Don't lose faith in dissent.

In J. D. Salinger's Novel Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield has just run away from boarding school and describes his feelings:

In the first place I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus ... but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the disciples, for instance ... They were all right after Jesus was dead but while He was alive ... all they did was keep letting Him down.

I used to get into quite a few arguments about it with this boy down the corridor, Arthur Childs ... Childs was a Quaker ... and he read the Bible all the time ... he kept telling me if I didn't like the disciples, then I didn't like Jesus ... he said that because Jesus picked the disciples, you were supposed to like them. I said I knew He picked them but He picked them at random. I said He didn't have time to go around analyzing everybody. I wasn't blaming Jesus.

In Holden Caulfield we find one expression of what goes by the name of crisis of faith. Crisis of faith tends to revolve not so much around the problem of God but more around the problem of human beings and not so much from the gospel but from the church that proclaims that gospel. In other words, for most people the problem isn't Jesus. The problem is the disciples - that is, the church.

In the words of present-day social commentator Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B., "I started out committed to the 'church' and found myself committed only to the Christ. Let those who think the two are the same beware. The problem is to determine where the two merge and where they do not. The 'safe' thing is to assume - as we've been taught - that there is no difference. The way of the Spirit is to struggle between the two."

The struggle can perhaps be best illumined with a story. This is a story of the disciples of Jesus, known as the American Catholic Church. The time in which this story takes place is the 1950s and '60s. The history of a particular period is sometimes learned by looking at the life of one person who embodied that period, such a person in the U.S. Catholic Church was a Jesuit priest by the name of Father John Courtney Murray.

Murray was a teacher and writer on the subject of the relationship of church and state. And part of his vocation was to make known to the worldwide Catholic Church the American experience of religious liberty. However, this was not to happen easily.

During most of his career, Murray found himself in conflict with authorities at the Vatican regarding his writings. In 1955 he was ordered by the Vatican to cease publishing on the church and state. He obeyed, and this ban lasted for four years. Ironically, during the time when his writings were censored within his own church, they were finding wide acceptance beyond the church. Murray's portrait graced the Dec. 12, 1960 cover of Time magazine - indicating the cover story of U.S. Catholics and the state.

The ban on Murray's writing ended with the election of a new pope - Angelo Roncalli, who took the name John XXIII. Pope John convened a council of Catholic bishops. He described the purpose of the council, later known as the Second Vatican Council, to be reform and renewal of the Catholic Church and to build bridges of understanding between the Catholic Church and other religious faith groups, as well as bridges to the entire world.

Murray was the primary author of a document on religious liberty. At issue was the Catholic Church's going on record in support of the primacy of the conscience of the individual person and freedom of expression for people of all religious persuasions.

The debate went on for three years. As American bishop after another spoke on behalf of the document, one bishop commented, "The words are the words of the U. S. bishops, but the thoughts are the thoughts of John Courtney Murray."

The final vote on the document came on Dec. 7, 1965 - 2,300 bishops voting for and 70 against. That same day, the document was promulgated by Pope Paul VI as official Catholic teaching.

Murray died in 1967. He received a privilege not given many prophets: vindicated in his own lifetime - silenced in the 1950s for his writings on religious liberty and received during his lifetime as the primary author of a document on religious liberty that would become official Catholic teaching in 1965.

The story of Murray illustrates that, at times, dissent is not only a right but also a duty. To the objection that dissent can be misused, the answer can be, "Of course, just as authority can be misused." Misuse does not do away with the legitimacy of either authority or dissent.

The legitimacy of faithful dissent is expressed in the words of the 1960 pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops, "Human Life in Our Day":

The expression of theological dissent from the magisterium is in order only if the reasons are serious and well-founded, if the manner of the dissent does not question or impugn the teaching authority of the church and is such as not to give scandal.

In Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (Doubleday, 1972), author Gary Wills cites an example offered by 19th-century cardinal and writer John Henry Newman of the church's hierarchy being, for the most part, in error: "During the Arian heresy, Newman argued, church authorities erred oftener than not papal authority as well as conciliar - and the greatest continuity of orthodox belief was maintained by the laity. Newman saw nothing unusual in this: he argued that the Spirit's promise was to the whole church." Dissent has a place of honor in the Catholic tradition.

In speaking of dissent, theologian Father Charles E. Curran makes a distinction between infallible and noninfallible church teaching. He describes the distinction as the difference between core, central, and essential beliefs on the one hand, and those that are more remote and removed from faith on the other.

A similar distinction can be made regarding moral teaching. Take the example of three Commandments expressed in the Ten Commandments, "You shall not kill ... You shall not steal ... You shall not covet your neighbor's house" (Exod. 20:13, 15, 17). Some Commandments are more serious than others. To steal is a more serious matter than to covet; to kill is a more serious matter than to steal.

Take the most serious of those Commandments, "You shall not kill." Part of the Catholic Church's traditional moral teaching states that not all killing is murder - as evidenced by the church's support of the just-war theory. In effect, this is saying that there is room for legitimate dissent in connection with the Commandment "You Shall not kill" in the sense that killing is not necessarily morally wrong in every case.

But this is not to say that the Commandment "You shall not kill" no longer obliges. It obliges but not in the sense that it always provides each person with his or her conscientious answer. Rather, it provides each with a basis for arriving at a conscientious answer. This includes the acceptance of the fact that two conscientious people may confront the same moral principle, "You shall not kill," and come to different conclusions.

For centuries the Catholic Church has respected different kinds of decisions of conscience flowing from the moral principle "You shall not kill." The church has respected the decisions of those who serve in the military of their countries and the decisions of those who refuse to do so on conscientious grounds. The church also respects a middle position of those who refuse to participate in what they judge to be an unjust war while acknowledging that circumstances could arise where they would participate.

Often in the past we have tended not to use the language of conscience in describing such cases. We have tended to speak instead of "following a higher law" or "having conflict of duties" or "choosing the lesser of two evils." Yet, in fact, what else have we been talking about if not the conscience of the individual who must finally weigh over the conflicting demands and decide what's to be done?

Moral dilemmas arise in situations in which if we follow course of action A, we seem to violate one clear Commandment. And if we follow course of action B, we seem to violate another clear Commandment. Yet we still must act. We still must choose. Finally we weigh over the conflicting values and decide. At times, one's choice may be limited to choosing the lesser of two evils.

Today, one finds on the part of many a desire to return to some point in the past at which morality was a simple thing, a point at which, in moral terms, black was black and white was white and right was right and wrong was wrong. However, the moral principles regarding killing indicate that back in the days when "things were clear-cut and black-and-white in moral terms," things really were not as clear-cut or as black-and-white as they may now appear.

This is not to say that we take less seriously or minimize the moral problems we face today. However, it is to say that we do well to remember that the so-called gray areas in morality did not begin yesterday or ten years ago. They have been with us for a long time.

The present emphasis on the conscience of the individual does not mean avoiding the fact that conscience itself is subject to distortion and forms of corruption. We recall that well-known line by Thomas Carlyle in writing about the French revolution, "O Liberty, what things are done in thy name!" In a similar way we can say, "O Conscience, what things are done in your name!" We do well not to underestimate the human capacity for self-deception and evil.

To affirm the primacy of conscience does not end the subject but only begins it. Some related questions are, How do we know if we are following a well-formed conscience or simply following the voice of our own selfishness? How do we know if we are following a sensitive conscience or simply rationalizing our way to a course of action we've already decided upon?

These are not easy questions, but they are good questions. To ask such questions means to be aware that sin is a reality and that there are forms of corruption to which conscience is subject.

So we must recognize that in following our conscience we can deceive ourselves. We may fail ourselves and others. We may falter, and we may sin. However, when all of this is said and taken into account, it does not change the fact that conscience is what we "go with."

In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck has helped the slave Jim to escape. However, Huck has qualms of conscience about what he's doing. According to the accepted moral teaching of the day, Jim is the property of the slave owner. Huck feels his own "wickedness" because he was stealing an old woman's slave.

He thinks about "the Sunday school" where "they'd 'a' learnt you there that people that acts as I'd been acting ... goes to everlasting fire."

For a moment Huck thinks that maybe he'll feel better if he writes a letter to the slave owner, letting it be known where Jim now is. He writes the letter and debates with himself whether to send it.

"I took it up and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath and then says to myself: 'All right, then, I'll go to hell' and tore it up."

The reader of Huck Finn's story knows Huck didn't go to hell. The reader knows that Huck's conscientious decision - a personal decision of dissent from an accepted moral teaching of church and state - was heroic and trailblazing, trailblazing in the sense that Huck's decision and the decision of others like him would one day lead to a change and development in the teaching and practice of both church and state, a change which would declare that the institution of slavery is an outrage.

The Catholic tradition is at its best when it makes room for responsible dissent. It is at its best when it acknowledges that there's something to be learned from the Huck Finns and John Courtney Murrays of this world.

In his "Letter to the Duke of Norfolk," Newman's final words are: "If I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts ... I shall drink - to the pope, if you please - still, to conscience first, and to the pope afterward."

Father Edward J. O'Heron, Catholic chaplain at the State University of New York College at Cortland and author of Your Life Story: Self-discovery and Beyond (St. Anthony Press, 1993).