Maria has a difficult decision to make. She has made an appointment with Father Luke her parish priest to discuss her predicament.
Maria explains to Father that she has been married for four years and has two children, one only eight months old and the other two and a half years old. She and her husband, John married after a short courtship of only nine months at her parish in another state.
Quickly after their marriage, she began to see unsettling signs of a bad temper in John. At times he could be quite loving and gentle, but at other times, especially if he had been drinking, little things could set him off. Twice he had pushed her and six months ago he hit her. She was afraid that next he might do the same to the children.
He wouldn't get any help and said he could control his temper on his own --- and besides, he didn't believe they should be "airing their dirty laundry" in public. Consequently she asked him to leave the house but he refused.
So she reported him to the police and had a restraining order taken out to keep him away. His last words to her were, "You will be sorry, I'll get even. And besides, we're married in the Church. We can't get divorced; you're stuck with me whether you like it or not."
Maria is terrified for herself and her children. She's also worried about her standing with the Church. She was brought up to be a good Catholic and has always done her best to follow Church teaching. She does not believe in divorce, and when she was married she was committed to remain married "for better or for worse."
She wants to know if she committed a sin in kicking her husband out of the house. Did her conscience lead her astray?
Every Christian every day is faced with important moral choices, choices that either build our character or erode it. At the heart of the pursuit of the good is our conscience.
A well-formed conscience is essential when a student is tempted to take the easy way out and cheat on an exam, steal pieces for a term paper off the internet, download copyrighted material, experiment with drugs, alcohol or sex. It is essential when young adults are making decisions about their relationships and how to keep them both holy and happy. It is essential to our soldiers when they are faced with decisions about how to treat enemy soldiers who are in the Abu Ghraib prison.
Only a well-formed conscience will be able to direct us to pursue the good when we are forced to make choices in a very complex world.
False meanings
A solid and legitimate understanding of "conscience" is essential to every Catholic. To follow one's conscience is at the very center of everyone's authentic moral life. There are three false meanings of conscience that are unfortunately all too common:
---For some, conscience is reduced to feelings. This is often expressed when someone says, "I feel that this is the right thing to do, and I have the right to follow my conscience. The Church can't dictate to me what is right or wrong in my life."
---For others, conscience is almost a form of scruples, where every decision is anguished over and one struggles always to keep every rule for rules sake.
---Finally, and perhaps most insidious, others have reduced conscience to "social norms." In this last case conscience is formed by "what is acceptable to the majority."
Perhaps the most quoted definition of conscience is found in the document Gaudium et Spes from the Second Vatican Council:
"Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment...For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God…"
Here we see two absolutely essential elements of the authentic conscience: (1) it is not invented by any individual nor by society, it is God given. And (2), it is not directed to what feels right, but to the "objectively good."
Conscience is not a burden to be carried but a great gift from God that allows every person to choose happiness because true happiness is only found in the pursuit of what is good, not what is evil. Conscience is our moral compass that allows us to be our best selves, to be most loving, most authentically human. Without such a compass we would be doomed to wander a landscape of choices with no ability to know which way to turn.
A good conscience directs us to make some hard choices in favor of "tough love" that deep down we know will make us happy, even if they don't make us feel good at the time. The lure of a temporary high from drugs or the thrill of a casual sexual encounter or the no-holds barred pursuit of money and material comforts can be countered by a conscience that sees the truth of the "big picture."
Conscience is made up of two complementary human powers, the intellect and the will. Conscience depends on the ability of the intellect to see, acknowledge, grasp the truly good, the real truth. Only after our intellect has perceived an authentic good, can the will direct us to choose that good.
For example, if we want to lose weight the intellect needs to understand that weight loss can be the result of a good diet and healthy exercise. But to everyone who has failed in such an endeavor, they know that the will must choose the diet and the exercise. The intellect and will must work together in every authentic moral choice.
Growth and development
Conscience, then, is best understood not as something static, but as growing. While the Church's moral precepts remain the same, our ability to grasp and apply them mature as we grow. In the same way that children need good parenting until they are able to assume the responsibilities and challenges of adulthood so does our conscience grow through stages of development.
Because of this, the Church recognizes that an individual may follow an ill-formed conscience that is not mature due to no fault of his own. In such a case is a person committing a sin by following his conscience? No, certainly not. But that does not dismiss the responsibility that every person has to do his best to form a good conscience. When an ill-formed conscience is our own fault, we do become morally responsible for a sinful choice.
Developing a good conscience, its constant care and feeding, is at the heart of Catholic morality. For without a healthy conscience, objectivity and truth are elusive. It is the responsibility of every person to "inform" their conscience.
The question then remains, how does one go about developing a well informed conscience? The answer is in understanding the intellect, in other words knowing how we grow in knowledge. There are two essential kinds of knowledge; factual knowledge and wisdom.
Factual knowledge is the kind most of us learn in school, which is important and is a real part of making moral decisions. For example, since we know that cigarette smoking is highly addictive and harmful to our health, we can use that knowledge to make a decision, since we know that it would be wrong to deliberately choose anything that attacks the integrity of our health.
Wisdom on the other hand is knowledge that comes from experience. For example, most people "know" they are loved by their parents, not simply because they have been told so, but because they have experienced the real care of their parents who have fed, clothed and taken care of them throughout their childhood.
Experiential knowledge is also essential to forming a good conscience. Experience teaches us that we tend to be better persons if we associate with people of good character and vice versa.
Intellect, truth and responsibility
Forming a good conscience means that we need to feed our intellect with the truth that comes from both facts and experiences. This is a lifelong task.
Are we aware of God's word in Scripture? Do we make a place in our lives for reading and pondering the Bible? Do we take the time to learn the Church's teachings on moral issues that surround us in society? Have I taken the time to learn not just "what" the church teaches --- on abortion, assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research, the just war theory and the death penalty --- but just as importantly, "why"?
An "informed" conscience, is just that, "informed." A good conscience won't happen by accident or by luck; each person is responsible for "doing the work" of informing their conscience. However, beyond the written Scripture and teachings of the Church, one informs his/her conscience by attention to other "sources" of wisdom.
If wisdom is gained by reflecting on our experiences, every conscience will be affected for good or for ill by the experiences we choose. Therefore the development of conscience will be positively affected by participating actively in our local parish, attending the Mass attentively, and being present for faith formation opportunities.
Similarly our conscience will be informed positively or negatively by the people we choose to associate with, by the magazines we read, the radio personalities we listen to, the television programs we watch and the movies we rent. Whether we like it or not, teenagers watching a sitcom where casual sex is the norm and/or drug or alcohol abuse is a joking matter are forming or rather, deforming their conscience.
Video games that reward aggressive, violent and immoral behavior are also guilty of deforming a conscience, as are parents who use foul language in front of their children. Just as our conscience defines our choices, our choices form the reliability of our conscience.
Ultimately, when people do their best to inform their conscience, when they open themselves up regularly to the Scripture, to the Church's teachings, and feed themselves with good, holy and healthy nourishment for their imagination and soul they have no fear of following their conscience, even if, for some reason, their conscience is not accurate in a particular case. Since we must follow our consciences as a moral imperative, we are just as strongly responsible for developing an informed conscience.
'A working compass'
It can not be overemphasized how much we as a Church should be concerned both about making sure that conscience is truly understood for what it is and also for how to provide for its care and feeding.
Morally, we live or die by our conscience. Without a working compass, we cannot help but get lost. Each of us is responsible to be a light in a world shrouded in too much darkness. A well-formed conscience provides a path to the good, not necessarily to the easy. Vincentian Father Richard Benson is academic dean and professor of moral theology at St. John's Seminary, Camarillo. His column appears monthly in The Tidings. |