Our Consciences help us to make decisions between right and wrong, but if they are not formed by the truth; by the natural and divine law, by the magisterium of the Church, and above all by genuine love "not just words or mere talk, but something real and active" then we can easily be led astray.
When my grandfather died two years ago, my mum and her sister put together a board with pictures from his life, to put up at the wake. Alongside the pictures were some of his favourite sayings; a picture of him side-car racing making some kind of dangerous turn, along with his most quoted piece of driving advice: “the undertaker gets the over-taker.” My own favourite saying of his was on the board as well: if he thought you were mad or just a bit eccentric, he’d call you a ‘Harpic’ – clean around the bend!
One of the beauties of the English language is that it’s full of these little idioms, where you say one thing and mean another, and everyone else knows what you’re talking about – everyone knows exactly what you mean when you say there’s more than one way to skin a cat, or when you say you’ve got egg on your face, or tell someone to chance their arm. That said, no English idiom will ever beat one I learned in Bavaria, where they say Jetzt geht’s um die wurst – now it’s about the sausage – when something is very serious indeed – their equivalent of “it’s crunch time!”
But, there are some sayings in the English language that have lost their original meaning and have now come to mean something quite different. How many retailers operate under the mantra, the customer is always right? It might surprise you to learn that this phrase as we know it is missing it’s ending. We have left out the second half of the saying, in matters of taste. It isn’t in fact telling retail employees or service workers not to disagree with customers or to do whatever is asked, or to put up with bad behaviour, but that if the customer wants to buy a jumper or a piece of furniture in a hideous shade of mustard yellow, or to paint their walls blood red, it’s their taste that counts, not yours, and to sell it to them anyway.
We often lift quotations out of context and out of their original meaning and make them mean something else entirely. This is especially true in the realm of moral theology, and especially true when moral theologians talk about the conscience and the role of the conscience in deciding between right and wrong and in questions of guilt. Two saintly theologians, in particular, are quoted out of context.
St John Henry Newman, in his letter to the Duke of Norfolk, is quoted as saying that conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ. St Thomas Aquinas, is very often quoted as saying that the faulty conscience binds. These out of context quotations are often placed alongside this line from today’s second reading, from the mouth of St John: if we cannot be condemned by our own conscience, we need not be afraid in God’s presence.
When we make decisions between right and wrong, the Church says that our conscience is sovereign. That means we must always do what we believe to be the right thing to do. That’s what St John is saying in the first reading; do what you believe to be right, do what you believe to be good, and you need not be fearful in the presence of God. St John Henry Newman calls the conscience the Vicar of Christ because that little voice in our heads telling us the difference between right and wrong “is a messenger from [Christ], who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil.” (Lett. Duke of Norfolk, 5.246) The conscience is so important that we must never violate it, never doing something we believe to be wrong even if others try to tell is it isn’t. St Thomas Aquinas’ dictum the faulty conscience binds us, means it would be a sin to do something we believed was wrong even if it wasn’t actually wrong at all.
However, these lines by the Beloved Disciple, the Angelic Doctor and the great Cardinal Newman are so often taken out of context and taken to mean something very different than their author’s meant when writing them. They express a negative rule, that we should never do something we believe to be wrong, but are very often taken to give a positive permission: do whatever you like, so long as your conscience doesn’t tell you otherwise.
Writing in 1870, Cardinal Newman’s warning against this distorted understanding of conscience is prophetically true today also:
Conscience has rights because it has duties; but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations. It becomes a licence to take up any or no religion, to take up this or that and let it go again, to go to church… to boast of being above all religions and to be an impartial critic of each of them… in this century [conscience] has been superseded by a counterfeit… the right of self-will.
Conscience must be led by something outside of ourselves, it has to be shaped and formed by something more than our own desires: what I want is not always synonymous with what is right, and we so often muddle the two. How then do we form our consciences? How do we guarantee we are doing what is right?
Christ calls Himself the vine of which we are branches, we must remain in Him and remaining in Him means being pruned by the words He has spoken. It means letting the scriptures, and the sacred tradition, and the magisterium of the Church, and the natural law he imprinted on our hearts cut away what is wrong so that what is good, and true, and beautiful can bear fruit. Above all it means living in genuine love, which means the genuine desire that each and every person we meet should come (like us) to know God, to love God, to serve God, and through this, to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.
our love is not to be just words or mere talk, but something real and active; only by this can we be certain that we are children of the truth and be able to quieten our conscience in his presence.
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