Catholics and Conscience

Cornell law prof Steve Shiffrin has some good questions for me following my post on authority and conscience:

The new Pope has been interpreted to say (rightly or wrongly) that the failure to follow the church's lead on a number of issues is an indication of a sinfully formed conscience.  I am curious what you think. Suppose a Catholic who disagrees after prayerful consideration of the church's position on say birth control, sexual orientation, divorce, mandatory celibacy, or the ordination of women. Suppose the Catholic feels a duty as a matter of conscience to speak out on these issues. Recognizing that the Catholic might be wrong on the merits, is it your position that the Catholic has a duty not to follow his or her subjective conscience (however carefully formed)? What should the same Catholic have done in the past when he or she disagreed with the Church's position on slavery, interest on loans, evolution, the purpose of sex in marriage (thus, previously ruling out the rhythm method), or religious liberty? My goal here is not to debate you on the issue. I am just curious about your position.

This leads me to a second question.You seem to suggest that Catholic legal theory can help to lead American Catholics away from their disagreements with the Vatican. What I like about the Mirror of Justice site is that it brings together people who bring quite different Catholic perspectives to the site. Your comment seems to suggest that Catholic legal theory is committed to the view that American Catholics are wrong. Have I misread you?

My earlier post may have left a mistaken impression, no doubt due to my own lack of clarity.  When I denigrated the "purportedly ominpotent conscience," I did not mean to offer in its place a completely eviscerated conscience.  Indeed, my own tendency is to want to elevate conscience above all else in matters of faith. 

This inclination is no doubt due in part to the individualist strain of my evangelical upbringing.  Even there, though, I learned that the operation of conscience has its limits.  Since I was a young boy, for example, I've always struggled to reconcile the existence of Hell with a loving God.  I still haven't been able to reach a satisfactory reconciliation, but in some ways I learned to push the question to the side, neither openly defying the religious authority (in the case of my upbringing, scriptural passages) nor pretending that my conscience simply reflects authority (I don't deny that I still struggle with the issue). 

Now it's relatively easy for me to push the question of Hell to the sidelines of my faith journey (though it wasn't when I was a boy and the fear of Hell overwhelmed me); much more difficult would be the marginalization (much less subjugation) of my conscience when it defied religious authority on a question that is central to my existence, e.g., the issue of sexual orientation to a gay man or lesbian.

In the new First Things, George Cardinal Pell has an essay titled, "The Inconvenient Conscience," in which he writes that conscience:

is neither the apprehending of an alien law nor the devising of our own laws.  Rather, conscience is the free acceptance of the objective moral law as the basis of all our choices.  The formation of a Christian conscience is thus a dignifying and liberating experience; it does not mean a resentful submission to God's law but a free choosing of that law as our life's ideal.

And if a Catholic does not choose God's law as it is embodied in Church teaching, according to Cardinal Pell, "that should not be the end of the matter but the beginning of a process of conversion, education, and quite possibly repentance."

My reference to conscience as not being omnipotent signals the extent to which I agree with Cardinal Pell's understanding: if, as a Catholic, I dispute the Church's teaching on a given issue, I have much cause for reflection, prayer and conversation with other believers.  But I'm not comfortable with the suggestion that the properly formed conscience is defined by its acceptance of Church teaching, as Cardinal Pell implies.  Sometimes, the end result of sincere reflection, prayer, and conversation is continued disagreement.  My inclination is to create as much space as possible for such conversations to continue within the Church without precluding the possibility that dissenters may actually turn out to function as agents of change.  (The space should not be so endless as to create a vacuum; there's no point in having a conversation about whether Jesus is the son of God, to take an easy example.)

As for Professor Shiffrin's question about MoJ's stance toward American Catholics, I think it's important that we help elucidate connections between the Gospel and our real-world environment, particularly connections that run along our legal and political cultures, challenging each other to reflect more deeply on what it means to follow Christ in the modern world.  More often than not, this effort will be directed toward encouraging Catholics to recognize the wisdom of Church teaching on a range of issues that are given short shrift in the current climate (notably war, materialism, and poverty, not just sexuality).  At other times, though, Catholic legal theorists may challenge the Church to recognize overlooked or potentially misconstrued implications of the Gospel.  (That was the point of my earlier post on John Courtney Murray.)

Again, I'm new to Catholicism, and thus have little life experience in the context of a religious community that takes hierarchical authority seriously.  (In my experience, when conscience runs up against religious authority, we start a new church.)  I'm anxious to get the views of other folks.

Rob