First, from George Weigel's post, "Catholic Reflections on the Endgame 2012", on the National Review site:
Whatever
happens on November 6, though, the Catholic Church in America has been
changed, likely in irreversible ways, by the experience of this campaign
year.
A critical mass of U.S. bishops now understands the
challenge of this cultural moment, and these bishops are prepared to
exercise their pastoral office in the prophetic way that the challenge
of the culture requires.
The utter incoherence of the
Pelosi/Biden/Sebelius form of Catholicism has created a situation that
those prophetic bishops will not likely fail to address. For while it is
true that the Catholic Church is big enough for Paul Ryan and Joe Biden
(and Nancy Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius), it is also true, and far more
urgently true from a pastoral point of view, that there are different
pews within Big Church Catholicism. Many of those in the more distant
pews are grievously uncatechized, which causes them to lead lives of
spiritual and moral incoherence. That situation will not be tolerated
indefinitely.
As the Catholic Church once became the lead
Christian community in intellectually formulating the pro-life position,
it has now become the lead church in articulating, through the arts of
public reason, the defense of America’s first freedom, religious
liberty. In both of these exercises, Catholics have found common cause
with evangelical Protestants; and in the religious-freedom battle (and
the battle to defend marriage rightly understood), Catholics have found
new allies among Mormons. And as the Catholic-Evangelical alliance in
the American culture war led unexpectedly to new and rich theological
exchanges, so, it may be expected, will the partnership in battle
alongside Latter-day Saints. The ecumenical landscape in the 21st
century will thus look nothing like the ecumenical landscape when the
Second Vatican Council opened 50 years ago.
“Progressive” Catholicism in America once claimed the Church’s Vatican II defense of religious freedom as its proudest
accomplishment
— as well it might. Yet that, too, has changed. The abandonment of the
religious-freedom issue by far too much of the Catholic Left in 2012 was
a further indicator of what Francis Cardinal George announced years
ago: the death of liberal Catholicism from what had become, in the
post–Vatican II decades, its spiraling intellectual implausibility.
Read the entire piece. The incoherence that Weigel mentions is front and center in a recent attack by North Dakota Senator Tim Mathern, a former seminarian, on Bishop David D. Kagan of Bismark. In an October 19th letter, Bp. Kagan wrote a letter, titled, "Catholic citizenship", which contained the following:
I
will not tell you how to vote. However, I ask you to vote as a
Catholic citizen with a properly formed Catholic conscience. A properly
formed Catholic conscience will never contradict the Church’s teachings
in matters of faith and morals. In this letter I wish to explain what
this means in direct relation to the issues on which each person’s vote
will have a lasting impact.
What is “a properly formed Catholic
conscience?” The Catechism says: “A well-formed conscience is upright
and truthful. It formulates its judgments according to reason, in
conformity with the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator.
Everyone must avail himself of the means to form his conscience.” (1798)
The Catholic Church’s teachings are the means for us to properly form
our consciences so that we seek always what is true and good.
At
the heart of all Catholic moral and social teaching is a single fact:
the respect given to an individual human person must always be first and
must govern every law and action so that the person’s life and dignity
is always and everywhere protected and defended. In other words, from
the first moment of human conception to the last moment of life on
earth, the person must be respected without exception.
For this
reason, there are some actions that are never acceptable and should not
be made so by law, they include: abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem
cell research, and not recognizing the unique and special role of
marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
All of the
other social, economic and political issues gain importance only from
the fundamental issue of the respect for the individual person and the
inviolability of each person’s life and God-given dignity.
Thus,
if there is no respect for the life and dignity of each person from
conception to natural death, then every other moral evil can be
justified. There are some things we must never do, as individuals or as
a society, because they are always incompatible with love of God and
neighbor. Such actions are so deeply flawed that they are always
opposed to the authentic good of persons. These are called
“intrinsically evil” actions. They must always be rejected and opposed
and must never be supported or condoned. A prime example is the
intentional taking of innocent human life as in abortion and euthanasia.
Sen. Mathern—described as "courageous" by one national newspaper that claims to be Catholic—wrote a letter (Oct. 23rd; PDF file) which stated:
The
letter engages in partisan politics and damages the bounds of personal
conscience, the Church's role in building the common good, and the
non-profit status of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. I
urge Bishop Kagan to withdraw or change the letter. ...
The
Bishop's position is inconsistent with the principle of Primacy of
Conscience, a long accepted position of Roman Catholic moral theology.
The Bishop's letter states: “A properly formed Catholic conscience will
never contradict the Church’s teachings in matters of faith and morals.”
As exemplified in the sentence above, Bishop Kagan short circuits
conscience formation by insisting that properly formed conscience must
follow his direction. He speaks as if the Church and he himself are
infallible on matters of personal conscience. In a misstep of power, he
colludes the complicated doctrine of papal infallibility with the
positions of the Church.
(By the way, how is it "courageous" to
tacitly threaten a bishop with governmental action, a bishop who has no
earthly powers save that of reason, argument, and, if need be, the power
to excommunicate?) Sen. Mathern's understanding of conscience is
woefully lacking; worse, his reference to the Church's non-profit status
is a thinly veiled and arrogant threat that would be lamentable coming
from a non-Catholic. Coming from a Catholic, it is far worse, being a
display of public insolence and shameless posturing that indicates just
how far some Catholic politicians will go to ingratiate themselves to
political ideology at the expense of truth.
Sen. Mathern, not
surprisingly, misrepresents both the bishop's statement and the Church's
clear teaching about conscience. First, Bp. Kagan was simply
articulating perennial Church doctrine; he, as a bishop, has a right and
obligation to do so. To act offended when a Catholic bishop presents
Catholic doctrine is to be either clueless or disingenuous; you might as
well be shocked when a football player tries to score a touchdown.
Secondly, conscience does not and cannot involve the belief that
everyone's claim to a correct judgment of conscience is equally
true and valid (i.e., "My conscience says stealing is good, so leave me
alone.") If so, as Cardinal Ratzinger notes in book, On Conscience, there would be no such thing as truth
It
is, of course, undisputed that one must follow a certain conscience, or
at least not act against it. But whether the judgment of conscience, or
what one takes to be such, is always right—indeed, whether it is
infallible—is another question. For if this were the case, it would mean
that there is no truth—at least not in moral and religious matters,
which is to say, in the areas that constitute the very pillars of our
existence. Thus there could be, at best, the subject's own truth, which
would be reduced to the subject's sincerity. No door or window would
lead from the subject into the broader world of being and human
solidarity. (p 12)
The very notion of a conscience presupposes
there is objective truth and a moral law transcending human whim,
passion, and caprice, as the Catechism states: "Deep within his
conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid
upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love
and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the
right moment.... For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God" (par
1776). In addition, a true conscience is formed and shaped by a number
of things, including reason, divine revelation, and authentic moral
authorities: "The education of conscience is indispensable for human
beings who are
subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer their own
judgment and to reject authoritative teachings" (par 1783). There is
much more, but suffice to quote the following, which dissenting
Catholics never bother to quote:
A
human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If
he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself. Yet
it can happen that moral conscience remains in ignorance and makes
erroneous judgments about acts to be performed or already committed.
This
ignorance can often be imputed to personal responsibility. This is the
case when a man “takes little trouble to find out what is true and good,
or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of
committing sin.”59 In such cases, the person is culpable for the evil he
commits.
Ignorance of Christ and his Gospel, bad example given
by others, enslavement to one’s passions, assertion of a mistaken notion
of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the Church’s authority and her
teaching, lack of conversion and of charity: these can be at the source
of errors of judgment in moral conduct. (par 1790-2)
The certain
newspaper mentioned above is having none of this, likely because it
really doesn't care about, or understand, the underlying principles
informing such matters:
As you might
expect, Kagan zeroes in on social issues, with no mention of poverty,
economic justice, immigration, peace in the world or human rights. He
maintains, "A properly formed Catholic conscience will never contradict
the Church's teachings in matters of faith and morals." Really? A
conscience is an ecclesial tape recorder?
Uh, no, it is a gift
from God that must be protected, trained, controlled, and formed by
truth, with an attitude of humility and an awareness of our own
weaknesses. It is a guide given by God, not a private god given so we
can ignore truth. But what do you expect from a "Catholic" newspaper that shamelessly and brazenly publishes a piece titled, "I am a prochoice Catholic"?