I believe Joe Zammit takes an exceedingly fundamentalist approach in his understanding of conscience (September 16). He comes across as static and self-satisfied in his thinking, eschewing new and creative formulations of doctrine while ever clinging to the norms and imperatives of the past. He works strenuously to promote the restorations of a past order.
It would help Mr Zammit to know that Fr Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) while serving as chair of Dogmatic Theology at the University of Tubingen in 1968, expressed the Church’s understanding of the primacy of conscience thus: “Above the Pope as an expression of Church authority stands one’s own conscience, which has to be obeyed first of all, if need be against the demands of Church authority” (from a Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Vorgrimler, Herbert (Ed), Burns & Oats, 1969, p.134).
Mr Zammit seems to have no time for creative theologians “who are members of the body of the faithful and who, as such, are caught up in the confession of the apostolic faith and whose business it is to speak. And about what? About God, theo-logein, but in a specific manner which distinguishes them alike from the simple faithful with their native faith and from members of the pastoral hierarchy and ordinary preachers. The New Testament knows a ministry (diakonia) of the word which includes all the forms of its exercise. It also knows, as the primitive Church does, a specific service of teachers, didaskaloi” (Yves Congar, Towards a Catholic Synthesis, Concilium 1981).