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What if my conscience says one thing and the Church says another? The Catholic Church clearly teaches that I must follow my conscience at all times while also teaching that the Church has authority over me. Joe Heschmeyer offers some help for those who are confused about conscience.
Does conscience trump doctrine? Joe Heschmeyer is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host and a listener, Jason K, sent us a suggestion for an episode and we thought it was a perfect episode for Joe Heschmeyer who’s the new apologist here at Catholic Answers. It had to do with conscience.
And I was looking around on the internet, see what people, what Catholics are saying about conscience and this guest columnist for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Gaby Garcia-Vera wrote a piece in which she claimed that conscience can basically trump doctrine. I have to say, I mispronounced her name, you’ll see in the interview that follows, but I just want to apologize for that. I didn’t mean any disrespect to her. I wanted to take her idea seriously because it’s a very generally held idea these days.
But the Catholic church holds two things. One, you must follow your conscience. Two, you must follow the teaching of the Catholic church. So what gives? Here’s Joe Heschmeyer.
Joe Heschmeyer, Catholic Answers apologist. Thanks for doing this with us again.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, my pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
I think it’s cool that whenever you and I do it, we wear the same shirts that we wore the last time.
Joe Heschmeyer:
This is definitely a different day from-
Cy Kellett:
This is a totally different day. It’s not that we recorded these all in one day. It’s good to see you again, Joe. I want to talk to you about conscience and to do that, I’m going to share with you a Holy Thursday article from the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Thought Holy Thursday is the perfect day to honor the Lord’s passion by publishing an opinion piece called The Catholic Case for the reproductive Freedom Act. And it was written by Star-Ledger guest columnist, Gaby Garcia-Vega.
And I want to read just a little bit of what Ms. Vega or excuse me, Garcia-Vega … No, I read it wrong. I apologize to her Gaby Garcia-Vera. I apologize. So I want to read a little bit of what Ms. Garcia-Vera said and get your take on her understanding of the Catholic understanding of conscience. Okay, Joe?
Joe Heschmeyer:
All right, let’s do it.
Cy Kellett:
Was that too much setup, Joe? Are you awake? All right.
Here’s what she wrote. New Jersey has a profound opportunity to protect and expand to necessary and time-sensitive reproduction health care, including abortion by passing the Reproductive Freedom Act. The hierarchy of the Catholic church has come out against this bill as well as frequently and consistently against all abortion care. But I am one of the majority of the faithful in the Catholic church who understand that our tradition supports a person’s right to follow their conscience on important, moral matters like abortion.
I know that protecting reproductive healthcare is undoubtedly a Catholic value and then ellipsis for the rest of the entire column. And I want to get to because she mentions conscience again at the end. Catholic teaching regards our conscience as the final arbiter in any moral decision each of us must make. We regard it as both a gift and a responsibility and that we are called to follow our conscience and to respect the right of others to do the same.
Far too often, I hear my faith used as a sword and shield that our opponents brandish to hide behind, they would stop at anything to derail us from progress. I think I’ll just leave it there because I think that got the word conscience in every time that she used it. Does she have a proper understanding of the Catholic understanding of the primacy of conscience?
Joe Heschmeyer:
You’re going to be shocked when I say no.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I am shocked. She doesn’t get everything wrong, though.
Joe Heschmeyer:
No, she doesn’t. Actually, it’s really interesting because she’s getting something right. But I think what she’s getting wrong is probably what the word conscience even means. In other words, conscience isn’t just my opinion or my own personal what I would come to an unaided reason. If so, why have a church? Everything becomes totally relative. Everything becomes totally subjective if I’m the final judge of everything. I’ve just replaced God, I’ve replaced the magisterium. I’ve replaced everything with just me.
So that’s the danger. I would say the catechism in paragraph 1790 to 1792 are really helpful for understanding erroneous judgment. So I want to start with where she’s right because in 1790 it says, “A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience.” If your conscience tells you you have to do something or you must not do something, it says, “If he were to deliberately act against it, he would condemn himself.”
If you do what you believe is sinful you’re sinning. But then it goes on, “Yet it can happen that moral conscience remains in ignorance and makes erroneous judgements about acts to be performed or already committed.” Okay. So that’s what we’re going to want to unpack because then it goes on and then it says in 1791, it says, “Sometimes, that ignorance can be imputed to personal responsibility that you’ve taken no trouble to find out what’s true and good or you’ve blinded your conscience through the habit of committing sin. In such cases, the person is culpable for the evil he commits.”
So if the reason your conscience is totally cool with something is because you’re too lazy to find out if it’s wrong or you’re too wicked to care, okay, well you’re not off the hook. It’s like the guilty verdict. Half the time when they have a guilty verdict to give to the person, the person has no guilt at all.
In the sense of they feel no compunction, they feel no shame. They’re not sorry, but they’re still morally guilty. The fact that they’re just like, “Eh, I’m cool with it. I’m fine with committing crimes.” That’s not how to understand conscience at all. And so 1792 goes on and says, “Ignorance of Christ and His gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one’s passions, assertion.” And this is the part I think is going to be directly relevant, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the church’s authority and her teaching, lack of conversion and of charities. These can be at the source of errors of judgment and moral conduct.
That is not a, “Hey, if you ignore Christ, you’re good to go.” If your conscience is erring, those are big red flags that you’re in spiritual peril. If your conscience is telling you something very different than what the church of Christ is telling you, like God established a church and it says X and your conscience is telling you the opposite of X, there’s a problem. And it’s probably not with the church, right? It’s probably with you. So what’s going on there? Do you need to learn more? Do you need to go to confession? Is your soul just turned away from God for some reason? Or are you making an innocent mistake? Whatever’s going on, you’ve got a problem that needs sorting through.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so in a practical sense, because very often these are actually practical matters. So someone might find themselves in a moral situation where they know that the church teaches … Let’s say, let me give you an example and this is, I know, probably an overused example But Anne Frank is hiding in the attic. Okay. So here a person might say, “The teaching of the church is that I never lie and might even know that there’s other options that the church gives you in this situation, but can’t remember them and goes, ‘I’m just going to lie. I know that the church teaches me not to lie. I’m going to lie because I don’t want Anne Frank to get killed.'”
Okay. So the person’s conscience, they are rejecting what the church taught. And their conscience is not badly formed. They have a well-formed conscience. So help me out in that in the very practical case of the person who’s seeing a practical situation and goes, “I don’t know how to make the church teaching fit with this. I’m going to go with I’m going to lie and say, ‘Anne Frank is not in the attic.'”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think in the case you were describing something like panic is probably more likely the thing going on. There can be things where your culpability is reduced or even eliminated because of the circumstances. In the same way, if you’re being tortured in and you say something that’s false because you’re in a horrible situation, you don’t know what to do, yeah. You’re still doing something objective really wrong. But are you being condemned for that? That’s actually rather than clarifying, I’m worried that that kind of case is going to make things way more complicated just because there’s a whole other set of realm of things that come in besides conscience.
Because even in that case, the person is trying to remember what they’re supposed to do and their mind goes blank. And they reach for the one thing they can think of which is lying. So that’s a different kind of case. And something like this where someone premeditatedly says, “The church says this is wrong. I don’t care. I’m going to do it anyway because I don’t feel guilty about it.” That’s a pretty egregious violation of conscience. And the first thing I say there is I don’t think that the author Garcia-Vera …
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, Gaby Garcia-Vera.
Joe Heschmeyer:
She’s not saying, “I’m morally compelled to get an abortion. And in my view it’s wrong not to.” That would be a more serious issue. She’s just saying, “The church says it. I don’t really get why they say it. I don’t really agree with what I understand it to be.” Well, in that case, if you find yourself in that case, listener, whatever that teaching might be, you know the church teaches X, Y, or Z on contraception or on whatever it is, lying, whatever. Even if you don’t get why they’re coming to that conclusion, it’s enough to know God created the church. He promised the Holy Spirit would guide the church. The church says this and you can trust that’s right even if you don’t get why it [inaudible 00:10:23].
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Hopefully as you grow, you’ll start to understand the why. And so you’ll be able to assent in a freer and fuller way. But it’s like G K Chesterton has this great example. If you find a fence in the middle of nowhere, don’t tear it down until you know why it’s there. Assume there’s a reason that there’s a fence here and that you tearing it down is probably going to be bad. Even if you don’t get yet why. Now eventually, it’d be good to find out why. Is there something dangerous on this side or the other side? Are they keeping something in or out? All of that can come later. For now, there’s a fence there, don’t cross it. Don’t tear it down. It’s there for a reason.
That’s a starting point with allowing the conscience to be formed so that when if you find in yourself an erring conscience, meaning if you find in yourself the conclusions I’m coming to on my own point this way and the church is pointing that way, have the humility to say, “I trust the church rather than my own opinion.”
And then the final thing I’d say there is that’s part of what we mean by the formation of conscience. So the catechism speaks about how you have a moral duty to form your conscience. You’ve got a moral duty not to just leave it up to your own private guess or your own private judgment, but to actually get educated, to actually be formed by those who have a better idea than you do. So if you’re not doing that, then the error in your conscience, it’s something you’re free of because it’s due to your own lack of effort, it’s due to your own carelessness about the state of your own soul.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, right. Okay. So help me out then about the formation of my conscience then, because is it true then to say, given all that we’ve said and will say about this, that if in sincere conscience, in sincere, good conscience, maybe not well-formed conscience, but the person is following their conscience, they do something wrong thinking that it’s right, then they have not sinned. That’s fair to say?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Depending on the kind of the circumstances, but if you’re doing what you believe is right … I’ll give you an easy example. Let’s say we accidentally switch wallets. So I’ve got your wallet and I go and buy a sandwich or whatever with it.
Cy Kellett:
With what?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I use your money.
Cy Kellett:
It’s not my wallet if there’s enough to buy a sandwich in there.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I put it on the Catholic Answers card.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
In that situation, I’m technically doing something wrong. But because I don’t have the information necessary to even realize that I’m not sinning. An important dimension to this is sin is located in the will. And that’s just a fancy schmancy way of saying in the case of sin, it’s not just you make a mistake. It’s not even just that you do something wrong. It’s that you choose to do something wrong or choose not to find out what you’re supposed to do.
You’re either being negligent or you’re being willfully disobedient. That’s always necessary for a sin to really be a sin in big ways or in small. You should have known better or you did know better and you didn’t do it. So in a case where a person innocently does not know, you miss Sunday because you think it’s Saturday and it’s a totally innocent mistake, you have no reason to believe that it’s Sunday until the end of the day. And you’re like, “Oh, shoot. Today was Sunday?” You’re not sinning in that case. There’s no negligence. There’s no intentional disobedience. That kind of stuff is. So in that case, your conscience actually does excuse you.
Cy Kellett:
Well, but let me just go one step further though because there’s the very common phenomenon in our world today that a person is poorly catechized and most of us have suffered this at some point, gotten poor catechesis. And so the person says to the priest, “Am I obligated to go to mass every Sunday?” And the priest, he’s Father Nice Guy and he goes, “Well, you should go to mass every Sunday, but no one’s going to die if you’re not here one Sunday.”
Cy Kellett:
All right. So the person doesn’t have a conscience as to their Sunday obligation at all. And maybe if they were reading the catechism every night before they went to bed. But this is a normal person and I’m not saying the other person is abnormal, but this is a normal person with normal stresses in their life. They got a lot going on. They haven’t read the catechism. They asked Father, the Father gave them this answer and now they just have a poorly formed conscience. Are they sinning if they miss mass?
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s a really hard question because it’s a lot more that goes into it to know. So for instance, because look, the Holy Spirit is working within every one of our hearts. So is this person receiving a tug, encouraging them to take the faith more seriously and they’re waving it away and that’s why they don’t know? Are they just routinely putting the pressures of work above God and that’s why they don’t know? Or are they doing the best they can and they just happen to have bad priests or bad leaders?
And they’re totally innocent. And they’re just being misled. I mean, I know a lot of people who literally don’t know the catechism exists, don’t know what it is. In that case, that person’s no more at fault for that than a person on a desert island who’s never heard of a catechism. You know what I mean?
You’re not on the hook for things you had no way of knowing about. But you know who is on the hook in that situation? Father.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Well, yes, Father’s got a problem there, right?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So the big danger there is there’s sometimes this idea that you can protect people from the gospel. There arose this idea in the 20th century that if you just told people less of the truth, they would be on the hook for less. And the problem with that, besides the fact that it’s totally antithetical to everything Jesus says which should be a big red flag is that it ignores the fact that God is already speaking at the level of conscience. John Henry Newman describes conscience as the aboriginal vicar of Christ.
Imagine arriving on a desert island and you’ll find the Pope there. That’s what it’s like to have a conscience. You already have a little internal Pope telling you what you should do and not do. Then hopefully, that Pope is well formed. But either way, you better be listening to him. You better be submitting because that’s one of the ways that God does actually work in your soul prior to anybody else come in.
The only reason that the gospel makes sense when we hear it for the first time is that we’re not really hearing it for the first time because God has already been at work.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, Joe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Even in the hearts of the people who seemingly are totally cut off from it. So when you deny people the gospel, you’re not letting the aboriginal vicar of Christ connect to the outside vicar of Christ. You’re not allowing the gospel to do what it’s meant to do. You’re letting that seed die in the soul of someone else, out of a totally perverse idea of charity.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So we do know, for example, I mean, a person knows that someone has done you no harm, but you say something nasty about them behind their back to somebody else because ha ha, we’re having a moment. We know that that’s wrong. And we can wear away at that knowledge though, we can wear away at that knowledge because the 10th time we do it, we’re going to feel less bad about it than the first time we do it and the hundredth time, we might not feel it at all.
So, there is that … I’m saying that to continue from your idea that there is that vicar within us, we know that certain things are wrong, but we might get this or that wrong about it. But we know that certain basic things are wrong.
So I’ve been told that even children who are taught to be criminals by their parents, they know that their parents aren’t teaching them the truth. They might go along with it, but they know that this is not right what my parents are teaching me, this criminality. So tell me about the obligation to formation of conscience then because I know I can dull my conscience. Joe, I’ve done it many times, I dulled my conscience about things. And I know I’m answerable for that. But I know I can dull my conscience. How do I sharpen my conscience?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think the first is realizing that you need to, because so often, we don’t want to sharpen our conscience because we’re afraid of what it’ll say. In the same way, if I find money on the ground, I don’t want to find out if it belongs to somebody else. I want to assume, oh, probably nobody here. I can just take it and go home. And so I don’t want to do the work that I kind of already know I need to do.
Likewise, everyone has enough of an inkling about the nature of right and wrong. And even the person who claims all morality is relative, if you Rob them, they’re going to be peeved because they know you’ve actually done them a wrong. No one, I would go so far as to say I don’t believe anyone actually believes morality is relative in their bones.
At the most basic level, it’s what Aquinas called synderesis. This basic idea of right and wrong is totally inescapable. You can tell yourself, “Well, this is right, it’s not wrong, or this is wrong, it’s not right.” But even when you lie to yourself about right and wrong, you’re acknowledging right and wrong exist. That core thing exists. And then if you have that, the next step is, well, shouldn’t I find out what is actually right and what’s actually wrong?
If I’m expected to do what’s right and to avoid what’s wrong, wouldn’t it be good to have a better idea of which things are which? In the same way that once I realized some of the food I eat makes me feel good and makes me strong and some of it is just like, I have to lay on the couch for three hours afterwards because I shouldn’t have eaten that much pizza or whatever, I probably have a duty to educate myself, at least somewhat about nutrition. This is like that but for the soul.
What is actually healthy, what is actually making me grow and what’s killing me? And I’ve got that duty as a human being with a soul, I need to take care of my soul. Just like I need to take care of my body. I can’t just treat it like garbage. And so everyone should know that. And if they don’t, it’s either because they’re not thinking about it, in which case they’re being negligent, or because they’ve dulled their conscience so thoroughly through a life of sin. But either way, that’s a bad place to be at.
So then if you know someone in that situation, just prod them and say, “Hey, shouldn’t you find out a little more about whether this is right or wrong?” And I think that’s where outside intervention can be really helpful. But yeah, there’s this duty and it’s a universal duty. And everyone at some level has to know they have a duty to find out if something’s right or wrong.
Cy Kellett:
So to go back to Ms. Garcia-Vera, Catholic teaching regards our conscience as the final arbiter in any moral decision each of us must make. I just want to go back to that sentence. So having had you explicate this for us a little bit, there’s something that’s right about that and there’s something that’s profoundly wrong about that. I want to see if I get them right in your view.
Cy Kellett:
What’s right about that is you are obligated to follow your conscience. What’s wrong about that is that that doesn’t make your conscience the final arbiter of what is right and wrong. That part is outside of you. You have to do your best to follow your conscience. But what’s right and wrong exists outside of your conscience. And you’ve got to find out what that is. And if you don’t start finding out what that is, you’re living irresponsibly and in a spiritually dangerous way.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think that’s a good way of putting it. 1783 in the catechism says, “A conscience must be informed and moral judgment enlightened.” You have to take seriously the idea of informing your conscience, because the other danger with this, and I already mentioned this before is, we often think of conscience is just like my unaided uninformed opinion. And that’s not what conscience is. And you shouldn’t be just going with what your blind, ignorant guess is on anything. You should be taking the trouble to be informed and to be enlightened.
And so that’s the danger is like, yes, you’re responsible for making a moral act and you have to do what you believe is right. But to be able to do that well, you also have to be taking the time to find out what’s right. So you’re not just blindly saying, “Seems good to me.” And moving ahead blindly. Because you know that’s not right. You see what I mean? The person who does that is actually violating conscience. The person who does that is actually violating the duty in conscience to be informed. They’re purposely remaining ignorant which their conscience knows they shouldn’t.
Cy Kellett:
Right. And just to be clear, the church for Ms. Garcia-Vera and for us does have the authority to teach us on the issues of morals. And the church does teach against abortion and where our conscience disagrees with that, we need to inform our conscience in good faith. Even if we don’t see it now, we will see it one day, but we have to inform our conscience.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, exactly. It is a divine messenger, but we can mess up the message by intermixing all of our own negligence, all of our own sin, all of our own ignorance, all of that stuff. So, yeah, listen to the church that Christ gave us to help form our conscience and trust that He’s not going to mislead us through that church. And that’s how your conscience can be what it’s meant to be. And you can live that out more fully.
Cy Kellett:
Joe Heschmeyer, I’m really glad that you’re an apologist for Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Hey, thanks. I am too.
Cy Kellett:
And I wanted you to appreciate something about me right now. I’ve done two Focus episodes with you without mentioning Pope Francis, two in a row without mentioning Pope Francis once.
Joe Heschmeyer:
[inaudible 00:24:48] when you do multiple episodes.
Cy Kellett:
[Focci 00:24:50], I think you have to say focci.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, Focci. Focci episodes.
Cy Kellett:
Thanks, Joe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But yes, thanks for not needlessly getting me into hot water other than the lying questions.
Cy Kellett:
Oh yeah. The Anne Frank question. Sorry about that. All right. We’ll do this again. Let’s wear different shirts next time.
Joe Heschmeyer:
We’ll see if we can do. I only have so many one.
Cy Kellett:
One of he reasons that conversations about conscience are difficult is that there’s so much that’s subjective about it. What is the actual state of your conscience? Could you have done a better job? Are you avoiding doing a better job of informing and preparing your conscience? You might know that and God knows that. Nobody outside of that pair knows the answer to that question.
Cy Kellett:
We do have the obligation to prepare our conscience, to do our very best, to inform our conscience so that when we meet moral difficulties, we have a basis on which to proceed intelligently and reasonably and responsibly. You got to ask yourself, have I prepared my conscience? Have I really listened to what Jesus says? Have I really listened to what the church has to say? Have I considered these things and is my conscience well-prepared and well-formed?
If the answer is yes, then do good, avoid evil and go about your life. Thanks so much for listening to us. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and I’d love to get an email from you. We love getting emails around here, focus@catholic.com is our email address. Jason K sent us an email which gave us the idea for this episode. And your ideas are welcome as well.
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