{"id":54821,"date":"2014-09-11T11:14:57","date_gmt":"2014-09-11T18:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=54821"},"modified":"2014-12-28T21:06:42","modified_gmt":"2014-12-29T04:06:42","slug":"on-the-amazing-malleability-of-private-judgment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2014\/09\/on-the-amazing-malleability-of-private-judgment.html","title":{"rendered":"On the Amazing Malleability of “Private Judgment”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

My reader Zippy Catholic used to note that when Progressives want to blow off Church teaching they appeal to \u201cprimacy of conscience\u201d as the All-Excusing Catchphrase. Don\u2019t like the Church\u2019s teaching on the Pelvic Issues? Voila! Primacy of Conscience excuses you from obeying or even listening to what the Church says.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, he noted, conservative dissenters perform the same feat by invoking the magical incantation \u201cPrudential judgment\u201d. Does the Church bug you with its teaching on war, torture, capital punishment, your sacred wallet, the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable who happen to have been born in the wrong country? No problem! Just say the magic words \u201cprudential judgment\u201d and you can ignore the Church completely. <\/p>\n

Both camps make use of Court Prophets to lend themselves an illusion of weightiness for refusing docility to the Magisterium\u2019s teaching. Need an excuse for ignoring Humanae Vitae<\/em> or Evangelium Vitae<\/em>? Hey! Just quote Charles Curran or Dick McBrien or Hans Kung. Beside HV defined no *dogmas* so it\u2019s optional.<\/p>\n

Likewise, if you are a conservative dissenter who wants to torture somebody, just go get a screen grab of Fr. Brian Harrison\u2019s tendentious (and long repudiated by the author<\/a>) defense of torture in interrogation<\/a>. Or if you want to launch an unjust war, just ignore two popes and all the bishops of the world and go read Michael Novak explaining why \u201cprudential judgement\u201d means you can go ahead and do it anyway. And if there\u2019s something about the Church\u2019s social doctrine that inconveniences you, just have George Weigel highlight it in red and gold <\/a>so you can take the stuff you like and blow off the bits you don\u2019t. Or, better still, you can simply hire a court prophet to declare to you that Catholic Social teaching is a complete myth<\/a> *and* declare that anybody who says otherwise is an \u201cidolator\u201d for that extra-special below-the-belt sense of \u201c\u2018Shut up!\u2019 he explained\u201d demagoguery that crushes conversation and scotches troubling intellectual inquiry<\/a> in the egg.<\/p>\n

The key to all this sort of thinking is to avoid docility <\/a>to the Church\u2019s teaching at all costs (the notion that you should listen to and obey the Church, even on on non-dogmatic issues unless you can show a *damn* good reason why not) and instead insist that as long as a single voice can be found somewhere in the Church advocating whatever you want to do or ignore then, as this guy says \u201cthe jury is still out\u201d and you can go ahead and bullheadedly ignore the Church, even when it is quite luminously clear and unambiguous:<\/p>\n