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by Peter A. Kwasniewski
With countless advertised assurances of quick and carefree pleasure, relentless political and educational propaganda aimed at undermining traditional values, a never-ending flood of journalism characterized by poor reasoning about the most important ethical issues, and socio-economic structures that habituate people to think only about themselves and their “personal satisfaction,” the widespread corruption of conscience in the modern world is not to be wondered at. Pushing these things forward is the combined energy of contradictory stimuli rarely absent from democratic societies: individualism and its fraternal twin majoritarianism.
By the former stimulus, I try to get whatever I desire; any passionate attachment generates a corresponding right. By the latter stimulus, the opinions of the many determine what is permissible and praiseworthy, what is off limits and execrable. Anything not acceptable to the majority—obedience to religious authority, for example, or giving priority to family and children—is regarded as a barely pardonable eccentricity, or worse, a slavery that must be defeated in the name of democratic progress.1 In this confused and confusing situation, one would have good reason to say that a conscience unilluminated by the light of faith is condemned to remain in a state of frightful darkness. Lacking any true standards against which daily behavior and momentary opinions could be judged, human beings are increasingly compelled to live by selfish pragmatism alone.
All of us have witnessed the process by which consciences are corrupted, be it the twisting of a child’s innocent mind or the erosion of a college student’s inherited values, and it is surely one of the most terrible things to watch, since often little can be done to prevent it. Like a frog slowly boiled to death, the conscience poisoned by degrees remains unaware of its fate and thinks all along that its evaluations are unbiased, even while they become more and more skewed. Man’s propensity to sin already acts like a weight drawing him into sensuality, this being, as it were, the gravity of fallen nature. If one takes “conscience” to mean no more than an inner voice approving or disapproving of a given act—if, that is, one takes the voice as authoritative solely because it comes from within me and seems to justify some course of action—there is a constant danger that this inner voice will simply be whatever desire speaks most loudly and insistently. So far from guiding man, a “conscience” of this kind would be his undoing. “If a person is indifferent to the truth, he will give no thought to the formation of his conscience and he will end up sooner or later by confusing fidelity to his conscience with adhesion to any personal opinion whatsoever or to the opinion of the majority.”2
Even in the state of innocence or original justice, Adam’s conscience would have had to look to God, for God is the measure of man’s own good. The difference was that unfallen man could hear within himself an undistorted translation of God’s voice. By looking inward to the unclouded mirror of the heart, he looked outward to his Lord, he saw the reflected image of the good. Adam sinned by rejecting the moral order, the rule of justice, established by God for Adam’s benefit. In sinning against divine goodness, Adam lost his personal justice and entered into an ambiguous or manipulative relationship with reality. Due to the admixture of self-will—the impulse to consult his own desires as the measure of right and wrong—Adam’s inner voice could not be trusted as an interpreter of God’s will. Fallen man, inheritor of Adam’s alienation from God, is no longer capable of knowing what is right and wrong simply by consulting himself, by listening within.
Conscience, then, speaks with divine authority only to the extent that the soul remains uncontaminated by evil. If there were no way for a person to become worse, no way to be seduced by half-truths or waylaid by interior rebellion, it would never lose its trustworthiness and could be its own guarantor. Because the soul can be contaminated with false notions and bad desires, conscience itself can suffer corruption; that is why its authority cannot be trusted unconditionally, as though it were a self-justifying absolute. “It is not sufficient, therefore, to say to man: always follow your conscience,” writes our Holy Father. “It is necessary to add immediately and always: ‘ask yourself if your conscience is telling you the truth or something false, and seek untiringly to know the truth.’ If we were not to make this necessary clarification, man would risk to find in his conscience a force which is destructive of his true humanity, rather than that holy place where God reveals to him his true good.”7 As sin disrupts the threefold order of the soul — its proper relationship to God, self, and neighbor —and as Scripture declares that no man is without sin (1 Jn. 1:8), it follows that no man can lay claim to a conscience that perfectly mirrors the divine will. The fallen conscience lives, to a greater or lesser extent, in separation from God, the supreme measure of action; a living link must be forged over time if a person is to perceive what is good and rightly love the good. Fallen man must somehow find a way to have God as his teacher, the tutor of his innermost desires and choices. If a man is ever to become truly good, then prior to all human sources of ethical norms or values — sources which cannot guarantee their own reliability — there must be some access to immutable divine wisdom. The human situation would be hopeless unless God spoke first, re-establishing the broken relationship, unveiling the law by which we need to live, indicating the path we need to take to reach him.8
The unenlightened or unformed conscience cannot know if its word corresponds to the grammar of reality, if its language translates the will of God. Only when the word of conscience is united to the word of Christ can it be a power that renders right judgment. This connection between the human logos and the divine Logos does not happen automatically in the individual’s heart, for then we would have in practice a regress of subjective claims leading to self-authorization. The believer cannot form his mind autonomously without deforming it in equal measure. If we are to be truly free to do good while knowing at the same time that our conscience adheres to what is truly good, we stand in need of a final objective authority, public, external, and indefectible, which has power to shape the inner voice according to divine truth, power to instruct the heart in hearing and obeying the Word of God. Interior reformation can take place only if there is an unfailing standard outside of the individual conscience, to which its dictates can be held up to test their rightness. This standard or measure is the Church.14 To whatever extent formed or unformed, the conscience finds in her one ever-present, never-failing teacher, one sure master for moral apprenticeship. No one has described this aspect of the economy of salvation better than Newman:
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The sense of right and wrong, which is the first element in religion, is so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so subtle in its argumentative methods, so impressible by education, so biased by pride and passion, so unsteady in its course, that, in the struggle for existence amid the various exercises and triumphs of the human intellect, this sense is at once the highest of all teachers, yet the least luminous; and the Church, the Pope, the hierarchy are, in the divine purpose, the supply of an urgent demand.15
This objection rests upon a fundamental mistake, an illicit dichotomy, that has to be corrected in order to understand how the Church mediates for conscience. The Church is the Body of Christ, the continuation of his life and saving work. She is essentially the mystical extension of the Incarnate Word to the ends of the earth and the end of time, carrying all who will be saved into the Kingdom of God.18 From another angle, the Church is the spotless and immaculate bride united to her Lord in bonds of ineffable love, filled in the depths with his grace. The Church is our mediator because, as bride of the Lamb, she lives within the Heart of Jesus, the one Mediator between God and man; she is bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. Led by the Holy Spirit, Christians strive to incorporate themselves more and more into this Body, so that when the Father looks upon them he will see his beloved Son, to whom they are united as members. It is necessary to belong to the Church because the Church herself belongs to Christ; she is the union with Christ which constitutes the essence of salvation.19 To be united to the head, we must belong to the body; if we are not in the body, we are not part of the one whole. To speak of “salvation outside the Church” is to speak of entering the kingdom while separated from Christ, the content of the kingdom.20 One does not therefore belong to the Church and to Christ; one belongs to Christ in the Church. It is far from true that the Church comes between the believer and Christ, as though she were a busybody or a prying third party to a love affair. On the contrary, since she is the communion of the redeemed with their Lord and Savior, without her there could be no union at all between the believer and Christ. One can partake of his divine life only by living as a member of his Mystical Body. To say, then, that the Church mediates between conscience and Christ means that her teaching and sacraments are a vis unitiva, a unitive force, enabling the member of Christ’s mystical Body to adhere more firmly and closely to the Body’s Head.21 Her mediation has the sole purpose of ensuring and deepening an immediate union of love.
In order for this union to be real and not merely apparent, or put differently, in order to make it possible for us to know with certainty what we must do and believe, our Lord ensured that his Body would also be visible in the world—that it would be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, possessing a definite structure of authority.22 By heeding the Magisterium handed down by the successors to the Apostles, we can know with certainty how to be reborn in Christ, which involves not just a one-time choice but a life of abiding in his grace, doing works pleasing to the Father.23 All of us stand in need of guidance, and it is the Church who, filled with the Holy Spirit, guides us along the way of eternal life by means of her teaching on faith and morals. The Church mediates for conscience because the Word of truth dwells within her. Reformulated to emphasize the primacy of the Lord and his salvific will, Jesus mediates himself through the Church, by whose doctrine and sacraments he shares with us his eternal truth and inner life.
The foregoing remarks help us to see why the war-cry often heard nowadays—that the Magisterium of the Church is an “external imposition,” something that deprives a person of responsible freedom and the dignity of self-determination—betrays a false conception of things. The most obvious point is that no teaching is, or could be, imposed on someone unwilling to accept it. The Magisterium enlightens and purifies the conscience so that the individual Christian may be truly free in serving God, truly a part of the one body which believes, hopes, and loves in common, not according to idiomatic measures. “Authority is there lest the Christian content himself with mediocre ideals; it ensures that he stands under the norm of his living Lord.”24 The Magisterium proclaimed by the Church is not something irreducibly other, an external intimidation to the believer, a system of conformity imposed within a rigid framework of obedience and submission; the Magisterium exists to guarantee true liberty of conscience, to foster development without corruption, self-determination without arbitrariness, maturity without introversion, enabling the Christian to recognize the voice of Christ and distinguish it from the voice of demons or the selfish ego.25 Without this Magisterium, I am thrown into one or another form of subjectivism.26 The external authoritative Church acts as a guide to greater interior union with God; and to the extent that her teachings are internalized by the believer, her aspect as “other” or “outside” disappears. The Church is only “over against” the believer when, and so long as, the believer resists the truth Christ communicates through her.27 At the climax of the section on conscience in Veritatis Splendor, we read these magnificent lines:
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[T]he authority of the Church, when she pronounces on moral questions, in no way undermines the freedom of conscience of Christians. This is so not only because freedom of conscience is never freedom “from” the truth but always and only freedom “in” the truth, but also because the Magisterium does not bring to the Christian conscience truths which are extraneous to it; rather it brings to light the truths which it ought already to possess, developing them from the starting point of the primordial act of faith. 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 (cf. Eph. 4:14), 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.28
Once a believer cuts the link between his conscience and the teaching Church—once he has denied that his inner sense of right and wrong is immature and must stand in a pupil-teacher or child-mother relationship with a visible authority greater than him — he has effectively cut the link between his subjective judgment of the truth and any external sign or measure by which he could know that this judgment is right and worthy to be acted upon. Such a believer may be fortunate enough to have a knack, as it were, for knowing what is right and wrong, so that there would not always be an obvious difference between him and another who follows the teachings of the Church because they are her teachings; but the motive of the two individuals in choosing their actions is completely different. The motive of the latter is the Church herself: because she has taught that A is morally good (or evil), he will strive to do (or avoid) A until his character is formed according to this truth. The motive of the other, however, is really his own will; for no matter how much he may protest that he has prayed to the Holy Spirit for guidance (assuming the best intentions), there is no way to gauge whether or not it is really the Holy Spirit who is guiding him forward.32 Someone tempted by the anti-dogmatic principle either has to repudiate it in the end, or follow it all the way to practical, and sometimes theoretical, atheism — the position that there is no ultimate principle of good and evil, truth and falsehood, outside of myself, and that my acts are, in the final analysis, self-justifying.
From the foregoing, we can understand the way in which a corrupt conscience is a schismatic conscience. Conscience is meant to be in communion with the Church. If one cuts off one’s mind from the source of truth, one has a schismatic intellect; if one cuts off one’s heart from the source of goodness, one has a schismatic will. In like manner, when conscience is alienated from the divine measure of right and wrong, it will grow ever more antagonistic towards it, and over time will necessarily espouse disordered acts. If this condition lasts for a long time, the conscience will become so corrupted that it will declare to be good that which is truly evil and evil that which is truly good, as the prophet Isaiah soberly testifies.33 Ecclesial schism, by which a group of Christians separates itself from the earthly head of the Church, is thus reflected in the inner schism that occurs when conscience separates itself from its source of illumination. There is consequently an unbreakable link between “communal obedience” and “personal obedience” — between the adherence of Christians to the Pope and the bishops in union with him, and the adherence of the individual conscience to God, its inner light. The one who rejects the external authority of the Church ipso facto rejects the inner formative power of divine light, just as one who departs from her external sacraments cuts himself off from the inward grace of Christ.
The Magisterium in its entirety demands a religious assent of mind and will; it is the authoritative interpretation of the depositum fidei which comes to us from the Apostles.34 Dissent always implies disobedience, and can only stem from pride, passion, lack of education, or loss of faith. Dissent means not assenting: the Church has spoken in the name of Christ, whose authority she possesses, and I choose to disobey her voice. It does not matter what the reason for my dissent is; I am not a practicing Catholic while I persist in denial or rejection. Undoubtedly these hard truths are painful for a democratic age to hear, since people who are taught to reduce everything to personal freedom would prefer to think of truth on the model of feelings and referendums. Because the soul can be contaminated with false notions and bad desires, conscience itself can suffer corruption; that is why its authority cannot be trusted unconditionally, as though it were a self-justifying absolute. In spite of tiresome polls and petitions gathered from disgruntled populations, a specious appeal to the absolutism of conscience can never convert doctrinal errors or moral perversions into truth and righteousness.35
Conscience is a divine gift to the person, and when properly formed it judges rightly about the good to be done and the evil to be avoided. However, the trustworthiness of conscience is impaired by original and personal sin, and thus needs to be purified and enlightened by God. Our Lord provided for its purification and enlightenment by founding a visible Church, dispenser of his mysteries, light to the nations, faithful interpreter of his Gospel. He ensures the sound formation and certainty of conscience by guaranteeing to his Church indefectibility and infallibility in her Magisterium on faith and morals, made known by the authoritative acts of the Pope and of bishops in union with him. In the economy of salvation, these points imply and depend upon one another. The Magisterium is the merciful gift of the Lord to the conscience of his disciple, and the best response is a humble joy and a grateful docility. Commenting on the verse “The water that I give will become a fountain within him” (Jn. 4:14), St. Thomas Aquinas writes: “one who drinks by believing in Christ draws in a fountain of water; and when he draws it in, his conscience, which is the heart of the inner man, begins to live and it itself becomes a fountain.”36
- One need only recall the infamous Cairo and Beijing conferences.
- John Paul II, General Audience, in L’Osservatore Romano, August 22-29, 1983.
- From “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” quoted in CCC 1778.
- Gaudium et Spes 16, quoted in Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 1776 [hereafter CCC].
- Quoted in CCC 1779.
- CCC 1777.
- John Paul II, General Audience, in L’Osservatore Romano, August 22-29, 1983.
- See St. Thomas’s argument for the fittingness of revelation (Summa theologiae 1a, 1.1).
- John Paul II, Address to Austrian Bishops in Salzburg, in L’Osservatore Romano, September 5, 1988.
- CCC 1780. See Gaudium et Spes 16: “His dignity lies in observing this law, and by it he will be judged.”
- See 1 Cor. 2:16, Gal. 3:27, Eph. 4:24, Cos. 3:10.
- John Paul II, Nov. 1988, Address to Second International Congress on Moral Theology, in L’Osservatore Romano, December 19-26, 1988. See also Veritatis Splendor 62–64.
- This particular conclusion follows from the universal statement of Gaudium et Spes 22, which John Paul II has made the foundation of his teaching: “Only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light . . . Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”
- Of course, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the canons and decrees of Councils, encyclicals and other papal writings, etc., do not and could not furnish a guide for every detail of action; the Christian must apply what he knows in general to the situation at hand, and should he feel unfit to judge the alternatives, he must seek out a trustworthy adviser. What is far more important is that the Church teaches us what kinds of things, what species or types of acts, are intrinsically good or evil—what a person is required to do for salvation, what he is permitted to do as he wishes, and what he is forbidden to do. The Church holds out for man the ultimate standard, holiness, and explains what kinds of actions contribute to it and what kinds detract from it or destroy it altogether.
- From “A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” in Newman the Theologian: A Reader, ed. I. Ker (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 235.
- John Paul II, General Audience, in L’Osservatore Romano, August 22–29, 1983.
- It should be noted that conformity in this spiritual sense is to be contrasted with a rigid outward conformism which would impose particular cultural or regional patterns of thought or action on all the faithful throughout the world. Such superficial conformity has nothing to do with the deeper meaning of conformatio or conformitas: an inward obedience to and love for the universal Magisterium, which can be lived integrally by the faithful of any country, race, or culture, at any time in history. This does not mean, however, that it can be lived without opposition and suffering.
- See H. de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Mankind, trans. L. C. Sheppard and E. Englund, O.C.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988).
- See Lumen Gentium 8; CCC 846.
- The all-too-common efforts to qualify or dismiss the traditional dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus indicate a misunderstanding of the very meaning of this de fide teaching. See my articles “The Necessity of the Church for Salvation,” The Catholic Faith 3.4 (July-August 1997), 11–18; “The Cross of Christ and the Salvation of Mankind,” The Catholic Faith 3.5 (September-October 1997), 30–35.
- There are two distinct meanings of Church at work here: one is the union of Christians with Christ in his mystical Body, the other is the Church as an external, authoritative body of believers on earth, ruled by the Pope. Yet these cannot be separated; what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.
- Cardinal Ratzinger’s superb book Called to Communion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996) pursues these themes at greater length.
- The surest way to form a pure conscience is to follow the teachers whom Christ has appointed in his Church, according to their levels of authority. Local bishops may deviate from the faith, as has happened at times in the Church’s history. Christ acknowledged this possibility by choosing Judas as one of the Apostles. From the very fact of human fallibility, one could deduce the necessity of there being in the Church a final authority of universal jurisdiction who not only approves the appointment of bishops but stands, in the exercise of his magisterial power, as infallible witness to and guardian of the fullness of faith. If a bishop teaches a doctrine contrary to that of the Pope, then this bishop’s teaching has to be rejected as false.
- H. U. von Balthasar, In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic, trans. G. Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 55.
- An illustration will clarify this point. The Church is often accused of being preoccupied with sexual morality, but her insistence on moral truths in this area is easily explained. Though not the worst vice, lust is the most debilitating. It dominates the imagination, blunts the will, stupefies the mind; it brings about a state of self-forgetfulness which is paradoxically linked with an exacerbated selfishness, and for this reason it often prepares the way for more serious vices. Even if it does not lead to other vices, sensual indulgence narrows the soul’s eye, making a person increasingly oblivious to spiritual realities. Modern man himself is unhealthily preoccupied with sexual matters, and has fallen into abominable perversions in a most sacred and fragile area of human life. To fall into sin and error is already to enter the outermost darkness of which the Gospels fearfully tell. This, then, is why the Church must speak out. Her work is to save souls from this darkness.
- The experience of having fallen prey to self-deception in any matter of moment teaches us that our powers of discernment are feeble and fallible, that the voice within can be a Trojan horse. To prevent the triumph of egoism masquerading as reason, we must lean on a God-appointed teacher whose guidance cannot fail and whose wisdom contains no error. Any position that rests upon a subjective authorization, such as a “religious experience,” cannot be taken as proof of rightness of conscience, unless this experience corresponds to, or at least does not contradict, authoritative teaching.
- An externalist conception of the Magisterium resurfaces in some Eastern Orthodox thinkers as well, who speak of the Pope as though he were “outside” of the Church or “external” to the body of believers and his teaching were imposed by executive fiat—a parody of what the Church really is and what roles the papacy and the Magisterium have in her life. As vicarius Christi, the Pope re-presents Christ, and his authority is derived solely from the One he represents. For this reason, he stands at the center of the Church, right where the divine and human, eternal and temporal, axes converge; in no sense is he another head or an incongruous appendage. The extreme Orthodox critique of the Roman Church presupposes an ecclesiology which denies that the Holy Spirit is the inner life and unfailing guardian of the institutional hierarchical Western Church. Jesus promised his Apostles that the Spirit will always remain with them, leading them into the fullness of truth. If our Lord spoke truth, how could the Church ever lose this truth-preserving presence of the Spirit? (See R. Slesinski, “Postmodernity and the Resources of the Christian East,” Communio 17.2 [1990]: 220–37.)
- n. 64, end.
- Summa theologiae 1a2ae, 19.5 ad 2.
- “The formation of one’s conscience is a fundamental duty. The reason is very simple: our conscience can err. And when error prevails over it, it becomes a cause of the greatest harm for the human person” (John Paul II, General Audience of August 1983, emphasis added).
- “Let me state more definitely what the position was which I took up … First was the principle of dogma: my battle was with liberalism; by liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments” (Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. D. J. DeLaura [New York: W. W. Norton, 1968], 50-51).
- “. . . whoever does not adhere, as to an infallible and Divine rule, to the teaching of the Church, which proceeds from the first Truth manifested in Holy Scripture, does not have the habit of faith, but holds what is of faith otherwise than by faith. Even so, it is evident that a man whose mind holds a conclusion without knowing how it is proved, does not have scientific knowledge but merely an opinion. Now it is manifest that he who adheres to the teaching of the Church as to an infallible rule assents to whatever the Church teaches; otherwise, if, of the things taught by the Church, he holds what he chooses to hold, and rejects what he chooses to reject, he no longer adheres to the teaching of the Church as to an infallible rule, but to his own will” (Summa theologiae 2a2ae, 5.3 corp.).
- Is. 5:20; see Mal. 2:17.
- Categories or gradations of teachings and the specific mode of assent corresponding to them serve only to signify the place of a given teaching in the whole organic body of Catholic doctrine; they do not in any way affect the essential spirit of obedience which the Catholic owes to the Church’s teaching authority as such and to her doctrinal pronouncements.
- The problem of what the historian John Rao calls the “deification of conscience” has been around for a long time. The false view of conscience as an unanswerable final authority had already become established in parts of Catholic Europe by early modern times, especially among the Jansenists in France, who strove to protect their ideals by appealing to an inner certainty more authoritative than the teachings of the ecclesial hierarchy. Ironically, in this respect the Jansenists emulated the Protestants against whom they directed their sharpest critiques. See Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950], 176–230.
- Commentary on John, trans. J. Weisheipl and F. Larcher (Albany: Magi Books, 1980), ch. 7, lec. 5, n. 1090.
Peter A. Kwasniewski is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria.