Conscience: a reason to dissent?

In the spring of 1997, the Globe and Mail published an article by Cardinal Emmett Carter entitled "Why the Catholic church maintains a male priesthood" (April 7). It was a response to Joanna Manning's column of January 28, "How the Vatican contorts itself in banning women as priests." The Cardinal's contribution led to a dozen letters to the editor printed through the remainder of April, one in support of him, one questioning, ten hostile. The dominant note of these last letters was sarcasm, with several Catholics (some lapsed) denying that the Cardinal had any right to speak in their name.

One writer said, for example, that the decision not to ordain women "reflected the current inability of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to divest itself of its misogynist past." Other marvellous examples of twisted logic were forthcoming in these letters; some of them brought in Galileo and segregation in the United States, as if such tangential issues as these had any bearing on the Catholic understanding of the ministerial priesthood. The impression one received was of a reasonable man being attacked by a group of intellectual midgets.

When Catholics attack a bishop who is teaching in harmony with the Holy Father, as Cardinal Carter did, they are putting themselves in a perilous situation. They are acting in deliberate defiance of what the Second Vatican Council taught, especially in its dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. The third chapter, "The Church is Hierarchical," calls attention to the duty imposed on Catholics to follow their shepherds: "The sacred synod consequently teaches that the bishops have by divine institution taken the place of the apostles as pastors of the Church, in such wise that whoever listens to them is listening to Christ and whoever despises them despises Christ and him who sent Christ." A little farther on, the text adds,

"Bishops who teach in communion with the Roman Pontiff are to be revered by all as witnesses of divine and Catholic truth; the faithful, for their part, are obliged to submit to their bishops' decision, made in the name of Christ, in matters of faith and morals, and to adhere to it with a ready and respectful allegiance of mind."

Newman

In his Letter to Norfolk (1874), Fr. John Henry Newman provided a famous defence not just of the right but of the obligation of Catholics to follow their conscience; but he also pointed out that the dictate of conscience, "in order to prevail against the voice of the Pope, must follow upon serious thought, prayer, and all available means of arriving at a right judgment on the matter in question."

In fact, "Unless a man is able to say to himself, as in the Presence of God, that he must not, and dare not, act upon the Papal injunction, he is bound to obey it, and would commit a great sin in disobeying."

There is no such thing as a right of Catholics to dissent from the authentic teaching of the Magisterium. As Newman makes clear, and as the Second Vatican Council solemnly affirms, the person who ridicules the teaching of the Holy Father, and the teaching of the bishop who echoes the papal instruction, may be guilty of a serious sin.

Does conscience override binding teaching?

A related but different question is this: does a well-formed conscience override a binding teaching or does the teaching take precedence? In 1994 three German bishops claimed that the problem is "to rightly determine the relationship of generally valid norms to the personal decision of conscience." They were in favour of admitting to the sacraments people in invalid second marriages. Previously, the three bishops had asked priests to accept the decision of such Catholics to receive Communion if in good conscience they thought their first union was invalid.

In mid-October of that year, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith affirmed the teaching that Communion is prohibited to Catholics in such marriages. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded by saying that it was a mistaken conviction to believe that personal conscience is able by itself to come to a decision about the existence or non-existence of a previous marriage. Church courts must decide whether there is objectively such a nullity of marriage, because there are canonical laws binding in conscience.

Subjectivism 

A different aspect again is the modern idea that conscience decides what is right or wrong. In The Splendour of Truth (1993) Pope John Paul wrote that "a radically subjectivist concept of moral judgment has found its way into some theology; it would grant the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly." This results in an "individualistic ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others." Rather than conscience deciding what is truth, conscience, says the Catechism, "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 . . ." (CCC, #1776)