The Catholic conscience in our culture
By Roy Barkley

Conscience in our culture. In a recent article1-compact, perceptive, and a bit gloomy -Robert R. Reilly described the dynamics of our much-bruited culture war. He wrote that those who wish to persist in "vice" (i.e., flagrant sin) must, for the sake of their own peace of mind, assert the view that their vice is actually virtue. And they must not only convince themselves, but everyone else. Only by making their practices normative through the rationalization that evil is good can they still their consciences so as to avoid the pain of self-rebuke. (So priceless is "self-esteem" that it will brook no feeling of guilt.) The result, if they are successful, is a cultural revolution; for what was previously condemned by the culture will henceforth be considered right and good. "Thus rationalizations become an engine for revolutionary change that will affect society as a whole." Reilly applies this process to some of the chief abominations of our time-sodomy, abortion, and euthanasia-and shows in brief how proponents of their legitimation have been so far successful. Abortion, for instance, is now considered a "positive good," a "loving choice," by Beverly Harrison, a teacher of "Christian ethics" at Union Theological Seminary. Ginette Paris upstages Professor Harrison by arguing in a book emetically entitled The Sacrament of Abortion that society should recognize the "sacred dimension" of abortion.

To see the process that Reilly describes through the lens of Scripture, one need only consider St. Paul's warning that some of the evils of the "last times" will come about as a result of the deadening of conscience: "Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, through the pretensions of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage," etc. (1 Tim. 4:1-3, Revised Standard Version). One hears little about conscience these days in the popular media. That is because the process of moral anesthesia that St. Paul and Robert Reilly describe has advanced very successfully . Outside of the apparently shrinking circles of orthodoxy the propositions of the moral revolution have been nearly universally accepted. The principal subject in contemporary popular discussions of ethics, carried on in such fora as the United States Congress, is money. Even so, taking a bribe is considered "unethical" but not immoral: to relate one's unacceptable actions to an objective moral law is definitely passé. Except for violations of individuals under such rubrics as sexual harassment, dissolute behavior unrelated to money is simply a matter of the perpetrator's choice. An ample witness to this fact is the nearly complete irrelevance of the "character" issue to the outcome of the recent presidential election. I am reminded of a little interchange between Sir Lawrence Mont and his son, Michael, in John Galsworthy's novel Swan Song:

"The public have suffered from [cleverness] too much. Besides, we don't really like it in this country, Michael. Character, my dear, character!"

Michael groaned.

"Yes, I know," said Sir Lawrence," awfully out of date with you young folk."2

Considerations of character are so out of date among us that they troubled our electorate little, and conscience has vanished from discussion even of such trendy topoi as the environment.

What has taken the place of conscience in our culture? Consent, or feelings, or whim. Anything to which a person deemed an adult consents is all right merely by that fact. This makes consent a machine for moral empowerment that need not be responsible to any external restraining force. Indeed, it makes external moral restraining forces by definition nonexistent. The only valid restraint now acknowledged among, for instance, most university students, is the proviso that one's actions "not hurt anyone." If "anyone" is an unborn human being who cannot speak for himself, he can be conveniently and easily redefined as "nobody."

One of the paradoxes in this arrangement is that consent, which objectively heightens the sinfulness of a wrong act, is now considered the sole determiner of moral goodness. Mortal sin requires (a) knowledge that an act is gravely sinful, (b) sufficient reflection, and (c) consent to the action. In the popular mind, the moral goodness of an action now requires only consent to it: merely that one feel like doing it and decide accordingly. Unfortunately, however, even on the cultural level there is no such thing as a victimless sin. "A society," Reilly writes, "can withstand any number of persons who try to advance their own moral disorders as public policy. But it cannot survive once it adopts the justifications for those moral disorders as its own. This is what is at stake in the culture war." So it would seem that we all, partakers of a particular culture, are hurt by the public acceptance of rationalized vice. This is the engine of the Untergang des Abendlandes.

Conscience in the Church. The malformed consciences of cultural revolutionaries therefore result from rationalizations about moral truth. Unfortunately, many similar rationalizations have been absorbed from the culture by Catholics, with the same result. I should like to discuss a few of them.

The concept of victimless sin has, sad to state, infected the Church. Many Catholics-indeed, many who teach and are responsible for passing on the faith-fail to recognize that others are always hurt by one's sins, no matter how private. A great deal of teaching needs to be done in this regard. The damage occurs because, most basically, a sinful life is not only spiritually malformed but stunted; it does not grow into what Christ wants it to be, and it consequently deprives the human family. Every human being is called to a personal vocation, as the Second Vatican Council emphasized. The document on the laity puts it thus:

To the apostles and their successors Christ has entrusted the office of teaching, sanctifying and governing in his name and by his power. But the laity are made to share in the priestly, prophetical and kingly office of Christ; they have therefore, in the Church and in the world, their own assignment in the mission of the whole People of God. . . . [L]aymen are called by God to make of their apostolate, through the vigor of their Christian spirit, a leaven in the world.3

This is the great affirmative teaching of the council, that every individual is chosen to be the light of his own little part of the world. But that role can be fulfilled only through a sincere, daily submission to God's will. Such submission is incompatible with deliberately chosen sin, even solitary sin. Holiness of life is not optional for a Christian who wants to fulfill the vocation to which God has called him, a vocation that always calls for evangelizing his neighbor through good example. Private sexual sins between consenting adults, and solitary sexual sins, the kinds of sin most often defended, are always harmful to the Kingdom of God. Germain Grisez writes, "even solitary sexual sins are social sins insofar as they violate the body's capacity for self-giving and the sacramental significance of human sexuality."4 If we fail in self-giving, we fail as Christians, for self-giving is the essence of Christ. As a result, someone whom we were intended to save may be lost.

Since the promulgation of Humanae Vitae, many Catholic priests have to their shame taught that conscience is independent and sovereign. On their view, one is not responsible for forming his conscience but merely for obeying it. Perhaps this is the reason we hear so little preaching of substance in the Church today. Whereas the priest in the confessional refrains from disturbing the conscience of a penitent, the homilists at Sunday Masses appear to refrain from disturbing anyone's conscience, except in certain popular matters. Thus a few worthy but trendy causes-AIDS, the homeless, the environment-are far more likely to be mentioned than the related moral conduct of one's private life.

At the same time, many Catholics are taught that their consciences are a kind of trump, or line-item veto, to use against "official" Church teaching. Ludicrously, some Catholic leaders seem to want to protect the consciences of their flocks against Catholic teaching. A cohabiting couple coming to a priest or deacon, for instance, is rarely challenged to live up to the moral law; confronting fornication is embarrassing, and one can always hope for the best while averting one's eyes. Not mentioning the immorality of extramarital sex, or the futility of trying to prepare for marriage by living in sin, is quasi-official policy in some places. Thus the Church of the future is formed of young families who have learned from the clergy to scorn her teaching. An advocate or user of contraception is usually told that his conscience should be followed rather than reformed. And so on, right through the unpopular teachings of the Church-all those teachings that might actually make the Church a "sign of contradiction." The image of the "cafeteria Catholic," which is based on the concept of conscience as supreme and unassailable, is both well known and true to life.

Such subjectivism of conscience is even touted by Catholic bishops. Preposterous as it may sound, the "conscience clause" with regard to contraception recently requested by some European bishops shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the relation between the Church and the moral law. (What "Spirit of Vatican II" seminary trained these guys?) For the Church does not create the truth and is obligated not to ignore it. Giving permission to break the moral law is, like the ordination of women, beyond her capacity. She can only obey and teach what is revealed to her. This is one of the subjects of the great encyclical Veritatis Splendor, which drew howls of dissent from centrifugal elements in the Church. Contra the dissenters, the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit, whose continued presence in the Magisterium is promised by Jesus Christ, to understand and promulgate the moral law, not to invent it or rationalize its abuse. The practical, cultural stakes are immense. As the Holy Father wrote, "only a morality which acknowledges certain norms as valid always and for everyone, with no exception, can guarantee the ethical foundation of social coexistence, both on the national and international levels."5 Bishops who reject those norms are, like Reilly's cultural revolutionaries, rejecting the moral reality of creation itself. In cahoots with them are growing numbers of dissident Catholics-for instance, the ungrammatically named, subversive movement We Are Church-who refuse to submit their consciences to the heaven-sent guidance of the Magisterium.

One practical effect of this widespread Catholic failure to form consciences in accord with the teaching of the Church is that when the bishops do speak out on an important moral matter, no one listens. In the recent presidential election, for instance, although the leaders of the Church in America clearly and strongly rejected the legality of the kind of infanticide known as partial-birth abortion, the candidate who favors those abortions won more of the Catholic vote than the previous, pro-life, president. In short, in this country there is no "Catholic vote,"6 even when the gravest moral matters are concerned, because so many Catholics have rejected the Church as their authority in faith and morals. They have been taught, even by their pastors, that right and wrong depend on consent. Indeed, with the leaders of the Zeitgeist, they have rejected the idea that an authority beyond the imperial self can exist. Their consciences are seared, often with the collusion of their priests. Surely it was to halt the progress of such degeneration of conscience in the Church, which was already well under way in 1974, that the Canadian bishops issued their well-known Statement on the Formation of Conscience. This excellent document teaches that

even in matters which have not been defined ex cathedra, i.e., infallibly, the believer has the obligation to give full priority to the teaching of the Church in favor of a given position. . . . If his ultimate practical judgment to do this or avoid that does not take into full account the teaching of the Church, an account based not only on reason but on the faith dimension, he is deceiving himself in pretending that he is acting as a true Catholic must. For a Catholic, "to follow one's conscience" is not, then, simply to act as his unguided reason dictates. "To follow one's conscience" and to remain a Catholic, one must take into account first and foremost the teaching of the Magisterium. When doubt arises due to a conflict of "my" views and those of the Magisterium, the presumption of truth lies on the part of the Magisterium.7

Conversion and conscience. For salvation we need conversion, and the connection between conversion and reformation of conscience has been clear since the beginning of Christianity. In particular, in the writings of St. Paul, to become Christian is to change one's understanding of what is acceptable-to leave behind the "old man" and be re-formed in the image of Christ. Baptism recapitulates the sacrificial death of Christ in the individual's life; through it, "we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin" (Rom. 6:6), but freed from our former selves. St. Paul enjoins converts to "put off your old nature which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful lusts, . . . [to] be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (Eph. 4:22-24). Conversion therefore entails not just an external ritual but a radical change of life. That, in turn, requires new life "management"-the converted conscience-that can, with the help of Christ, maintain the change.

Among the Fathers, St. Justin Martyr, for instance, writes repeatedly of such a change. Formerly, he writes, "we lived in fornication and all kinds of filthy conversation, [but] have by the grace of our Jesus, according to His Father's will, stripped ourselves of all those filthy wickednesses with which we were imbued."8 For another early example, St. Irenaeus writes,

the apostles, who were commissioned to find out the wanderers . . . certainly did not address them in accordance with their opinion at the time, but according to revealed truth. . . . [W]hat medical man, anxious to heal a sick person, would prescribe in accordance with the patient's whims? . . . How then shall the sick be strengthened, or how shall sinners come to repentance? Is it by persevering in the very same courses? Or, on the contrary, is it by undergoing a great change and reversal of their former mode of living, by which they have brought themselves no slight amount of sickness, and many sins?9

The conversion or radical change that is necessary for salvation is so closely bound up with the formation of conscience that they are in part identical. But not all people realize this, for "joining the Church" in the United States has become for some a mainly social affair. In RCIA programs around the country, for instance, one finds people preparing to become Catholic in order to have their civil marriages blessed by the Church. So far, so good. But for many, this move is a mere ritual, done to satisfy a troublesome family. (I will not get into the question of annulments here.) Are these candidates for baptism challenged to let the Church truly reshape their consciences? Do the adult catechumens of America know the cost of becoming genuinely Catholic, or are they just being fed a program of "Catholic Lite" (Msgr. William Smith's phrase), an undemanding regimen of watered-down doctrine and no rigorous moral requirements? To be more specific, how many incoming converts are challenged to give up contraception, to leave off sexual sin of all sorts (see St. Justin's reference to fornication), and to conduct their civic duties, including voting, in accord with the moral law? How many converts being brought into the Church in America know that in order to become genuinely Catholic they must unconditionally give up their sovereign consciences?10 Those who do not know this are undergoing external conversion without internal change; they embrace the shadow of the Church without her substance. How many children attending nominally Catholic schools know that they must turn away from the worldly teachings of our culture and let the Church guide them morally? All too often, it seems that students in Catholic schools are actually absorbing the immoral teachings of a failing American culture in the schools themselves.

Catholics must form their consciences otherwise. The Church teaches that "Conscience is not a law unto itself, and in forming one's conscience one must be guided by objective moral norms, including authentic Church teaching."11 To accept this is to accept the true nature of conversion. Not until one disposes of the idea that conscience is an untouchable attribute or absolute power that enables its bearer to veto Church teaching-not until one gives himself over to the Church and ipso facto to Christ for formation in faith and morals-is conversion real. Only then will the convert climb out of the quicksand and up on the Rock. n

1 National Review, November 25, 1996, pp. 60-61.

2 Swan Song is the third novel in A Modern Comedy (the quoted passage is from pp. 580-581 of a one-volume edition, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956).

3 Apostolicam Actuositatem (Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People), 2, in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, New York: Costello, 1987); italics added.

4 Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Volume 2: Living A Christian Life (Quincy, Illinois: Franciscan Press, 1993), p. 664.

5 Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (Boston: St. Paul Books & Media, 1993), no. 97.

6 See James K. Fitzpatrick, "Kerry Defeats Weld! Who Cares!," the Wanderer, November 14, 1996.

7 Statement on the Formation of Conscience, issued by the Canadian bishops (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1974), nos. 40-41; heading (number) omitted.

8 St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Ch. 116 (Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson [American reprint, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1993], Vol. 1, p. 257).

9 St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.5.2 (Ante-Nicene Fathers, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 418); italics added.

10 This is by no means to advocate the "legalism and minimalism" (Grisez, op. cit., p. 251) that sometimes characterized older moral theology. On the contrary, discernment is obligatory for the fulfillment of individual vocation. But the will of God must be humbly sought in the Church, even as one's own will must be renounced. True interior conversion is more, not less, demanding than the old legalism.

11 "The Washington Case," Vatican II: More Postconciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, New York: Costello, 1982), p. 420. Notably, this teaching on conscience is directed against dissenters on the matter of contraception.