Musings on “conscience.”

The most misunderstood concept in Catholicism today is the “conscience clause.” I few weeks ago I mentioned that I would be attending a talk on Catholic moral teaching at my parish – but it turned out to be another talk about “conscience,” how the conscience is supreme, how the conscience guides us, and apparently everyone’s favorite, “you must follow your conscience even if it is in error.”

For post Vatican II Catholics such a talk just isn’t helpful, instructive or informative and after helping Gabe with his reading last week, I think I’ve hit upon a helpful analogy.

If I told Gabe, “OK Gabe, this is the letter Y. Sometimes it sounds like I, sometimes it sounds like E. It sort of depends on how many syllables the word has – if it has two syllables usually it has the E sound, if only, than usually the I sound. Okey doke Gabe, so how do you think you would say this word? ”

Unless Gabe knows what I and E are, and what sound they make AND unless he knows what a syllable is, he is going to be totally clueless as to when a Y makes this sound or that sound. If I don’t clear that up for him, he’s going to be making arbitrary stabs at the sound of Y when ever he comes across them – blurred guidelness and fuzzy rules lead to chaos and confusion!!

How much worse would it be if I said, “Gabe, it doesn’t matter what sound Y makes. It make whatever sound you want it to make!” Uh.. wow that would sort of change the entire language wouldn’t it?

That’s precisely in my opinion what has happened with Catholic moral teaching post Vatican II. It’s not that the documents aren’t clear – they’re clear. It’s apparently that no one with any authority or understanding bothered to read them and pass them along to the faithful, and the consequence of that is a generation or two of Catholics who have a fuzzy, unclear notion of what the church teaches, but they don’t understand why, but they sure have gotten the notion that they can follow their own fuzzy consciences without guilt! And – just as the language would change for Gabe if I allowed him to make up his own spelling and reading rules as he went along, so has the language of moral Catholic teaching changed to the point that we have a major Catholic presidential candidate evoking the ghosts of Paul VI and Pius XXIII (sic) without a clue as to what those gentleman really taught!

Just as you can’t teach reading and spelling without clearly defining the rules and the guidelines, y u can’t form the conscience without a systematic teaching and understanding of what the Church has always taught and why – AND that if you decide to dissent from those rules, the same consequences apply.

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