Followup Questions on Conscience

[[Dear Sister, you wrote a couple of weeks ago [July 6th] that, [[ Simply knowing and believing what the Church teaches abstractly is not the same as having a well-formed conscience which can make moral judgments in specific situations.]] I was very struck with that and surprised by your comment that the church depends on people being able to be church by making moral judgments in concrete situations, but some of the language was new to me and I am not sure I understood completely. Can you give some examples of preferencing, discerning, etc?

You also said that conscience is inviolable and that one must act on a conscience judgment even if one errs in doing so. How can the church teach that?? What happens if one errs? What happens if one makes a judgment which is contrary to what the church teaches? Does one still act on that? What happens if one believes one thing is right which is against church teaching and then decides to do what the church teaches instead?]] (redacted, especially by culling questions from longer text)

These are great questions and I am not surprised the comment that the Church depends on us being Church (that is, being the presence of Christ) in concrete situations is new to you. Remember that the Church cannot discern or preference all the possible values and disvalues present in any given situation from amongst those we each run into every day. I was taught this as an undergraduate in theology but don't think I have heard the matter put in exactly those terms by anyone else; other theologians teach the same thing, but the language was my professor's. The possibilities are infinite. Of course the Church can and does tell us what is intrinsically evil; she can and does tell us what objective values should be affirmed and what disvalues must be eschewed. She can remind us of basic moral principles like "one may not do evil in order to do good", but the application of these in concrete situations require a human heart and mind schooled by the spirit of Christ. You may recall that Friday's gospel passage from Matthew centered on Jesus' admonition that his disciples be simple as doves and shrewd as serpents. One application of this admonition is that of conscience formation. Jesus asks that we become people moved simply by the love of God but who are capable of negotiating the moral demands of a complex and complicated world. That is, in fact, our mission as those sent by Christ.

Discerning and Preferencing Values and Disvalues

When I speak of discerning values and disvalues and then preferencing them I am speaking of determining the values and disvalues present in a situation which, because they are objectively real, make an existential claim on us in some way and then "sorting" these in terms of which will have priority over the others and in which way that occurs. The simplest kind of situation might be a dilemma about feeding one's family and facing the choice whether to steal food to do that or not. Remember that the Church teaches that values are objective realities and that these are also keys to understanding the very call of God to us. So closely linked are these that we even speak of people who discover the existence of values as discerning the presence of God or we deny that persons who affirm the existence of values are truly atheists, for instance. So, with regard to this situation there are a number of objective values present which make a claim on the person and there are certain disvalues (usually the opposite of the values) which are also present. In most of what follows the disvalues are merely implicit and I mainly leave them to you to articulate explicitly.

Honesty (the value) and dishonesty (the disvalue), the commandment's prohibition not to steal and fidelity to divine law, compassion (both for one's family and for the store owner's own need for reimbursement and the ramifications of stealing from him), one's responsibility to provide for one's family, the health or well-being of that family, the example one sets for them in stealing (both positively and negatively), the demands of personal integrity and what that means in this situation, the presence of other options which might mitigate the need to steal in other ways (shelters, food banks, welfare programs) and any number of other values or disvalues and mitigating or aggravating circumstances are present in this simple situation. A person needs to be able to discern these, preference them (by which I mean determine which is more or less important than the others at this moment in time) and then to make a conscience judgment (a decision on how one is called to act) on the matter. We need to be able to do this not only because God calls us to do this but because WE literally are the Church incarnated in this specific situation, and so, we need to make the best moral judgments we possibly can.

The Inviolability and Primacy of Conscience, and the Erring Conscience

Essentially the Church teaches that one may act in either good faith (good conscience) or bad faith (bad conscience). This is the most fundamental division recognized in the Church's teaching on conscience. What this means is that at any point in time, no matter how well-formed and informed one's conscience is, one will be called upon to make conscience judgments and to either act on those judgments or to act against them. This recognition is based on the fact that conscience is, in one sense, the place where God dwells within us and summons us to embrace the good, the true, etc. This place or event within us is sacred ground and no one can enter in here or ask us to show them this "place" unless we freely give them that right. Neither can anyone coerce us to act in a way which is contrary to the call we hear here. In another sense, conscience is defined in terms of judgments. We make what are called conscience judgments on the basis of the entirely inviolably personal conversation that goes on between ourselves and God as we discern and preference the values before us. This conscience judgment also has primacy. Once we have gone through the process of informing ourselves as best we can, of discerning and preferencing the values and disvalues present in a situation and made a judgment from this deep, immediate, and original place of truth within ourselves, we must either act on it or act against it. There is no other choice open to us.

If we act on our conscience judgment, that is, if we do what our conscience tells us we must then we may be right in our judgment or we may err in our judgment, but still we MUST act on this conscience judgment if we are to act in good faith as we personally hear God calling to us to do. Even if we were mistaken in our judgment we have acted according to the voice of God as we heard it and for that reason there is merit in the act (St Alphonse Liguori, et al). if, on the other hand, we act against what we have deemed to be the right thing to do at this point in time, then we act in bad faith and go against what we heard God calling us to do. Because of this, to act in bad faith or bad conscience is ALWAYS a sin, and often a very grievous one. Note that all of this reasoning stems from the theology which regards conscience as involving the very voice of God within our heart of hearts (as well as the other ways this voice is mediated to us) which NO ONE can oppose or gainsay. Even if what our sincere (or literally conscientious) judgment tells us is God's will goes against Church teaching the Church herself affirms that we MUST act on it or sin.

The classical version of this was set forth (based upon the teaching of St Paul in Rom 14:23) by Thomas Aquinas who said that if a person found that they acted in good conscience (followed the dictates of their conscience) and were unjustly condemned to excommunication as a result, they "ought rather to die under the interdict than obey superior orders he knew [in his heart of hearts] to be mistaken". In other words if, in acting in good faith one opposed the church's teaching in a way which resulted in even the church's worst penalty, one was still obliged to act in precisely this way. Obviously Aquinas recognizes that acting in good faith ("in the spirit of faith") does not mean merely doing what the Church teaches or he could not have raised the question he does nor given this answer. Further, while he recognizes that actions have consequences and one must bear the consequences of one's choices, he also recognizes that a good conscience act should NOT result in a severing of one's relationship with the Church or he would not have referred to "unjust" excommunication.

Innocent III put the matter this way: [[What is not done from faith is sin and whatever is done contrary to conscience leads to hell. . .as in this matter no one must obey a judge against God, but rather humbly bear the excommunication.]] (By the way, the fact that Innocent III said one is to "humbly" bear the penalty also implicitly affirms that one remains in communion with God since humility is a kind of remaining in the truth and since the presence of humility implies communion with God. ) Thus, even if one's conscience is in error one is obliged to obey it. (If one suspects it is in error or doubts the conclusion or knows one has not done what one could to inform it, then one has not yet made a conscience judgment and is obligated to do what one can to rectify the situation.) In other words, to follow one's conscience and to act on the voice of God one hears in one's heart of hearts involves some risk. We may hear incorrectly; we may discern and preference values wrongly. YET, we are obligated nonetheless to follow the dictates of our conscience. The corollary is that when we do so we must also bear the consequences of this obligation, whether those are ecclesial or civic.

Conscience: How about just Acting in Accord with Church Teaching?

In order to do away with this risk should we simply do what the Church teaches? My previous post dealt with one dimension of this question, but another revolves around the following question: should we assume that if we are in apparent disagreement with the Church that we have not adequately formed or informed our consciences? This is a position put forward often today by conservatives trying to smooth out the tensions inherent in the Church's own teaching on the primacy of conscience. At Vatican II however, when a minority group approached the Theological Commission with this position they were rebuffed. The group suggested that a text that read (paraphrase) "one should always listen attentively to church teaching in forming one's conscience" should be rewritten to read instead, "a well-formed conscience should be formed in accord with church teaching. . .." The Commission effectively said,"No, what we have written is church teaching," and found the proposed redaction too narrow and rigid. And they were right; Innocent III said essentially the same thing. Nothing, no other judge or authority can remove our obligation, nor the risk of informing, forming, and acting on our own sincere conscience judgments. Nothing relieves us of the obligation to be obedient to the voice of God which speaks in our heart of hearts.

If one sincerely determines that x is the right thing to do and simply instead does y (even if y is what the church rightly teaches one should do), then one sins. Now, let me be clear: if one determines x is the right thing to do and then realizes she has not informed or formed her conscience properly, she can then determine that doing y or acting in accord with what the church teaches is the right thing to do. In such a case she has reached a second conscience judgment and is obligated to act on it. Similarly if one comes to a decision regarding a way to act but doubts she has formed or informed her conscience properly, then she cannot really act in good faith in terms of the decision marked by doubt. (Such a decision does not actually rise to the level of a certain conscience judgment.) In all cases one must continue to discern as well as inform and form one's conscience. One must especially continue to do so if one finds after the fact that she has erred. Even so, sincere conscience judgments bind despite the risk that the person making them is in in error.

Finally, one caveat with regard to this last paragraph. One NEVER reaches the end of informing and forming one's conscience, nor is one ever relieved of the obligation to continue doing so. When I refer to "adequately" doing so I mean that one has sincerely done the best they can at this point in time and knows that to be the case. The fact that one may err while acting in good conscience underscores the fact that one MUST act in always-imperfect circumstances and cannot become paralyzed by the prospect that a judgment is not perfectly informed. While real indecision or doubt must ALWAYS be attended to whenever a judgment can be safely put off, we cannot always simply wait until there is greater information and formation to judge and act. We must make decisions in concrete circumstances with temporal and spatial limits and constraints and this is the reason developing the ability to discern, preference, and make a judgment on the values and disvalues present is so very important. That is simply part of being human and incarnating the word of God in our own lives and world.