Q&A with Fr John Flader
Primacy of conscience?
What exactly is the Church’s teaching on conscience? Is it true that in the end we can follow our own conscience even if we know it goes against the teaching of the Church?
You ask one of the most important questions in the area of fundamental moral theology and in the daily lives of people today. There is much confusion on the issue. Pope John Paul II dedicated a whole section of his encyclical Veritatis splendor (1993) to conscience.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives us the classical definition of conscience: “Conscience is a judgement of reason whereby the human person recognises the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (CCC 1778).
The definition already tells us much about the role of conscience. Conscience is not just a voice within us that somehow mysteriously tells us what to do or avoid doing. It is a judgement of reason, a judgement of the intellect or mind.
A judgement in general involves weighing up a number of factors in order to arrive at a conclusion. In the case of the judgement of conscience, the intellect weighs up the objective truth about the morality, the rightness or wrongness, of the act in question in order to decide whether the act is obligatory, permissible or forbidden.
But where does this objective moral truth come from? The answer is our loving Father God, who created human beings with a particular nature. Some human acts are in keeping with that nature and contribute to human flourishing, and are therefore morally good. Other acts are not in keeping with human nature and lead to harm. They are morally wrong. This is what we know as the divine law.
The simplest and most well known statement of the divine moral law is the Ten Commandments, which God revealed to Moses and which the Church has safeguarded and passed on over the years.
But while some of these Commandments are easy to understand, such as that killing the innocent, committing adultery, stealing and lying are always wrong, others require a deeper reflection in order to be understood. For this reason, Jesus gave the apostles the assistance of the Holy Spirit to “guide [them] into all the truth” (Jn 16:13), so that the Church down the ages would be able to teach moral truth authentically in His name. Thus, for example, the Church has made clear the immorality of such acts as abortion, contraception, in-vitro fertilisation, euthanasia, etc.
In order for conscience to make correct judgements, it must first learn the objective truth that God teaches through His Church on moral issues, so that it can then apply this teaching to the case at hand.
In this sense, conscience is like a sextant which a sailor uses to determine his position by focusing it on the stars. Without the stars, the sextant is of no use. Similarly, without the light of God’s law, as taught by the Church, conscience has nothing by which to guide itself. It is blind.
Thus, conscience is not a law unto itself; it is not autonomous. Indeed, the Catechism mentions “assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience” as one of the factors that “can be at the source of errors of judgement in moral conduct” (CCC 1792).
Returning to your question, we cannot follow our “conscience” if it leads us to go against the teaching of the Church.
If we did that, our very conscience would accuse us. Really, a “conscience” that disagreed with the Church would not be a conscience at all, but rather the voice of whim, pride, convenience or comfort. A true conscience puts us in touch with God.
In Veritatis splendor, Pope John Paul II quotes St Bonaventure on the binding force of conscience: “Conscience is like God’s herald and messenger; it does not command things on its own authority, but commands them as coming from God’s authority, like a herald when he proclaims the edict of the king. This is why conscience has binding force” (In II Librum Sent., dist. 39, a. 1, q. 3; in Veritatis splendor, 58).