Pope reaffirms conscience as heresy debate divides Church -- How big of a deal is this?

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AdamPeter said:
You are correct, mostly. The problem is that conscience must be informed in the faith. You can’t say “my conscience tells me I’m alright” unless you actually attempt to form it in some way.
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Absolutely agree
 
Human conscious must be formed in accordance with the truths of the Catholic Church.
 
Duesenberg said:
Indeed, but the problem I see is that that many with unformed or malformed consciences will confuse or conflate the two – sometimes on purpose.
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Honestly, from experience, I would say an equal danger is someone with a malformed conscience could sincerely believe they are committed to something they are not. (We see this a lot in cases of spousal abuse, usually towards the wife, in certain protestant sects. The wife is counseled that her duty is to submit and take no action to protect herself or her children, and does so, out of a well-intentioned but malformed desire towards godliness.)
 
DarkLight said:
Honestly, from experience, I would say an equal danger is someone with a malformed conscience could sincerely believe they are committed to something they are not. (We see this a lot in cases of spousal abuse, usually towards the wife, in certain protestant sects. The wife is counseled that her duty is to submit and take no action to protect herself or her children, and does so, out of a well-intentioned but malformed desire towards godliness.)
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All this goes back to the fact that the conscience is a very important thing in terms of individual decision making, but it must be fed with truths of the faith in order to be worth anything.
 
It seems to be a departure from the traditional Catholic views of what the arbiter of truth is. Whether it’s Augustine’s view of divine illumination, or Thomas Aquinas’ view of the intellect, etc.
 
No,not really.
He is a son of the Church.

Here are is a passage from Pope Benedict XVI when he himself was Pope.
The link and context:

Christmas greetings to Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops and Directors of the Governorate of Vatican City State (December 20, 2010) | BENEDICT XVI

See if you can get it in this " format":

" Finally I should like to recall once more the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman. Why was he beatified? What does he have to say to us? Many responses could be given to these questions, which were explored in the context of the beatification. I would like to highlight just two aspects which belong together and which, in the final analysis, express the same thing. The first is that we must learn from Newman’s three conversions, because they were steps along a spiritual path that concerns us all. Here I would like to emphasize just the first conversion: to faith in the living God. Until that moment, Newman thought like the average men of his time and indeed like the average men of today, who do not simply exclude the existence of God, but consider it as something uncertain, something with no essential role to play in their lives. What appeared genuinely real to him, as to the men of his and our day, is the empirical, matter that can be grasped. This is the “reality” according to which one finds one’s bearings. The “real” is what can be grasped, it is the things that can be calculated and taken in one’s hand. In his conversion, Newman recognized that it is exactly the other way round: that God and the soul, man’s spiritual identity, constitute what is genuinely real, what counts. These are much more real than objects that can be grasped. This conversion was a Copernican revolution. What had previously seemed unreal and secondary was now revealed to be the genuinely decisive element. Where such a conversion takes place, it is not just a person’s theory that changes: the fundamental shape of life changes. We are all in constant need of such conversion: then we are on the right path.
 
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(Cont.)

The driving force that impelled Newman along the path of conversion was conscience. But what does this mean? In modern thinking, the word “conscience” signifies that for moral and religious questions, it is the subjective dimension, the individual, that constitutes the final authority for decision. The world is divided into the realms of the objective and the subjective. To the objective realm belong things that can be calculated and verified by experiment. Religion and morals fall outside the scope of these methods and are therefore considered to lie within the subjective realm. Here, it is said, there are in the final analysis no objective criteria. The ultimate instance that can decide here is therefore the subject alone, and precisely this is what the word “conscience” expresses: in this realm only the individual, with his intuitions and experiences, can decide. Newman’s understanding of conscience is diametrically opposed to this. For him, “conscience” means man’s capacity for truth: the capacity to recognize precisely in the decision-making areas of his life – religion and morals – a truth, the truth. At the same time, conscience – man’s capacity to recognize truth – thereby imposes on him the obligation to set out along the path towards truth, to seek it and to submit to it wherever he finds it. Conscience is both capacity for truth and obedience to the truth which manifests itself to anyone who seeks it with an open heart. The path of Newman’s conversions is a path of conscience – not a path of self-asserting subjectivity but, on the contrary, a path of obedience to the truth that was gradually opening up to him. His third conversion, to Catholicism, required him to give up almost everything that was dear and precious to him: possessions, profession, academic rank, family ties and many friends. The sacrifice demanded of him by obedience to the truth, by his conscience, went further still. Newman had always been aware of having a mission for England. But in the Catholic theology of his time, his voice could hardly make itself heard. It was too foreign in the context of the prevailing form of theological thought and devotion. In January 1863 he wrote in his diary these distressing words: “As a Protestant, I felt my religion dreary, but not my life - but, as a Catholic, my life dreary, not my religion”. He had not yet arrived at the hour when he would be an influential figure. In the humility and darkness of obedience, he had to wait until his message was taken up and understood. In support of the claim that Newman’s concept of conscience matched the modern subjective understanding, people often quote a letter in which he said – should he have to propose a toast – that he would drink first to conscience and then to the Pope. But in this statement, “conscience” does not signify the ultimately binding quality of subjective intuition. It is an expression of the accessibility and the binding force of truth: on this its primacy is based. The second toast can be dedicated to the Pope because it is his task to demand obedience to the truth."
 
These may help,FollowChrist.
These headlines are also different.
I deleted the previous post because one of the links stopped working. Now it does.


http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/201..._form_consciences,_accompany_faithful/1348321

Here is Romano Guardini,whom he cites on the first link.

"Romano Guardini, in a text on the subject of conscience, indicates the way to the search for the true good. He writes: “From this imprisonment in myself I am free only if I find a point, which is not my ego: a height higher than myself; something solid and working in my interior – and behold! Here we are come to the core […] that is, to religious reality. That good […] is something alive. […] It is the fullness of worth, which belongs to the selfsame living God. (La coscienza, Brescia 1933, 32-33)”
 
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Richca said:
The ultimate arbiter of man’s moral decision making is God and the eternal law. Human beings are not God but creatures of God. … We are called not to do our own will but that of God as Jesus taught us in the Our Father prayer ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ The will of God for us is expressed in the natural law and the ten commandments and the teaching of the Church.
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But this is the very issue.
Is the “natural law” to be identified wholly with any written or spoken word whether in the past or present?

No it is not. It cannot be fully written and set in concrete.
It is written in the depths of the human heart - this is where God speaks.
It is the same voice in all hearts - but the more exalted the truth the more does it get distorted and vary amongst men - and not always for morally culpable reasons since the Fall.
 
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Thank you for taking the time & effort to make these two posts. I very much enjoyed reading them.
 
Thank you for taking the time & effort to make these two posts. I very much enjoyed reading them.
 
Here’s a good read from Bl. John Henry Newman on conscience–the authentic version and the one condemned by the Church.

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/section5.html

An excerpt:
  1. First, I am using the word “conscience” in the high sense in which I have already explained it,—not as a fancy or an opinion, but as a dutiful obedience to what claims to be a divine voice, speaking within us; and that this is the view properly to be taken of it, I shall not attempt to prove here, but shall assume it as a first principle. {256}
  2. Secondly, I observe that conscience is not a judgment upon any speculative truth, any abstract doctrine, but bears immediately on conduct, on something to be done or not done. “Conscience,” says St. Thomas, “is the practical judgment or dictate of reason, by which we judge what hic et nunc is to be done as being good, or to be avoided as evil.” Hence conscience cannot come into direct collision with the Church’s or the Pope’s infallibility; which is engaged in general propositions, and in the condemnation of particular and given errors.
  3. Next, I observe that, conscience being a practical dictate, a collision is possible between it and the Pope’s authority only when the Pope legislates, or gives particular orders, and the like. But a Pope is not infallible in his laws, nor in his commands, nor in his acts of state, nor in his administration, nor in his public policy. Let it be observed that the Vatican Council has left him just as it found him here.
 
SalamKhan said:
It seems to be a departure from the traditional Catholic views of what the arbiter of truth is.
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He is not saying conscience is the arbiter of truth, but of moral decisions. Truth as absolute is an essential belief. It is the objective nature of sin. Conscience is the subjective nature and individual.
 
Yeah, my understanding is conscience is not used to determine what the truth is, but rather it helps you determine how to act in a given situation given the truth that you know.
 
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