
](
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0505/articles/pell.html)
firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0505/articles/pell.html
George Cardinal Pell
…In other words, a Catholic conscience cannot accept a settled position against the Church, at least on a central moral teaching. Any difficulty with Church teaching should be not the
end of the matter but the
beginning of a process of conversion, education, and quite possibly repentance. Where a Catholic disagrees with the Church on some serious matter, the response should not be “that’s that—I can’t follow the Church here.” Instead we should kneel and pray that God will lead our weak steps and enlighten our fragile minds, as Newman recommends in his Sermon 17, “The Testimony of Conscience.”
Of course, this view of conscience seems profoundly counterintuitive to modern readers. For Newman, conscience is a hard, objective thing—a challenge to self, a call to conversion, and a sign of humility. And this sits uncomfortably with those who see conscience as a sign of freedom, and freedom as the right to reject what is unpalatable…
This specifically Catholic view rejects the mistaken doctrine of the primacy of conscience and clearly asserts the primacy of truth. “It is always from the truth that the dignity of conscience derives,” the pope writes. “In the case of the correct conscience, it is a question of the
objective truth received by man; in the case of the erroneous conscience, it is a question of what man, mistakenly,
subjectively considers to be true. It is never acceptable to confuse a ‘subjective’ error about moral good with the ‘objective’ truth rationally proposed to man in virtue of his end, or to make the moral value of an act performed with a true and correct conscience equivalent to the moral value of an act performed by following the judgment of an erroneous conscience.”…
Much of the debate over conscience in Catholic circles focuses on the possibility of a conscience set against the Church’s teaching. This seems to me a peculiar notion. For a start, it seems to mean that dissenters believe that following the Church on, say, contraception or same-sex relationships, would actually give them a guilty conscience. Yet it seems clear that most dissenters do not fear guilt if they obey the Church. What they fear is precisely the frustration of their unsatisfied desires…
I suspect that much of the contemporary debate over conscience is driven by a pseudo-Christian impulse towards individual autonomy. Where the world once valued autonomy as the recognition that we are bound by moral laws, it now understands autonomy as the existential liberty to compose our lives, and even reality, for ourselves. It is as though modern and postmodern man is staging a rerun of the primeval fault of our first parents. We stand on the brink, seeking a way forward, accepting no moral guidance in advance of the choice. Yet, as with the first parents, moral guidance is there. A law has been given, and the choice we are faced with is the ancient one: Do I freely obey, or disobey?..**
) is that the ways we form our consciences–how we get to where you’re addressing–and what we accept as credible guides in this process, are greatly influenced by our experiences in life. The people we’re addressing here have largely had their consciences formed, rightly or wrongly, and already have made some determination of credibility that now must be addressed after the fact. How we are to do that is really what’s at issue in my mind.
