SDG here with some thoughts on conscience and authority sparked by the combox from my last post.
Every man is bound absolutely to follow his own conscience. Hopefully, if and when a man finds that his judgments of conscience are contradicted by competent authority, he will take that fact into account in informing and revising his judgments of conscience.
But this doesn’t mean blindly following competent authority. Sometimes, competent authority is wrong, and good men can honestly conclude that competent authority is wrong — sometimes when it is, sometimes when it isn’t.
So there is still the possibility of contradiction. What happens then is … tricky.
If a man’s conscience tells him that something is morally licit, and competent authority tells him otherwise, he will often be well advised to refrain from the activity in question in deference to competent authority.
If, on the other hand, a man’s conscience tells him that something is morally obligatory — or morally illicit — and competent authority tells him the opposite, he must not act against his conscience in deference to authority.
If he is in sufficient doubt as to the rightness of his own judgment, and is swayed by the weight of authority, then he may arrive at a new judgment of conscience, putting his faith in authority to guide him. Assuming he is honest in this process, the responsibility for his actions now lies to a significant degree with that authority. If authority has led him astray, there are millstones for such things. If it has led him aright, there are rewards.
Conversely, if he remains confident enough of his own judgments as to reject the guidance of authority, then he himself incurs a new burden of responsibility for his actions. In that case, he had better hope and pray that he is right. Just as following authority can mitigate one’s responsibility, flouting authority can aggravate it. That doesn’t mean you can never, or should never, do it. It does mean you take your head in your hands.
If one is instructed by one’s bishop not to present oneself for communion, there is an obligation to honor that instruction, even if one is privately convinced that the bishop’s instruction is unjustified. If the bishop is right, he has saved a sheep from (hopefully unwitting) sacrilege. If he’s wrong, a soul has suffered unecessarily, but with merit before God for sumbitting humbly to authority and meekly accepting unjust punishment.
However, even in such a case I don’t think the obligation is necessarily absolute. Take the case of a couple — a pair of converts, let’s say — whose marriage is not recognized by the Church because of a previous union for which the tribunal could not find evidence of nullity. And let’s say the couple has appealed to Rome, attempted every recourse, all to no avail.
And now let’s say that the couple knows, with great moral certitude, that even though they weren’t able to prove it to the tribunal, the previous marriage was not valid, and so their current marriage is valid. In such a case, it seems to me, they are not morally obliged either to refrain from conjugal union or to refrain from receiving communion.
If they can do so without scandal — if, say, they attend a parish where the circumstances of their marriage are not known and no one has reason to suspect that their marriage isn’t recognized by the Church — then I think it is possible for them to continue to live together as man and wife and to receive communion with a clear conscience.
Now, if the tribunal was right and the couple are wrong, their moral culpability is all the greater. When you rely on the internal forum, you accept a greater weight of judgment, just as you do when you presume to instruct or lead another.
Conversely, if a tribunal judges wrongly, and gives a couple a clean bill of marital health when in fact there is no marriage because of an existing impediment, if the couple acts in good faith in following the tribunal, the moral responsibility is the tribunal’s, not the couple’s. (It’s also worth noting that there is an obligation to try to work things out through the external forum, not just settle for the internal forum from the get-go. One might possibly choose, with fear and trembling, to disregard the wrongful verdict of a marriage tribunal, but this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to bother petitioning for a decree of nullity in the first place.)
Unfortunately SDG wrote a lot of words without understanding the human condition. I think Jeremiah understood it best:
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?
Our hearts and consciences are so depraved that we are incapable of finding truth or acceptance in God’s Kingdom unless we are born again.
For example my conscience and most other Evangelicals believe that Catholics must be evangelized and brought to the truth. If we do not evangelize them, their blood will be on our hands( see Ezekiel 33:1-17)
Ezekiel 33:11 Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?’
If they can do so without scandal — if, say, they attend a parish where the circumstances of their marriage are not known and no one has reason to suspect that their marriage isn’t recognized by the Church — then I think it is possible for them to continue to live together as man and wife and to receive communion with a clear conscience.
This is a load of crap.
Rule 1, BillyHW.
“If a man’s conscience tells him that something is morally licit, and competent authority tells him otherwise, he will often be well advised to refrain from the activity in question in deference to competent authority.
If, on the other hand, a man’s conscience tells him that something is morally obligatory — or morally illicit — and competent authority tells him the opposite, he must not act against his conscience in deference to authority. ”
Exactly. Well stated.
I also find this true; that when your conscience tells you it’s just fine to do something you really want to do anyway, you should immediately suspect that your conscience may be unreliable on that point. If, on the other hand, you are convicted in your conscience that you *should* do something that you really don’t want to do, you should strongly suspect that your conscience is reliable in that case.
“Unfortunately SDG wrote a lot of words without understanding the human condition.”
He doesn’t demonstrate how this is so, but expects us all to accept the assertion anyway.
“Our hearts and consciences are so depraved that we are incapable of finding truth or acceptance in God’s Kingdom unless we are born again.”
This is the Calvinist doctrine of “total depravity”, which is self refuting. If we are totally depraved and incapable of finding the Truth until we are Born Again, then how do we find and recognize the truth of the Gospel to begin with?
“For example my conscience and most other Evangelicals believe that Catholics must be evangelized and brought to the truth. If we do not evangelize them, their blood will be on our hands( see Ezekiel 33:1-17)”
Silly rabbit, Catholics *are* born again. If you insist, though, on the Sinners Prayer, then I’d like to see your biblical evidence for that. Incidentally, I ask Jesus into my heart every day.
SDG,
I appreciate your post and your clear-thinking. I am however wondering about the specific hypothetical situation that you brought up regarding someone having “moral certitude” that their current marriage is valid, though the tribunal, etc, could find no evidence of such.
What does Ed Peters say about that? Do they have to defer to authority anyway? (power to bind and loose and all that…) I thought they would.
I know it’s just an example, though. I don’t mean to detract from your main point.
Tim J.,
Funny you should mention The Sinner’s Prayer. Only recently (during Lenten Parish Mission), my pastor provided a wonderful insight about this very topic: Catholics pray “The Sinner’s Prayer” every Sunday.
Let me see if I can explain it as well as he did. According to him (Fr. Mario Romero), the Sinner’s Prayer consists of:
1. acknowledging before God and man that we are sinners
2. asking for forgiveness
3. acknowledging that Jesus Christ died for our sins
4. and that Christ is our Lord and Savior
(or something like that; you can check out a version of it at sinner-prayer.com).
So, Fr. Romero said – That’s exactly what Catholics do! Every Sunday!! 🙂
1. from the Penitential Rite: “I confess to Almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault…”
2. immediately following, from the Kyrie: “Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy.”
3 and 4. from the Gloria: “Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world; have mercy on us.”
I could continue with the rest of the prayers of the Mass, but you get the idea.
(By the way, I’ll put in a plug for Fr. Romero’s GREAT book Unabridged Christianity, the first book that really helped explain the faith to me. It’s published by Queenship Publishing Company – http://www.queenship.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=5651)
Dear SDG,
You have touched agonizingly close to why I defected from the faith, yet why I cannot keep from her doorstep.
The Church needs to insert itself much more deeply into marriage situations but I do not have the answers and cannot get into this one without losing objectivity. Too much hurt.
With respect to scandal, the real scandal of this has deeply influenced most of our children very, very negatively and has always been a scandal to me, as it has lead to my defecting from the faith.
Nice post, but too theoretical. These issues are at the heart of many alienations from the Church.
Every man is bound absolutely to follow his own conscience… If one is instructed by one’s bishop not to present oneself for communion, there is an obligation to honor that instruction, even if one is privately convinced that the bishop’s instruction is unjustified. If the bishop is right, he has saved a sheep from (hopefully unwitting) sacrilege.
In CCC#1790, the Church teaches, “A human being must ALWAYS obey the CERTAIN judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he WOULD condemn himself.” Thus, if the certain judgment of a man’s conscience were that the bishop is wrong, and he followed the bishop anyway rather than obey the certain judgment of his own conscience, CCC#1790 doesn’t say the man is saved if the bishop is right but that “he would condemn himself.”
Jeffrey & BillyHW:
Both of you can do better than that.
Jeffrey:
I absolutely agree that the fallen human heart is 100 percent incapable of the slightest attainment of spiritual truth without grace, and cannot achieve acceptance in the kingdom without regeneration.
Looks to me like we more or less agree on the human condition.* You wanna rethink, or reformulate, your argument?
Do you really mean to say that you and “most other Evangelicals” believe that Catholics must reject Catholicism in order to be saved? I don’t think that most Evangelicals believe that. Of course, you get to define “Evangelical” to mean whatever you want, so why not just say “all Evangelicals” believe it?
BillyHW:
I agree that a lot of crap is promoted in the name of the internal forum, but the concept itself isn’t a load of crap. More later.
Louise:
Dr. Peters touches on the subject in this book review, where he writes in part that “…the ‘internal forum’ solution is only to be considered after one has truly exhausted the Church’s extensive ‘external forum’ apparatus.”
Which doesn’t make it true, of course, but I think is a notable indication that it isn’t a load of crap.
The caveat w/r/t “binding and loosing” in this connection, it seems to me, is that if a marriage is valid, God has joined the couple together, and it is before God that each owes the other the debt of marriage.
———————-
*”More or less,” notwithstanding Tim J’s observation that “This is the Calvinist doctrine of ‘total depravity.'” I agree that it sounds like behind Jeffrey’s words is the falsely exaggerated notion of “total depravity.” Nevertheless, the words Jeffrey used could almost have been written by an orthodox Catholic, with only very slight adjustments, as indicated by my suggested paraphrase above. (While we can’t arrive at spiritual truth without grace, but it is not true that we can’t arrive at spiritual truth without regeneration. God’s grace leads us to spiritual truth, and thence to the further grace of regeneration.)
I know. This issue touches close to home for me (not my home, but close to home). Glad you found the post at least somewhat worthwhile.
The only “certain judgment of conscience” that one can “obey” is a judgment about what one ought to do. A judgment about the rightness or wrongness of what a bishop says is not a judgment about what one ought to do, and so is not a judgment that can be “obeyed” or disobeyed.
One can be certain of the wrongness of a bishop’s decision, and still arrive at a certain judgment of conscience, which must be obeyed, that the bishop’s mistaken decision must still be obeyed, isofar as it does not compel one to go against other certain judgments of conscience.
Thus, e.g., if my bishop commanded me to stop receiving communion for reasons I was certain were wrong even though he believed them right, I would be certain his order was unjustified, but I would also be bound in conscience to obey him. But if he commanded me to profane the sacrament, I would be bound in conscience to defy him. My conscience would allow and require me to obey an unjustified command, but would forbid me to obey an immoral one.
The only “certain judgment of conscience” that one can “obey” is a judgment about what one ought to do. A judgment about the rightness or wrongness of what a bishop says is not a judgment about what one ought to do.
I would expect that’s implied by the context of judgments of conscience. Does your conscience give you certain judgments on anything other than what you ought to do / have done? For example, does your conscience give you a certain judgment on whether “Pamela” is a good baby name for your neighbor?
if my bishop commanded me to stop receiving communion for reasons I was certain were wrong even though he believed them right, I would be certain his order was unjustified, but I would also be bound in conscience to obey him.
Implicit in your example must be some other unexpressed judgments of conscience which would bind you to obey him. For example, an insane man also believes he’s right. Would you be bound in conscience to obey a man you reasonably believed to be maniacally insane and he commanded you to not eat or drink for the next month? Perhaps you might try it out for a couple of days hoping that he would come to his senses while you maintain some preliminary compliance in case there was more to the story than you understood.
SDG
You da man. Very nice post. A New York Diocese for 20 years has been raking privilege of the faith couples over the coals and telling them that have to get an annullment instead of a Pauline or Petrine Privilege through Rome. I know a victim and then we found the stats in a recent book: for 20 years (and probably right now) that large diocese has virtually no privilege of the faith cases when compared to 4 other leading cities with half its population. By tricking the couples into the annullment venue (which they did to my victim friend), all fees go to the Diocese and no fee goes to Rome. In the Pauline or Petrine venue, the fee is much smaller and it all must go to Rome and the Diocese gets nothing. Stalwart Catholics on the net who deride you on such things have never met the face of clericalism at its worst and intimately. But sooner or later they will.
Now theologically what is awful about this scam aside from the money issue is that the annullment process has a different reason than privilege cases: an annullment says a real marriage never took place/ the privilege process says that a real natural contract took place but is superceded by a sacrament with the permission of the first spouse. The privilege case also is not invasive of one’s private life; the annullment process necessarily is because it is trying to show that at least one person was not qualified to vow anything back in the day. The privilege process does not have to deal with that. For about 7 years Rome had brand new doubts about the privilege process but then the new canons resolved that but NY kept up the “annullments only” for years afterward…and it looks like money. The other cities show geometrically more cases since they went back to the old system which included the privilege venue. I wonder actually how many conversions this scaming may have prevented when victims asked around a little.
When you think about it, it’s the same clericalism that saw parents as having no right to know that a sex abuser was being introduced into the parish and near their children. Same opacity…different venue.
PS My point in line with your example is that some of these couples discovering the ruse, may conscientiously arrive at a private vow as was typical in the early Middle Ages in the Catholic Church since the couple are the real ministers of the vow.
Glad we seem to agree. It looked like by saying “if the certain judgment of a man’s conscience were that the bishop is wrong” you might be conflating always obeying certain judgments of conscience with other possible judgments.
Well, to begin with, not eating of drinking for a month, or even for several days, would go against my conscience with respect to the fifth commandment. Secondly, if I reasonably believed someone was insane, that might possibly go to the question of whether the criterion of “competent authority” was met in the first place. But I would want more imput there from the moral theologians and canon lawyers.
SDG –
Your remarks regarding Jeffrey’s comment on total depravity are well taken. Had I had a little more time I might have fleshed out my comment a bit, as it was a little simplistic.
Your parenthetical statement at the end;
“While we can’t arrive at spiritual truth without grace… it is not true that we can’t arrive at spiritual truth without regeneration. God’s grace leads us to spiritual truth, and thence to the further grace of regeneration.”
…explains my objection to Jeffrey’s statement very well. Non-Christian people experience God’s grace (speaking through their conscience) all the time. If all people were totally depraved, we could not recognize the prompting of the Holy Spirit and respond to it at all, so the prompting of the Holy Spirit (and the capacity to rightly respond) must precede regeneration.
It is true that we can’t see the truth without grace… we could do nothing at all without grace… but it just makes no sense to say we can’t recognize the truth before we act on it.
The proper formation of one’s conscience is at the heart of all the hypotheticals. Personally, I don’t know if I could count on my own conscience without lining it up with the Church’s teachings. When I converted in 2004, I found the CCC very helpful in helping me sort out right vs wrong in various areas of life. I would very seriously think through a decision to disobey a directive from one’s Bishop. There is a hierarchy of authority in the Church for a reason. Notwithstanding the fact that there are Church leaders who cause scandal, our Lord left us a blueprint for following the instructions of His leaders. Our Bishops are the pastors of our souls and must one day give an account of what they did in that office. We need to love our Bishops, respect their office, and pray for the Holy Spirit to always guide them into truth. As to the marriage issues in the Church, these are difficult and painful. The Church received Her instructions on marriage from our Lord. Complexities do not change what He said.
Sheila
On marriage, Christ said nothing about annulments and privilege of the faith cases…the latter comes in the epistle and annulments simply are the logic of decision making: was this adult pyschologically capable of a vow at the time of marriage…if not…God never accepted the vow even if the eyes of the Church did at that time since there was something the Church could not have seen.
On obedience to all clerical decisions, if life one day leads you into the complex vis a vis the clergy, you actually will have an obligation not only to hear Christ say “the scribes and the pharisees have sat on the chair of Moses, all that they command you observe and do”..you will also have an obligation to hear both He and Peter warn authorities not to lord it over jurisdictional inferiors (Luke 22:25-26 and I Peter 5:3). And you will have to watch as Christ and his men did not observe and do all that the pharisees wanted as to the Sabbath even though Christ seems to have said to obey whatever they say. So maybe “all that they command you observe and do” is not absolute but conditional on their commanding the rational…giving them some leaway for what is rational. But if you give them too much leeway, that led to laity in Portugal obeying Pope Nicholas V in his permission to them to “perpetually enslave” any non Christians natives that resisted the gospel (see Romanus Pontifex mid 4th paragraph). The result was that Portugal had a written Papal excuse to be one of the worst during the slave trade and the last European country out of the slave trade…because the bull had voided any future contraditions of its permissions which Paul III later attempted but did not back up with interdict….let alone contradicting himself 11 years later on the topic of slavery as documented by Noonan recently. But if they..the clergy… are abusing you in your context and you ignore watching Christ and his men not obey the pharisees in all things on the Sabbath, then you will be truncating the whole message of Christ..in favor of a paradigm of life being simple forever which is an intoxicating paradigm.
In the Portuguese case, we needed Catholics to disobey and they did no such thing in general though the anti slavery voices began but had an immense problem in that the major theologians aside from the anti slavery bulls held in every century for exceptions as to usually four just titles for slavery and that bogged down things immensely. But dissent was needed then and happened but not as a rule.
What is never quoted and yet is only in the Catholic canon of Scripture is Sirach 37:14 NAB version: ” A man’s conscience can tell him his situation better than seven watchmen in a lofty tower.” If you know your Augustine, you know that 7 means “complete” in such passages. There can come a time in life when no one but you will have the answer because only you intimately know all the circumstances.
I had 16 years of Catholic school…8 with Dominicans and 8 with Jesuits…not one person or class ever cited Sirach 37:14….and the section in the catechism on conscience is not complete but is circular… always leading back to asking the Church whereas Catholic official Theology in seminaries… is wider than that in even the most conservative author Germain Grisez who on page 854 of his volume one of “Way of the Lord Jesus” grudgingly allows for non assent when the infallible is not at stake.
Right, Tim J. I agree with your critique of Jeff’s view of depravity, I just wanted to agree as much as possible at the same time. 🙂
As you note, this is where Reformation soteriology is a little wobbly: They propose that God starts the salvation process by just up and regenerating man out of the blue, whereupon man then begins to have faith, etc.
By contrast, Catholic soteriology, though very close to Calvinist soteriology in many ways, affirms something like what the Arminians call “prevenient grace,” i.e., grace that is prior to regeneration, that inspires man’s first impulse toward God, the beginning of faith in God and hatred of and sorrow for sin, and the desire for regeneration. Then, having been prepared by prevenient grace, man is disposed to receive the grace of regeneration.
(I mean, in the case of an adult convert, of course. Those of us baptized as infants did receive the grace of regeneration out of the blue.)
Lucid explanation SDG – thanks.
Perhaps a misunderstanding the origin and role of conscience has led to abuse of the internal forum by some Catholics and its rejection by some Protestants.
Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk
Gaudium et Spes as quoted in Catechism of the Catholic Church 1776 et seq This short passage from the Catechism is worth reading.
This is an interesting post and one which I have had to grapple with in the past. Both my wife and I had our marriage convalidated in the Church in the fall of 2008. I am Roman Catholic, she is Lutheran, and we were married in her church in 2005 with no dispensation from the bishop. Obviously, I was not a practicing Catholic at that time.
After returning to the Church at the beginning of 2008, however, I became aware that my marriage was not valid in the eyes of the Church and must refrain from Holy Communion until the marriage is properly convalidated. This required some soul searching and also necessitated that I keep my pride in check.
Although the Church very reasonably holds that baptized members must marry before a priest or deacon, I knew two things:
1. Both my wife and I were free to marry — there were no impediments, neither was previously married, and neither were coerced in any way.
2. Both my wife and I were validly baptized — me in the RC Church and her in her Lutheran church (I saw her baptismal records).
I, of course, was following through to validate the marriage in the Church, but my question was: Should I refrain from Holy Communion until the convalidation is completed? The pastor who was doing our convalidation gave me permission to receive. The law says otherwise to protect others from violating moral law in order to expedite a marriage when there are impediments; however, there were no impediments in my case. He told me I could receive unless there would be public scandal (i.e. I tell everyone in the parish or if fellow parishoners are aware of the situation and would be offended).
Therefore, I continued to receive Communion until my marriage was convalidated. The interesting thing is, right at the end a day or two before the convalidation, I felt guilty for going against Canon Law and divulged this in confession. However, it goes back to the point in the post that as long as I was correct in my conscience, I was free to receive Holy Communion. However, if I was wrong and there were impediments to marriage, I would have been all the more culpable.
Greg
St. Thomas wrote about epikeia which is the virtue of knowing when to act outside of positive law (man written or Church written..ie the canons)(not natural law..not God’s law..to which epikeia does not apply). You use epikeia whenever you decide just how sick you are on Sunday and whether the degree of that sickness excuses from Mass. You do not call your bishop on the phone; you make the call as does every Catholic make that call in respect to that particular example of epikeia.
That virtue of epikeia is what your pastor was using when he said you could receive despite the canon which he knew but he also knew his parish and your details…here is Aquinas on what he was doing as to epikeia:
” It would be passing judgment on a law to say that it was not well made; but to say that the letter of the law is not to be observed in some particular case is passing judgment not on the law, but on some particular contingency.”
This is from his piece on epikeia which can be found here:
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3120.htm
It is very relevant as to what Christ and the disciples were doing at times vis a vis the exact rules of the pharisees as to the Sabbath which they did not observe. You’ll notice that Aquinas considers it a sin when you do not know when to use epikeia: “To follow the letter of the law when it ought not to be followed is sinful.” You won’t find that one being taught in too many Catholic venues.
But it follows from Aquinas’ concept that sin is the lack of the due act….and if epikeia is the due act, then to not know the moment of epikeia and when it is due… is to sin. Aquinas was immmensely more adult than we modern Catholics in this area.