On the need to form our (fallible) consciences.
DATE: August 5, 2008

TIME: 9:00 AM EST

In Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote:

The Church equips her members to address political and social questions by helping them to develop a well-formed conscience. Catholics have a serious and lifelong obligation to form their consciences in accord with human reason and the teaching of the Church.

I have spent my last two columns (part I and part II) trying to elucidate the meaning of conscience as understood by the Church in the natural law (NL) tradition. Last week I delved into the difference between mere moral opinion and the real McCoy, the genuine judgment of conscience. I concluded that it can be hard to distinguish the experience of a certain judgment of conscience from the experience of formulating an opinion.

Generally speaking, the latter, even when it is an opinion shared by many people, is nonetheless characterized by that unmistakable taste of subjectivity – it’s my opinion. It can often conceal a lot of vested self-interest; the person clutches to his or her opinion perhaps in a state of interior uncertainty, even turmoil; opinions are often more the product of emotion and affective responses than of sound reasoning. The judgment of conscience, by contrast, is normally characterized by its flavor of objectivity and consistency with moral principle. When that judgment of conscience is certain, it is held with interior serenity and is not swayed by emotion. It can even be embraced independently of one’s own self-interest: think of men and women (Thomas More, Maria Goretti) who have gone to their own deaths out of fidelity to conscience.

Today I want to conclude by reflecting on the notion of ‘forming’ one’s conscience. Let’s begin again with the bishops’ statement:

The formation of conscience includes several elements. First, there is a desire to embrace goodness and truth. For Catholics this begins with a willingness and openness to seek the truth and what is right by studying Sacred Scripture and the teaching of the Church as contained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It is also important to examine the facts and background information about various choices. Finally, prayerful reflection is essential to discern the will of God. Catholics must also understand that if they fail to form their consciences they can make erroneous judgments (nn. 17-18).

To the notion that one must ‘form’ conscience through docility to sound moral guidance, for example, from Catholic moral teaching, one might object: I have always been taught to ‘follow my conscience’ no matter what others think, including the Catholic Church.

Now, the perennial moral principle directing us to “follow your conscience" holds true for all persons everywhere. But read carefully! That principle holds true only when it presupposes two things: (1) that what we’re calling conscience in this case is not just mere moral opinion, and (2) that what we’re calling conscience here presents itself with clarity and certainty (a further principle is that one should not act on an uncertain or doubtful conscience without clarifying the doubt). In light of the foregoing, it should be clear that this principle is not directing us to “follow your best opinion about what you consider to be right or wrong.” Rather, the principle is directing us to be faithful to the authentic judgment of conscience arising from within when, and only when, that judgment is firm and certain.

Now the tradition also holds, however, that moral conscience, although anchored in human reason, is not infallible. Conscience can err. Consequently, one can have a certain and objectively correct judgment of conscience about moral matters; but it can also be the case that one possesses a certain judgment about moral matters, albeit an erroneous and incorrect judgment. In the latter case, persons working in good faith are normally only aware that their judgment is clear and certain; they are not aware that their judgment is out of sync with objective moral norms. Think for example of the mother who holds for certain that she would transgress the moral order by allowing her gravely ill child to receive a blood transfusion; or of the ob/gyn who, although personally opposed to abortion, judges that it would be a grave omission to fail to perform an abortion on a pregnant fourteen-year-old who, with parental consent, is seeking one. Such judgments, though they present themselves as certain, are at odds with the objective moral order.1

This brings us to the question of why conscience must be “formed.” What, specifically, does the notion of conscience formation – from the Catholic and natural law perspective – entail?

• Conscience formation begins with the deep-seated decision to seek moral truth. One adopts as a way of life the habit of seeking out answers to questions about right and wrong and to persevere in that quest until one arrives at a state of moral certainty after having made the most reasonable effort possible to arrive at those answers.

• A sound conscience must stand on the firm foundation of integrity, sincerity, and forthrightness. Duplicity, personal inconsistency, and dishonesty undermine any hope of forming a properly functioning conscience.

• Conscience formation is sustained by the habit of consistently educating oneself by exposure to objective moral norms and the rationale behind those norms. Conscience needs a guide. Catholics – and, indeed all people of good will – find that guide in the moral tradition of perennial validity – the natural law tradition – as sustained and enriched by the constant and universal teaching of the Catholic Church. The Catholic who believes that “the Church can think what it wants on moral matters and I can think what I want” may believe this to be an expression of “moral maturity.” In fact, it is the expression of quite unsound reasoning. Catholic moral teaching is nothing other than the continuation of a tradition of moral thought which extends all the way back to Aristotle, well over two millennia. The Church’s moral teaching, while certainly enlightened by divinely revealed law, is at its core the application of what this tradition has discovered over the centuries about the kinds of behavior that lead us to live genuinely fulfilling human lives. One does not place oneself at odds with such a tradition lightly.

• Consequently, conscience formation requires a habit of on-going self-formation (what we might call moral information gathering) through study, reading, and other types of inquiry, including consultation with persons whose moral judgment we know to be sound and in accord with the Church’s moral tradition.

• Finally – although this would have to be the topic of a future column – conscience, if it is to be correct, needs the assistance of the virtue of prudence. By ‘prudence’, we mean the virtue as understood within the NL tradition, which is not to be confused with timidity, ‘covering one’s back’ or dissimulation. Prudence is the virtue that enables us to discern right moral options in every circumstance. It is prudence which lends immediate guidance to conscience. The prudent individual, in arriving at a judgment of conscience, will do so under the influence of this fundamental virtue. As the Catechism affirms, “with the help of this virtue we apply moral principles to particular cases without error and overcome doubts about the good to achieve and the evil to avoid.”2

In sum, conscience formation is a life-long project.3 It is something like playing tennis: if you stop playing long enough, you can lose your backhand. As with an athlete’s body, conscience formation is not a question of getting it in form once and for all, but of maintaining it in form for a lifetime. It is a project that is foundational for all other life-projects, for a genuinely human existence, and – not to mention – for eternal happiness.

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[1] For more on the matter of erroneous judgments of conscience, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn.1790-1794.

[2] See the Catechism, n. 1806.

[3] See the Catechism, nn. 1783-1784.

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