Awakening of conscience

The Misco survey recently commissioned by The Sunday Times and published on August 8 on the divorce issue underlines that “conscience is the predominant influencing factor for 85 per cent of those in favour of divorce and 66 per cent of those against”.

That seems to be quite a good sign – everybody should vote according to his conscience. He may be influenced or “instructed” by others, but in the case of a referendum (or election) it’s him alone who will decide. A person should never act against his conscience: for an act to be truly human, a person must act with complete knowledge and full consent.

What is worrying is that the survey seems to put conscience as an option among others. This raises a fundamental question: what is meant by the term conscience? Preferring to quote a very popular and presumably universally-accepted source instead of other more academic and ‘confessional’ ones, we could take the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of conscience as “a person’s moral sense of right and wrong, viewed as acting as a guide to one’s behaviour”.

Such a moral sense is something man matures during his life through his education, knowledge and experiences. The definition conveys the idea that conscience is a reality, “a sense” that guides one’s behaviour. Al­though it’s within the person, it’s beyond him in such a way as to guide his actions.

It’s not an emotion, a sensation, but something more than that. It has a certain objectivity, thereby making it possible for a person to evaluate his acts. Moreover, the definition also seems to imply that conscience is not the source of what is right and wrong but is placed in relation to two opposing poles: right and wrong.

A person needs to know what is right and what is wrong, what is the good to be done and the evil to be avoided. Conscience, in order to be a leading force in a person’s life, should help him choose and do good because it’s good in itself, and to avoid evil because it’s evil in itself. He will always remain conditioned by his subjectivity of what’s good in itself and bad in itself and yet, he can strive to reduce this subjectivity as much as he can.

How is this to be done? The answer is simple: a person must search for truth. This he does in various ways: through personal reflection, acquiring knowledge from others, putting his own convictions constantly into question, listening to opposing opinions and evaluating them.

In fact, the very term ‘conscience’ (from Latin conscientia, deriving from cum alio scientia [knowledge united to something else]) implies knowledge – knowledge that must be sought.

Socrates used the term daimonion understood as an interior voice related to the knowledge of good. One must listen to this voice in order to know what’s right and wrong.

Any Maltese citizen who could eventually be called to cast his vote in a referendum regarding divorce should act according to his well-formed conscience after having seriously considered the various arguments and with a personal conviction that his decision aims to choose what’s right in itself, and not merely what’s the right that suits him or what’s right according to others.

For 83 per cent of the survey respondents who consider themselves as churchgoers, conscience is more than just a person’s moral sense or acquired knowledge. St Augustine calls it sedes Dei, God’s seat in the human person.

One of the most beautiful and exalted descriptions of human conscience is that given by Vatican Council II: “In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to his heart: do this, shun that.

“For man has in his heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged. Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths. In a wonderful manner conscience reveals that law which is fulfilled by love of God and neighbour.”

It thus follows that conscience is a voice to he heard, an innate law to be discovered and observed, a reality that enables him to transcend himself and love the other.

Those who consider themselves Catholic must well know that God speaks also through His Church, Christ’s mystical body. The Church’s teaching should be welcomed by the individual as a service for the formation of a free conscience.

In this regard Pope John Paul II explains that “the Church puts herself always and only at the service of conscience, helping it to avoid being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine proposed by human deceit and helping it not to swerve from the truth about the good of man, but rather, especially in more difficult questions, to attain the truth with certainty and to abide in it”.

Unless one pertains to a ‘believing without belonging’ category of so-called Catholics – but then they wouldn’t consider themselves as ‘churchgoers’ – he must give considerable weight to what the Church teaches about the matter if he is to responsibly form his conscience, well aware that only truth can set man free.

As Pope Benedict wrote in his last encyclical letter, “the truth of ourselves, of our personal conscience, is first of all given to us. In every cognitive process, truth is not something that we produce; it is always found, or better, received. Truth, like love, is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings.”

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott’s column is not appearing this week.