guilt.”
Why Are Consciences Different?
So the presence of conscience is a powerful argument for the existence of God.
But wait a minute! you might be thinking: If all consciences have the same origin, why do not all consciences agree on everything? Even given free will, in which man can choose to violate his conscience, how can one conscience differ from another?
To begin to answer this question, it is helpful to recognize that some men do not always follow their conscience. People are not automatons, after all; they might be guided by conscience but they are not, in the final analysis, ruled by it, especially if they do not want to be ruled by it.
Conscience may be a “law of the mind,” but people can break the law. Confession lines in Catholic Churches consist of people who are cognizant of the fact that they turned against their consciences.
They knew that they shouldn’t have indulged in a third ice-cream sundae, or gossiped, or had impure thoughts. But to their credit, these penitents admit that they violated their conscience. They recognize that their conscience put up a “stop sign,” and they drove right through it anyway.
Sadly, from Auschwitz to Zagreb, history abounds with those who claimed they never saw the stop sign. But did they really not see it? And it is in the answer to that question where things can get a bit scary.
Some decades ago, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, sought to address these difficult questions of conscience. He writes, “It is never wrong to follow the convictions one has arrived at—in fact, one must do so.” Cardinal Ratzinger is simply expressing the consistent teaching that is reflected down through the ages and is currently in the Catechism: man must follow his conscience.
Man must follow his conscience. End of sentence. End of paragraph. Right?
Not exactly. That’s not the end of the story—or perhaps a better way to phrase it would be, that’s not the beginning of the story, nor is it the whole story.
Cardinal Ratzinger explains that, while men have a duty to follow their conscience, they have a prior duty to form their conscience well. He writes:
“But it can very well be wrong to have come to such askew convictions in the first place, by having stifled the protest of the anamnesis of being. The guilt lies then in a different place, much deeper—not in the present act, not in the present judgment of conscience, but in the neglect of my being that made me deaf to the internal promptings of truth.”
The man with a poorly-formed conscience must follow his convictions, but his convictions may well be based on something erroneous. This leaves the man with the erroneous conscience in a difficult place, as Cardinal Ratzinger explains:
“Certainly, one must follow an erroneous conscience. But the departure from truth that took place beforehand and now takes its revenge is the actual guilt, which first lulls man into false security and then abandons him in the trackless waste…”
“In truth it is his fault that his conscience is so broken that he no longer sees what he as a man should see.”
A conscience can be broken; indeed, even many Christian consciences are broken. But it is also important to recognize that not all consciences are broken; in fact, some are beautifully intact, possessing a wonderful integrity.
How do we know the difference between the two? As Saint Thomas explains to us, truth is that which is accord with reality. Conscience functions the same way. As Cardinal Ratzinger writes:
“Conscience is seen to be valid precisely because it incorporates the inner truth of things in accord with reality, which is after all the voice of the Creator.”(57) If one’s semblance of conscience leads him to believe that there is nothing wrong with such things as conducting extramarital affairs, performing abortions, blasphemy, lying, cheating, and stealing, his conscience is clearly damaged, illustrated in the fact that it does not conform to divine law.
His conscience is in need of healing.
Cardinal Ratzinger writes that conscience is a blessing, not a curse. And like many blessin