What of the erroneous conscience?

My friend Fr Joe Borg, in his article ‘Conscience and divorce’, which appeared in The Sunday Times on August 22, left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

This is because I found he is advocating a supremacy for acting according to one’s conscience without any consideration for the disastrous outcome which occurs when one follows an erroneous conscience. The fact that a conscience can be either good or bad, he completely left out of the picture and thereby achieved a lopsided picture, which disturbed me.

I have been lecturing on the obligation to follow the working of conscience to our first year law students since at least 1980, since this constitutes the ninth requirement of practical reasonableness in Natural Law.

I have always gone by and stuck to what is contained in Clause 1783 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“Conscience must be informed and moral judgment enlightened. A well-informed conscience is upright and truthful. It formulates its judgments according to reason, in conformity with the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator.

“The education of conscience is indispensable for human beings who are subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer their own judgment and to reject authoritative teaching.”

The whole doctrine on conscience has been given to humanity by the Catholic Church and I, therefore, found it wise and prudent to seek its true and significant formulation in the Church.

It is a pity that Fr Borg completely leaves out the pitfall which the Church points out for these “who prefer their own misinformed judgment and to reject authoritative teachings”.

It is completely wrong for anyone to suggest that on the matter of divorce the Church has not, for ages, given its authoritative teachings.

I have written this letter as an obligation to my hundreds of students who have heard me lecture on this view over so many years and its own justification.

In a practical and more down-to-earth fashion I must say that in my career, and in more than one field, I have been faced by people pleading “genuine” (or otherwise) crises of conscience when coming to grips with certain difficult moral judgments in their lives and careers, and I have always tried to help in this difficult field.

There is one thing, which I never dreamed of advising: that it is better to die excommunicated than to violate one’s conscience. That for me is a contradiction and false statement of the directive to follow one’s conscience.