Supremacy of Conscience, But Only If Formed By the Church

According to Donum Veritatis (which I also write about here, here, and here), conscience gives us no rationale to dissent from the Church. Conscience is “supreme,” but that does not mean it is subjective; nor is it is above the Church. “Argumentation appealing to the obligation to follow one’s own conscience,” the CDF says, “cannot legitimate dissent.” Although it is true that everyone must heed his own conscience,

he is also obliged to form it. Conscience is not an independent and infallible faculty. It is an act of moral judgement regarding a responsible choice. [This means that conscience is about doing what is right, not what one wills. What is right we learn from the teaching Church.] A right conscience is one duly illumined by faith and by the objective moral law and it presupposes, as well, the uprightness of the will in the pursuit of the true good. …

Setting up a supreme magisterium of conscience in opposition to the magisterium of the Church means adopting a principle of free examination incompatible with the economy of Revelation and its transmission in the Church.

The Holy Spirit guides the Church into all truth so that believers may form their consciences rightly.

With the aid of Newman, Cardinal Ratzinger develops this thought at length in “Conscience and Truth.”

According to Nemwan, the papacy is not separate from the primacy of conscience. Rather, it guarantees it. Ratzinger comments:

Modern man has difficulty understanding this. For him, conscience stands on the side of subjectivity and is the expression of the freedom of the subject. Authority, on the other hand, appears to him as the constraint on, threat to and even the negation of, freedom.

But modern man, of course, has it wrong. Authority (and the pope is the highest authority in the Church) is not the “negation of freedom.” Indeed, the Church alone guarantees conscience rightly formed. For conscience is “the demanding presence of the voice of truth.” All of us are obligated to do good and avoid evil, and good and evil are objective. They are not the property of the subjective self. There is no “my good” or “your good.” There is only the good.

Newman, as Ratzinger points out, converted to Catholicism because he “was much more taken by the necessity to obey recognized truth than his own preferences.” In other words, he had a conscience. His conscience led him to put truth above preference.

Nor can one appeal to “freedom” in order to justify preference over truth. True freedom is freedom, not so much of conscience, but the freedom to follow conscience.

The Church teaches that we have an obligation to form our conscience. The Catechism says:

Conscience must be informed and moral judgment enlightened. A well-formed conscience is upright and truthful. It formulates its judgments according to reason, in conformity with the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator. The education of conscience is indispensable for human beings who are subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer their own judgment and to reject authoritative teachings. (1783)

A properly formed conscience, in other words, is a corrective to the “reject[ion of] authoritative teachings.” It is not an excuse for it. Nor does conscience mean making one’s own judgments.

The formation of conscience must be “guided by the authoritative teaching of the Church” (1785). When one rejects the Church’s authority, he may make an “erroneous judgment” (1790, 1792).

All of this is to say that conscience, in its right meaning, will prompt a person to obey the teaching of the Church. Only then can it be said to have “supremacy.”

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