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Conscience and grace: A Lenten meditation

Christ promised to maintain his Church in the truth (John 8.32; John 16.3). Has that promise been broken?

(Photo: koldunova_anna/us.fotolia.com)

The scriptures of Lent in the Church’s daily liturgy invite two related reflections. The weeks immediately preceding Easter call us to walk to Jerusalem in imitation of Christ, so that, at Easter, we, too might be blessed with baptismal water and sent into the world on mission. The preceding weeks, those immediately following Ash Wednesday, propose a serious examination of conscience: What is there in me that’s broken? What’s impeding my being the missionary disciple I was baptized to be?

This Lent, that examination of conscience might well include some serious thinking about what “conscience” means.

That often-contentious subject has returned to the center of the world Catholic conversation, thanks to the forthcoming 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, Blessed Paul VI’s prophetic encyclical on the morally appropriate means of family planning, and the ongoing discussion generated by Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation on marriage, Amoris Laetitia. In that conversation, voices have been heard urging a view of conscience that is curious, even dangerous: under certain circumstances, conscience may permit or even require that a person choose acts that the Church has consistently taught are intrinsically wrong – such as using artificial means of contraception, or receiving Holy Communion while living the married life in a union that’s not been blessed by the Church.

Those propounding this idea of “conscience” urge us to recognize three things: that the spiritual and moral life is a journey; that when the Church teaches that some things are just wrong and no combination of intentions and consequences can make them right, the Church is proposing an “ideal” to which the most “generous” response may not always be possible; and that confessors and spiritual directors should be compassionate and discerning guides along the often rocky pathways of the moral life.

No reasonable person will contest the last claim. I’m grateful that I’ve been the beneficiary of such thoughtful guidance, and more than once. But the other two claims seem problematic, to put it gently.

If, for example, “conscience” can command me to use artificial means of contraception because of my life-circumstances, why couldn’t conscience permit, or even require, that I continue to defraud customers if my business is in debt and my family would suffer from its failure, even as I work my way into a better, more honest financial situation? Why couldn’t “conscience” permit me, on my journey toward the “ideal,” to continue to indulge in extracurricular sex while my spouse and I work out the kinks in our marriage? Inside the idea that “conscience” can permit or even require us to do something long understood to be wrong, period, where’s the circuit-breaker that would stop a couple from “discerning” that an abortion is the best resolution of the difficulties involved in carrying this unborn child to term, although under future circumstances they would embrace the “ideal” and welcome a child into their family?

The further claim being made here – that God can ask me, through my conscience, to do things that do not cohere with the teaching of the Church – fractures the bonds between God, the Church’s teaching authority, and conscience in perilous ways.

Christ promised to maintain his Church in the truth (John 8.32; John 16.3). Has that promise been broken? The Council of Trent taught that it’s always possible, with the help of God’s grace, to obey the commandments – that God wills our transformation and helps us along the way to holiness. Has that teaching been rescinded? Replaced by a “paradigm shift” into the radical subjectivism that’s  emptied most of liberal Protestantism of spiritual and moral ballast? Vatican II taught that within my conscience is “a law inscribed by God?” Is God now telling me that I can violate the truth he has written into my heart?

To suggest that the Church teaches “ideals” that are impossible to live undervalues the power of grace and empties the moral life of the drama built into it by God himself. Lent does not call us to confess that we’ve failed to live up to an unachievable “ideal;” Lent does not call us to be self-exculpatory like the Pharisee in Luke 18.10-14, who went away unjustified.  Lent calls us to embrace the humility of the Gospel publican and confess that we have sinned, knowing that God’s mercy can heal what is broken in us if we cooperate with his grace.


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About George Weigel 483 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent books are The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius, 2021), and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, 2022).

5 Comments

  1. If ever a critical article for our moment were submitted this is one. “The Church is proposing an ‘ideal’ to which the most ‘generous’ response may not always be possible”. What can be offered with sincerity is acceptable by a merciful God is the premise of Amoris. Reality is more important than ideas. Elicited from Peron by the youthful Jorge. The former “concrete circumstances” the latter binding doctrine. Francis’ premise tears at the heart for compassion, conscience objects. A Church torn by a premise that validates practice v doctrine. G Weigel identifies the crux. The Word written on Man’s heart, that inherent divine placement of indelible truth the under-girding of all conscientious deliberation and decision. Deny it and we sin, obey and we please God. The Pontiff’s Paradigm Shift speaks otherwise. Thus Spake Zarathustra.

    • Why? Because man has an amazingly robust capacity for rationalization.

      And if one only fights the easy evils in themselves and in others, they’ll likely never see it.

  2. Let’s face it, we humans are selfish and sinful. We will ‘rationalize’ EVERY ‘authority’ on Earth — even, ‘The Word of God’ — just to have our own way! ‘Conscience’ is linked to our thinking processes in a way that can, so easily ‘corrupt’ us; and lead those around us, to stray from the ‘straight and narrow path’! This is why we NEED our Church, and its Leaders to STAY TRUE to THE SOLEMN TRUTH HANDED DOWN to us, BY THE HOLY SPIRIT!!

  3. And yet when three Popes by the use of their conscience turned the death penalty on its head by all three seeking abolition worldwide, few traditionalists said boo….because they were grateful to the first two Popes of those three for other things…like the Latin Mass. We need Mr. Weigel to explain how three Catholic consciences within three Popes are an exception to his paradigm.

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