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AUTUMN 2007 Vol 41 No 1
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Editorial:
SELF-APPRECIATION
James Quillinan WHAT
LIES AHEAD FOR THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL?
Neil Darragh THE
VOCATIONS PROJECT IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND
Helen McCabe THE FAMILY
IN AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY: Christianity's contribution to understanding the
family and its role
Francine and Byron
Pirola MARRIAGE IN THE LIFE OF THE PARISH: He sent them out two by two
... Luke 10:1
Brian Lewis FREEDOM OF
CONSCIENCE
Marie Farrell
RSM ECUMENICAL CONSENSUS ON MARY
Desmond O'Donnell OMI A
LENTEN MEDITATION
REVIEWS
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Freedom of conscience
BRIAN LEWIS
FREEDOM OF conscience is something we take for granted these days, but,
though it has always been at the heart of our Catholic tradition, the
notion of freedom of conscience has had a chequered history in the
teaching and practice of the Church, as a brief overview will
show.
In the Jubilee Year 2000 the late Pope John Paul II called
the Church to an examination of conscience and a ‘purification of memory’
because of past failures to live authentically as followers of Christ. In
his Apologies he listed among the mistakes made by the Church over the
preceding 1000 years the many violations of conscience and other rights of
the human person perpetrated in the name of the faith in religious wars,
the courts of the Inquisition, the Crusades, anti-Semitism and other
expressions of grave intolerance. During that long period inadequate
notions of conscience, of human freedom and even of faith held sway among
some, often influential, members of the Church.
For four hundred
years following the Council of Trent handbooks of moral instruction were
used in seminaries to prepare priests for the ministry, especially the
ministry of the sacrament of penance. They were practical manuals, with a
pastoral orientation and only minimally theological in presentation. It is
interesting that typically the first and fundamental treatise was devoted
in these manuals to conscience. However, although this is a measure of the
importance accorded to it, as time went on the full meaning of freedom of
conscience was lost and conscience was given only a limited and
restrictive role in the conduct of moral life. In some quarters this was
pushed to extremes.
As the second millennium of the Christian era
progressed, the secular world began to react against current restrictive
understandings of conscience and freedom. The rights of individual
conscience and of its liberty in face of any kind of despotism and unjust
oppression were increasingly elaborated during the eighteenth century and
finally found expression in the ‘Declaration of Human Rights’ of 1789.
Ideas of democracy, tolerance, freedom of thought and speech and human
rights were spread in the Western World by the French Revolution and today
have become an essential part of our modern cultural heritage, although,
as has in fact not infrequently happened, the danger of turning freedom of
conscience into an absolute is always present.
Because of its
heavy emphasis on the law of God, the official Church of the time strongly
opposed this promotion of the rights of individual conscience, which it
associated with bitter memories of revolutionary anticlericalism. Liberty
of conscience was condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in 1832 as a ‘pestilential
evil and insane raving’, a condemnation taken up and confirmed by Pope
Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors in 1864. This continued refusal (at least up
to Vatican II) to endorse freedom of conscience was one of the main
aspects of the burgeoning divorce between the Church and the contemporary
world.
Older Catholics can probably remember how we tended to
think of conscience prior to Vatican II. Conscience was something that we
had, that we consulted for guidance, somewhat in the manner of the
commuter consulting the rail timetable or the forward planner looking up
the calendar. It was our private rulebook, a sort of built-in personal
code of ethics, or perhaps our very own dictionary of moral answers, all
given to us by God and enforced by our Church. Conformity and obedience to
authority (of God and Church) rather than freedom characterised
conscience. ‘Having a conscience’, for example, about snatching handbags
from little old ladies or falsifying income tax returns or missing Mass on
Sundays meant being a person in whom had been instilled the conviction of
the wrongness of such actions and who in consequence would feel guilty in
doing them. Since it often takes courage to ‘follow your conscience’ (that
is, in obeying these perceived and accepted rules of conduct),
particularly when it involves inconvenience or difficulty, for many of us
moral responsibility consisted, not in being a mature and self-determining
person (in this way conscience was denied any role in personal
self-expression or determination), but rather in awareness of these rules
of behaviour together with a strong will enabling us to live by these
rules.
The theological underpinning of this kind of thinking was
rooted in the kind of theology popular in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Theologians set out to recapture what they thought
were the key elements of the Golden Age of scholastic theology (the
movement was therefore dubbed neo-scholasticism). Adopting a particular
interpretation of natural law, they laid undue stress on an objective
moral order set up by God himself and written on our hearts, an order of
conduct which is absolute and which determines the morality of human acts.
The task of conscience in this view is to ensure that we conform ourselves
to this objective and absolute moral order and to the norms flowing from
it.
Conscience is thus conceived as simply the bridge between
individual persons and this order laid down by God. Only obedience to
these norms can ensure that we have a right conscience. Freedom of
conscience does not rate highly in this approach. Conscience’s only role
is in the application of moral rules to particular situations. Largely
because it was attributed, wrongly, to St. Thomas Aquinas, this position
became quite influential in Roman Catholic circles and was spelled out in
detail in the discussion paper presented by the Preparatory Commission to
the Second Vatican Council in 1962. It was rejected by the Council Fathers
in the treatment of conscience in The Pastoral Constitution on the Church
in the Modern World of 1965 (Gaudium et Spes).
In response to Pope
John XXIII’s challenge to contact the vivifying and perennial energies of
the Gospel, this document shows that conscience is not something we have;
it is the very person himself or herself in their inner depths, where they
are alone with God, whose voice echoes within (n.16). It is a meeting of
persons, not in the first place a confrontation with a law or a moral
order. The sense of moral obligation experienced in conscience concerns
more than particular decisions about doing good and avoiding evil; in the
depths of conscience it is the very person who is experienced as under
obligation to be a certain kind of person, that is, a loving, relating
person. Conscience in the first instance is a decision about being, only
in the light of that a decision about particular acts. The experience of
particular decisions comes only gradually. This approach to conscience is
not centred upon a moral order in the sense proposed by the preparatory
working plan but on a law of love, on an order of persons in communion
with one another and with God. Conscience renders testimony to our spirit
whether in all our moral decisions we express our being in Christ the
children of God our Father.
Finally the document makes the point
that ‘the Gospel announces and proclaims the freedom of the children of
God, rejects all slavery which in the last analysis derives from sin, and
honours as sacred the dignity of conscience and its free decision. All
this corresponds with the fundamental law of the Christian dispensation’,
by reason of which ‘the rightful autonomy of the creature, and especially
of the human person, far from being taken away, is rather re-established
in its own dignity and strengthened in it’ (n. 41).
The 1965
Declaration on Religious Freedom, a document that Pope Paul VI considered
‘one of the major texts of the Council’, confirms and proclaims this
principle of freedom. On the basis of their dignity as persons, it states,
people should not be forced to act against their consciences, nor should
they be prevented from acting in accordance with their consciences, within
due limits. The Declaration says: ‘the usages of society are to be usages
of freedom in their full range. These require that the freedom of human
beings be respected as far as possible and curtailed only when and insofar
as necessary’ (n. 7. Italics mine). According to John Courtney Murray SJ,
one of the principal architects of the document, this statement of the
principle of freedom (as much freedom as possible; as little restraint as
necessary) may be seen as the most significant sentence in the whole
document. He went on to explain that, ‘though the Declaration deals only
with the minor issue of religious freedom in the technical secular sense,
it does affirm a principle of wider import – that the dignity of man
consists in his responsible use of freedom’ (Religious Freedom (1966),
673-4). In his view the Declaration, taken together with the Pastoral
Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, has ushered in a new era
of reconciliation with the modern spirit and opened the way to a new
straightforwardness in the dialogue between the Church and the world.
Some, of course, take the notion of freedom of conscience to mean
open slather, a licence to do what you want. It is true that many today,
including Catholics, believe that one is entitled to make up one’s own
mind without reference to any outside authority, either of church or
state, and that one can do what one likes in matters of faith and morals,
provided the rights of others are not trampled upon. Thus the individual
is made completely autonomous in making personal decisions and truth
becomes completely relative. The late Pope John Paul II was so alarmed at
this trend that he tackled it head on. In his 1993 Encyclical Veritatis
Splendor he reacted strongly against this exaggerated exaltation of
personal freedom and its offshoot, ‘a claim to moral autonomy which would
actually amount to an absolute sovereignty’ and make conscience a law unto
itself (n. 35:3). On this basis the document criticised unidentified
theologians, who, it claims, have distorted the true understanding of
conscience ‘in relation to freedom and God’s law’ (nn.
55:1-56:2).
Strongly upholding the principle of freedom: as much
freedom as possible; as little restraint as necessary, the Declaration on
Religious Freedom is at pains to spell it out in some detail. ‘It is in
accordance with their dignity as persons that all should be at once
impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth’
(n. 2:3). Our exercise of freedom must be responsible, not driven by
coercion but motivated by a sense of duty. This means that in facing
difficult decisions we are called upon to reflect deeply on what we
propose and do our best to arrive at the right answer, taking into account
all relevant aspects of the situation. Since our actions can often have an
impact on others, we must always be careful that we do not encroach upon
their human rights. As Catholics we should listen attentively to what the
Church has to say about the issue – if it has spoken on it. And sometimes
we may need to consult others wiser than ourselves for guidance. All this
is implied in the Council’s explanation of the principle of freedom of
conscience.
Clearly, then, there has been a development in our
understanding of what it means to live as a human person in community, and
so in our perception of the notion of freedom of conscience, understood in
its full theological meaning and afforded its proper role in authentically
Christian living. This theme of freedom of conscience is of great
relevance to any dialogue between Church and the world, because it lies at
the heart of numerous actual problems both within the Church, for example,
the relationship between the teaching authority of the Church and its
exercise and the freedom of believers (keeping in mind that there is an
order or a hierarchy of truths taught and that all are not on the same
level), and in society at large, for example, in regard to society’s
treatment of its gay and lesbian members, its attitude to asylum seekers,
racial intolerance and sectarianism, or by contrast its indifference or
neglect in the area of social justice. However, the progress made in the
teachings of Vatican II regarding the primacy of conscience and its
legitimate freedom must not be seen as merely an attempt on the part of
the Church to catch up with contemporary secular thinking; it is
imperative to understand this progress in continuity with biblical
revelation and our basic theological tradition.
Brian Lewis graduated from the Alphonsian Academy of
Moral Theology and the University of St Thomas in Rome. He has written
much on moral issues, and is now in
retirement.
REFERENCES Vatican Council
II: --------(1965), The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the
Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), n.16. --------(1965), The Declaration
on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae). Both in Walter M. Abbott
(ed) (1966), The Documents of Vatican II. (Chapman: London), with the
introduction Religious Freedom and the footnotes by John Courtney Murray
SJ. D’Arcy, Eric (1961), Conscience and its Right to Freedom (Sheed
and Ward: London). Duncan, Bruce CSsR, ‘The Significance of the Pope’s
Proposed Apologies for Errors By the Church’, Australasian Catholic
Record, October 1999, 462-479. Kelly, Kevin T. (1992), New Directions
in Moral Theology. (Chapman: London), 76-85.
Further reading on
Conscience: Compass vol. 37,
2003, no. 4
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