Roamer’s column

As the date for Pope Benedict’s State visit to the UK approaches – exactly three weeks before he presides over the beatification, in Birmingham, of Cardinal Newman on September 19 – the subject of conscience may not yet be on everybody’s mind.

Odds are 100/1 that in one form or another it will be. This is a good thing and it ill-behoves us not to follow the many references to conscience, informed and uninformed or unformed, that are expected to be made and will be made. Some have already appeared and, in the way they have been expressed, bode none too well.

The National Catholic Bioethics Centre has been organising workshops on topics related to bioethics and moral-medical themes since 1973. In 1984 and in 1991 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was invited to deliver the keynote address – ‘Conscience and Truth’ (1984) and ‘Bishops, Theologians and Morality’ (1991). They were published together as a book, On Conscience, in 2007, two years after Ratzinger’s elevation to the papacy.

In the second section of the book the author remarks, one suspects with more than a little wryness: “It is strange that some theologians have difficulty in accepting the precise and limited doctrine of papal infallibility, but see no problem in granting de facto infallibility to everyone who has a conscience. In fact, it is not possible to assert an absolute right for subjectivity as such.” (p 59; Ignatius Press edition)

In the context of the times, and outside this context in our daily lives, conscience and its operation should be on everybody’s conscience: the bishops’, the theologians’, yours, mine, and in everybody’s inner being as we form it to best advantage; that is, in this particular case, through the deepest desire to reach the truth about marriage and the negative effect of divorce on marriage and on our society.

It is not enough, and those who regard conscience as a purely subjective opinion may wish to revisit their position; it is not enough to come to a conclusion without honest reference to a number of factors that weigh on the formation of conscience, like moral norms and the I-God relationship, and to adopt an arbitrary position unrelated to anything but one’s judgment. One may have to question, indeed has the duty to question, that judgment’s infallibility. Failure to do so, worse, a refusal to do so, can lead to all manner of abuse at levels we dream not of.

The Cardinal, as he then was, argues that it was precisely the deification of his subjective conscience that led Hitler to positions where moral norms, that had been identified as good for centuries, were deleted from the public square and led to the horrendous experience of Nazi terror; as was the case with Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao-tse-Tung in China and in tyrannies everywhere; and not only in totalitarian tyrannies.

In his foreword to the Cardinal’s book, John Haas, the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Centre, points at what he called the “unbridled subjectivism of many US Supreme Court decisions before and after Roe v Wade, which reached its “apotheosis in Planned Parenthood v Casey, in the infamous “mystery” passage written by Justice Anthony Kennedy: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” That, of course, is precisely what Hitler did.

The modern mind equivocates on the subject of conscience; there are those who gleefully pounce on a sentence, and that the last one, in a 45,000-word letter, that Cardinal Newman sent to the Duke of Norfolk as a reaction to offensive statements made by Gladstone about Catholics and their loyalties as citizens:

“Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing), I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please – still to conscience first.” Proponents of that sentence tend to refer not at all to what the sainted Cardinal said on obedience, loyalty to the Church, to its authority, its teachings, doctrines, apostolicity and, above all, to the fact that, as Ratzinger notes, “the centrality of the concept conscience for Newman is linked to the prior centrality of the concept truth”.

Newman’s letter is divided into 11 sections: Introductory Remarks, The Ancient Church, The Papal Church, Divided Allegiance, Conscience, The Encyclical of 1864, The Syllabus, The Vatican Council, The Vatican Definition, a Conclusion and a Postscript. For the Duke it must have been quite a mouthful, but what a mouthful this celebrated letter turned out to be.

The fifth section, dealing with conscience, is worth more than a glance, but space allows only that, for now; so I will limit myself to Newman’s remarks about the Supreme Being who is “of a certain character, which expressed in human language, we call ethical. He then lists His attributes – “justice, truth, wisdom, sanctity, benevolence and mercy (that are) eternal characteristics in His nature, the very Law of His being, identical with Himself… Newman then adds that next, when He became Creator, He implanted this law, which is Himself, in the intelligence of all His rational creatures.” This is the central starting point.

He goes on to make the assertion that the Divine Law is “the standard of right and wrong, a sovereign irreversible absolute authority and as apprehended in the minds of individual men, is called ‘conscience’; and though it may suffer refraction in passing into the intellectual medium of each, it is not therefore so affected as to lose its character of being the Diviner Law, but still has, as such, the prerogative of commanding obedience”.

“This view of conscience,” he goes on, “is founded on the doctrine that conscience is the voice of God, whereas it is fashionable on all hands now to consider in one way or another a creation of man.” For all that, and dramatically, “conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its information, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and have a sway”.

I have quoted at length because it has become overly simplistic to drink a toast to “conscience first” without making the slightest attempt to teach what conscience truly is; without taking into account Newman’s agonising, decades-long struggle to inform and purify his conscience so that he could be certain of his move from the Anglican church to Catholicism and, as it turned out, to sainthood.

Newman calls it “the voice of God, whereas it is fashionable on all hands now to consider it in one way or another a creation of man”. How much more is this the case today?

Darwin losing out?

The point about science is that it cannot, by definition, claim to have the last word; knowledge is an ascent up a ladder that has an endless number of rungs, sometimes missing them – like the Missing Link. So I was not too surprised to read that 150 years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species – in between, controversies galore – it was being called “a scientific impossibility” by a group of scholars.

I have never read the book and would almost certainly not have understood it had I made the attempt. I am buoyed up in my ignorance by the pithy comment Chesterton made in his book, The Everlasting Man, that, “evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under the illusion that they have read the Origin of Species.” Yet scores of millions have adopted the doctrine of evolution as an article of faith and look upon it as the atheist’s guide to atheism.

When it was first published, predictions were that God would die the death and the Catholic Church would soon be as extinct as the dodo – what else? They missed the point that when God truly died Christianity came to life. It, too, “has died many times and risen again; because it had a God who knew His way out of the grave”.

A refutation of Darwin’s theory took place last year in Rome – followed, I imagine, by a refutation of the refutation and so on and so forth – when, as the organisers of this event put it, scholars argued that “results of recent empirical research published by scientific academies refutes the basic principles of the geological time-scale. It reduces the age of rocks and therefore the fossils in them. The theory of evolution is undergirded by both the time-scale and the age of fossils”. Darwin’s theory was in the dock.

By its very nature science is unable, has not the wherewithal to explain the ultimate reality or provide an answer the fundamental question – why? That is left to theology and philosophy.

But now even the ‘how’ of science is being questioned as scientists challenge what had become “the accepted paradigm of the scientific community”. Science itself is now coming closer to conclusions reached centuries ago by theology; not least because it remains open to new knowledge and insights that only close-minded scientists reject.