Conscience is blind (1)

Three letters appeared under the title Divorce And Conscience (September 22).

Fr Konrad Grech SJ rightly concluded: “Conscience is very elastic. It can be stretched to the furthest point one wants to”. Frank Muscat quoted Cardinal Ratzinger out of context, forgetting that this Cardinal himself, along with others, has written the Catechism of the Catholic Church which speaks in detail about the necessity of an informed conscience. Peter Galea ended his by asking what consciences should be telling to the couple he spoke of. The following is a brief answer to the questions raised.

God has endowed human beings with the gift of reasoning. This is exactly what conscience is: reasoning.

Reasoning necessarily needs what is called a premise, i.e., the first principle on which to build the second premise and the conclusion.

Before Original Sin, human beings were capable to naturally know what principles are right and what principles are wrong according to God’s loving law. But after the Sin, human beings’ mind and heart darkened and cannot now in a natural way know what these principles of right and wrong entail.

Out of love for us, God has sent his only son, Jesus Christ, to redeem us from sin and eternal punishment in hell. As part of his redemption he taught us what is good to do and evil to avoid, and he set up his one Church on purpose to continue to echo his infallible teaching until the end of time.

So now, for our eternal salvation in heaven, we need both the infallible teaching of the Catholic Church and conscience. Both are necessary. There must be no disagreement between the teaching of the Church and the dictates of conscience.

Conscience is blind, so it must take as a premise a truth from the teaching of the Church, build its reasoning on it and come to a conclusion to urge us to do some particular good or to avoid some particular evil, or to praise us if we have committed something good and tell us off in case we have committed something evil. It is always important that conscience starts its reasoning from a right principle and arrives at the right conclusion. If its conclusion is not in conformity with the infallible teaching of the Catholic Church, there must be something wrong in the reasoning. We must never accept any conclusion that contradicts the infallible teaching of the Church because that conclusion will be surely wrong. Christ’s infallibility is with the Church and not with our conscience.

If we ignore the infallible teaching of the Catholic Church, we will be ignoring Christ. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham told the rich man that his five brothers had Moses and the prophets, i.e. the Church, to listen to. If we do not listen to the Church, we will not be listening to Christ.

Conscience is blind and needs Christ’s enlightenment according to the infallible teaching of the Catholic Church for its right and genuine operation. No argument, no quotation, no theologian can ever put conscience above or before the infallible teaching of Christ and of his one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.