The Authority of Conscience

Recently, Australian Bishop Anthony Fisher spoke at a Vatican conference on "Conscience and Authority.

Conscience:

"Late scholastic voluntarism and post-scholastic legalism took moral theology down just such a blind alley. Magisterium became the satellite navigator and the role of conscience was to hear, interpret and obey. Many contemporary theologians and pastors are heirs to this. For some the solution to the crisis of moral authority is to keep calling for submission to the navigator."

"... By the 1960s it meant something like strong feeling, intuition or sincere opinion. To appeal to conscience was to foreclose all further discussion and to claim immunity to reasoned argument or the moral law. 'Follow your conscience' came to be code for pursuing personal preferences over and against Church teaching, especially in sexuality, bioethics, remarriage and communion. Conscience was now the highest court of appeal: it had 'primacy' or infallibility... Conscience became, as the then-Cardinal Ratzinger put it, 'a cloak thrown over human subjectivity, allowing man to … hide from reality.'"

The Magisterium:

"The teaching authority of the Church, restating or unfolding the implications of Christ's teaching is called "magisterium." ... Interestingly Jesus' departing promise to be with his Church to the end of time was attached to a charge not to teach the nations Christology or Soteriology or even Fundamental Moral Theology, but to teach them his commandments! By the time of Vatican II the Church could assert that Christ's faithful ought to give the unconditional obedience of faith (obsequium fidei) to all that it proposes as certainly true and could express several ways in which this magisterium is operationalized infallibly."

I hope the CINO politicans in our country will take this talk to heart. I direct this to those who time and time again tell us "I am personally opposed to abortion, but I can’t inflict my beliefs on others" and then expect us to vote them into office! Worse, they say they are following their conscience!

ARTICLE