Category Archives: Conscience

Out of Voting Options?

October 23, 2024Abortion, American Founding, Catholic Social Teaching, Church and State, Conscience, Contraception, Culture of LifeCommon Good, Election, IVFtwowingstogod@gmail.com

With the usual turmoil that comes with a Presidential election it is easy to miss an overall cultural movement that has occurred: it has become increasingly harder for Christians to participate in the political process without compromising their principles. It seems that during this Presidential election cycle we are out of options. The candidate on the Left is radically pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ “rights”, and has been part of an administration that has repeatedly used lawfare, especially against Catholics. The candidate on the Right during his last administration did much to help the pro-life cause, favors the rule of law, and, as his record shows, favors peace both home and abroad. The choice seems rather easy, except the latter also has recently Donned himself “the Father of IVF” and promises, through his party’s platform, “to promote policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).” Can a Catholic, in good conscience, still vote for the Republican candidate?

Voting and the Common Good

As with any moral examination, it is important to begin by looking at the act in question and to frame it in its context. Since voting is a social action, its moral evaluation must always be in relation to the common good. Admittedly in our atomistic, “are you better off than four years ago?” culture this is a very un-American way of looking at it. Still, voting is a duty because we each have a duty to contribute to the common good. Voting is the means by which the individual chooses a representative whom he thinks will best protect and promote the common good (which is the overarching purpose of the State).

In an ideal world (and assuming our two-party system), any harm done to the common good by a chosen representative would be merely accidental in the sense that the implementation of a policy failed or had unintended consequences. In other words, the ends would be good even if the means were not; a failure in political prudence. Put another way, neither candidate would support what is intrinsically evil and any evil that does arise would be accidental. In that setting, an honest, non-partisan evaluation can occur in which the voter essentially comes up with a pros and cons list for each candidate.

This is why the Church has often spoken as if support for an intrinsic evil is an automatic disqualification. To that end the CDF, under the guidance of Cardinal Ratzinger in 2002, said:

A well-formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals… When political activity comes up against moral principles that do not admit of exception, compromise or derogation, the Catholic commitment becomes more evident and laden with responsibility… This is the case with laws concerning abortion and euthanasia… Such laws must defend the basic right to life from conception to natural death. In the same way, it is necessary to recall the duty to respect and protect the rights of the human embryo. Analogously, the family needs to be safeguarded and promoted, based on monogamous marriage between a man and a woman.

Because the candidate is openly advocating for a policy that can never be ordered towards advancing the common good, he or she is eliminated as an option. As an important aside, it is necessary to note that there is a distinction between toleration and active promotion. Sometimes the common good dictates that some evils be tolerated because of the moral condition of the polity. You cannot make laws that will eradicate every evil and sometimes the best you can do is contain it or limit it (e.g. John Paul II’s “Art of the Possible” in Evangelium Vitae) .

But what can we do when both candidates are advocating for policies that promote intrinsic evils? “Birth control” and IVF may be of a different moral quality than abortion, nevertheless they cannot be ordered to the common good. The Republican has moved from merely tolerating these things to actively promoting them. It could certainly be argued that because of the sheer number of children killed by both IVF and the Pill (because of its abortifacient properties) that it represents a greater threat to justice in our society than abortion. While it is impossible to quantify the effects, the movement in this direction is certainly a betrayal of those social conservatives who rightly place a premium on the foundations of society in life and the family. It is noteworthy that, in an attempt to avoid being outdone in evil, the Democratic candidate also promises unfettered access to both birth control and IVF as detailed in her party’s platform.

Voting and the Catch-22

There seems to be then a moral justification for not voting for either candidate or, at least, writing in some other worthy candidate. This would be in hopes of sending a message to President Trump that he has lost pro-lifers and he will reverse course. Edward Feser, among others has made a compelling case for that here. The problem with that approach is that, while it may be a political solution, it does not fulfill one’s duty to the common good which is relative to the here and now. The potential harm to the common good should Vice-President Harris win far outweighs the harm President Trump will do to it (this is a point Feser concedes). You must vote to limit the evil as it presents itself here and now; “Sufficient for a day is its own evil” (Mt 6:34). Cardinal Burke made a similar point when he was Archbishop of St. Louis in 2004:

A Catholic may vote for a candidate who, while he supports an evil action, also supports the limitation of the evil involved, if there is no better candidate. For example, a candidate may support procured abortion in a limited number of cases but be opposed to it otherwise. In such a case, the Catholic who recognizes the immorality of all procured abortions may rightly vote for this candidate over another, more unsuitable candidate in an effort to limit the circumstances in which procured abortions would be considered legal. Here the intention of the Catholic voter, unable to find a viable candidate who would stop the evil of procured abortion by making it illegal, is to reduce the number of abortions by limiting the circumstances in which it is legal. This is not a question of choosing the lesser evil, but of limiting all the evil one is able to limit at the time.

Despite the seemingly desperate situation, the only way forward morally is to vote for former President Trump. His policies in many ways advance the common good and he seems protective of the Church. He also seems committed to limiting abortion, although not as strongly as he once was. His pro-IVF and pro-contraception stance is unacceptable, but may actually be limited relative to the Democratic position. Because you cannot remain neutral with respect to your obligation towards the common good, it would be wrong to not cast a vote or to write-in another candidate even if it sends an important political message. That political message needs to be sent more directly and more vociferously by directly and clearly stating our objections to his stances on IVF and contraception.

Avoiding Therapeutic Tyranny

August 7, 2021Bioethics, ConscienceCoronavirus, Covid19, Dignity of the Human Person, Vaccinestwowingstogod@gmail.com

Because of the atrocities that were carried out under the Third Reich, there was a global awareness of the dignity of the human person especially when it comes to performing medical experiments. Experimentation today is mostly benign because of the fact that the war crime tribunal of Nuremberg articulated 10 standards by which researchers must conform when performing medical experiments on human subjects. These standards have now been adopted throughout the world and form the basis of our clinical trials system. The first of these standards was that “[T]he voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.” The Principle of Free and Informed Consent as it has come to be known has been included in nearly every code of medical ethics throughout the world. It is meant to protect human beings from a medical totalitarianism by which people are treated as guinea pigs. Tyrants always try to control the population and, thanks to medical technology, the temptation to chemically control them is greater than it was even 75 years ago.

The Principle of Free and Informed Consent

Although this principle has been articulated in secular code only recently, the Magisterium of the Church has taught this principle throughout the history of the Church. Her teaching has been summarized succinctly in the Charter for Health Care Workers that was promulgated in 1994 by the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers

“To intervene medically, the health care worker should have the express or tacit consent of the patient. In fact, he ‘does not have a separate and independent right in relation to the patient. In general, he can act only if the patient explicitly or implicitly authorizes him.’…Besides the medical relationship there is a human one: dialogic, non-objective. The patient …‘should be called upon to share in the improvement of his health and in becoming cured. He should be given the opportunity of personally choosing, and not be made to submit to the decisions and choices of others.’ So that the choice may be made with full awareness and freedom, the patient should be given a precise idea of his illness and the therapeutic possibilities, with the risks, the problems and the consequences that they entail. This means that the patient should be asked for an informed consent.”
Charter for Health Care Workers, 72

While the principle of free and informed consent is fairly straightforward, in practice it can be difficult to secure fully informed consent. The response to a given medical treatment varies greatly from individual to individual. This means that it is often impossible to explain to someone all of the possible complications involved in a given treatment modality. Some complications may be extremely remote and a listing of all possible complications may only serve to frighten them away from participation. At other times, not all of the related hazards are known.

Free consent is somewhat easier to achieve in practice because it is essentially consists in a negative. Any sort of coercion ought to be completely rejected. Because the goal of the research study is therapeutic in nature, this therapeutic benefit should be sufficient “payment” for their participation. They must remain free to determine whether the personal benefits outweigh the burdens. Likewise, there must be no “outside” coercion from either public or private institutions that threaten the person in some way.

For this reason, the principle of free and informed consent should really be interpreted as requiring “reasonably” free and “adequately” informed consent as governed by the a “Medical Golden Rule.” The US Bishops in their Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services stated the principle in this way: “Free and informed consent requires that the person or the person’s surrogate receive all reasonable information about the essential nature of the proposed treatment and its benefits; its risks, side-effects, consequences and cost; and any reasonable and morally legitimate alternatives, including no treatment at all” (27).

Why the Principle Matters Today

What makes this principle particularly important is that we are in the midst of the largest medical experiment in human history. No matter where you stand on the Covid vaccine—its safety or its effectiveness—you should be appalled at the gross violation of this principle.

First of all, the vaccines are advertised as “safe and effective”. They may yet prove to be so, but at this point to make such a claim is really unsubstantiated. Before such a claim can be made, there must be thorough risk-benefit analysis done. Other than the J&J vaccine, this has not occurred. They also have not been forthcoming with the data. Why, for example, when we are concerned about getting people vaccinated, would the CDC not report hospitalization and death data comparing the vaccinated and unvaccinated? It gives the appearance of hiding something. In fact, even if they aren’t hiding anything, it does gives credence to those who are concerned about a conspiracy.

What about the rates of adverse events? To say they are rare lacks a precision that they can readily quantify. This is vitally important when different subpopulations have greatly different risks from Covid. When, for example a 20-year-old already has a rare chance of suffering death or long term effects from the virus itself, why should they take a vaccine that also has rare side effects? How can someone compare them without anything more than the vague designation of rare? To appeal to public health is a two-edged sword as there is also a drain on public health should the person suffer one of said rare side effects. Public health is far more than just the elimination of communicable diseases and people are far more than incubators.

The point is that all of this and more makes it practically impossible to give informed consent. But more disconcerting is the growing attacks on free consent. The amount of coercion has reached a fever pitch. Federal agencies, universities both private and public and private companies have all instituted mandatory vaccination. Public officials have offered to pay people to be vaccinated and even have offered a lottery system that rewards one lucky winner a million dollars. All of these forms are coercion are morally reprehensible and should be of grave concern to us all. Mandatory vaccines today, mandatory sterilizations for the “public good” tomorrow. Once the principle of free and informed consent is no longer recognized, there is nothing to keep it from becoming a therapeutic tyranny.

The Covid vaccine might prove to be a good thing (that is why we are performing an experiment), but public health is not an element of the common good. It is essentially a private good because not everyone shares in it equally. Elements of the common good, as the name suggests, are shared equally among all the members of society. Freedom of conscience (properly understood). on the other hand, is part of the common good. To coerce vaccination, whether it is “safe and effective” or not is ultimately harmful to the common good and therefore must be opposed by even those who are personally in favor of vaccination.

Masking and the New Religion

December 9, 2020Apologetics, Church and State, Church Authority, Conscience, Culture, Human Dignity, Magisterium, Marxism, Moralilty, Natural Law, New Age, Paganism, Politics, Sacramentals, Sacraments, VirtueCoronavirus, Covid19, Mask Mandate, Religion of Humanity, Virtue Signalingtwowingstogod@gmail.com

We have been hearing for decades that we are living in a post-Christian society. This has mostly been a way to describe the fact that Christian values have been in decline. But Christianity has still been the dominant religion; dominant, that is, until the Covid-19 crisis hit. The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in our society marked the official changing of the guard. While we have been hearing about the emergence of a post-Christian society for decades, Christianity was still the dominant religion. No longer is this true, however. Christianity has been toppled and replaced by a new Gnosticism that we call Science.

To be clear, the issue is not against science per se, but what is more accurately described as religion masquerading as science. After all, as Aquinas says “He who neglects the experimental order in natural science falls into error” in all aspects of knowledge. To solve the Covid-19 crisis, natural science plays a necessary, although not sufficient, role. The peddlers of the new religion, would have us believe that it is sufficient because all we need to do is “trust the science.” We are saved by faith, not in Christ, but in Science.

The New Priesthood

Nor should we be quick to dismiss expert opinion. But expert opinion is not fact, it still must be based on solid reasoning. The problem is that expert opinion is often treated like dogmatic truth because the Scientific Elite are the new priests. Based on their secret knowledge that only “experts” such as themselves can understand, they dictate religious dogma. Spoken word becomes fact. Thus says the Scientist—“Masks don’t work” and it is so. Thus says the Scientist two months later—“Masks do work” and it is so. The Shepherds have spoken and the Sheeple must follow suit. Laws are made to punish heretics who dare to question the spoken word.

This, by the way, is why masks have elicited such a strong response. The High Priest initially said that they don’t work. Then he spoke again saying they did and that the Priests lied because they were worried about a shortage. But if a person unapologetically lies once, how do you know they are telling the truth now? Actually, a leading Priest at Johns Hopkins says, it wasn’t lying but that “[A]t first, researchers and scientists did not know how necessary mask wearing would be among the general public. Now we are aware that wearing masks is an effective way to help prevent spread of this coronavirus” (Emphasis added). Given the timeframe and the rather dramatic shift from no-mask to mask, where did this awareness come from? Changing your mind is fine. But changing your mind without a change in the data is based not on science, but fiat. If you search prior to the dogmatic declaration, scientific opinion for the most part deemed them ineffective. The fact is that the Priests exercised their hidden knowledge (because there was no new data) and declared them so. I would probably be clothed in a scarlet mask for this statement alone, but let me go a little further as a statistician and speak about what a reasonable approach to this question would look like.

The Statistician Speaks

First, proving a negative is extremely difficult. To conclusively say “masks don’t work” is a practical impossibility. Having said that, there is little data to suggest that they do work (a complete summary that is thoroughly documented can be found here). There have been studies in the last few months that have suggested they might, but these are inconclusive at best. They are all very poorly done because they are being done in the midst of the crisis. To study the problem properly you need to set up what would be something akin to a clinical trial in which you had a placebo group to compare it to. But you also have the problem that mask usage is almost certainly confounded with social distancing. Is social distancing the thing that helps, or is it masks, or is it both? You’d have to set up a study to separate them. Secondly, not all masks are created the same or are equally effective.

Carnegie Mellon tracks (among many other things) mask compliance here. Notice that many places are in the high 80ish% for compliance and yet “cases” continue to increase in all of those areas. If any intervention works, then you should expect the slope of the line of increase to decrease (“flatten the curve”). But the data suggests that the lines are actually steeper. For example, see the plot below of my home state of North Carolina which instituted a Mask Mandate on June 26^th and has had above an 85% mask compliance rate (currently 91%). North Carolina is far from unique in this regard and you can find similar data for all your favorite states.

If we were true to “Science” we would look at this medical intervention and determine that it does not work. A drug company running a clinical trial (where they are using their own money) would stop the trial and might even decide that the intervention is actually making it worse.

This might mean that…wait for it…masks are making it worse. You would again need to study this, but it is a reasonable supposition given the data. It also makes sense in that it could easily be creating a false sense of security or become a petri dish of germs just waiting to be deposited on someone else or an aritficial barrier suppresses the body’s natural barrier of the immune system. To be sure though, if we were testing a drug and the data looked like this, we would stop giving it to people.

This tangent was necessary because it speaks to the reasonableness of mask mandates. Law, according to St. Thomas, is “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community and is promulgated.” Any law that does not fulfill those four requirements—reasonable, aimed at the common good, proper authority, and made known—is not, properly speaking, a law. Therefore, because they are not reasonable (or at least can not be proven to be at this point reasonable) we have no obligation to obey them. As true Shepherds of the Flock, Bishops and Priests need to stop being so deferential to mask mandates precisely for this reason.

The New Sacrament

The revolt against masks then is really a revulsion to what they symbolize. They have been made into sacraments through the words of the New Priests. They are said to protect and so therefore they do. Those who do not want to subscribe to this religion therefore will not want to wear them. It seems like a small thing to do, but it plays a key role in the overall narrative that Science can save us. As a sacrament it symbolizes the fact that the Coronavirus is a serious threat to our overall well-being. If you are tempted to think “well 99.99% of people that get this will survive”, then you only have to look around at everyone wearing a mask to tell you that you should be scared anyway. The smiling face of your neighbor, which would normally comfort you, is now hidden from your sight. The masks will permanently disfigure us because when the next virus comes along, and it will, they will tell us “this is more serious than the Coronavirus (which it likely will be) you must put the mask back on.”

By blessing the mask, the Priest also makes it into a Secular Scapular. Through the words of Mary to St. Simon Stock, we know that the Brown Scapular helps to save you eternally. Through the words of the Scientist, the mask saves us from Covidoom. The Brown Scapular is an aid to our growth in virtue, the Covid Scapular signals that we have virtue.

One of the things that the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th Century was their exaltation of Science as the new religion. Lenin, Stalin, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Hitler all committed their atrocities using “Science” as their justification. Had someone stood up to them early on, one has to wonder whether things would have been different.

Border Control and Moral Equivalency

October 21, 2020Abortion, Catholic Social Teaching, Church and State, Conscience, Natural Law, PoliticsConsequentialism, Immigration, Pro-Choice, pro-life, Prudence, Votingtwowingstogod@gmail.com

In a previous post, the effects of Consequentialism on our moral thinking was examined. One of the effects that was briefly mentioned pertains to how consequentialism clouds are political thinking making it difficult to decipher between intrinsically evil actions and those which are not. The example that was put forward was the widespread habit of equating abortion with immigration policies because, well, in both cases, “people die.” In this essay I would like to show why this type of thinking is wrong.

First of all, if we accept the consequentialist mindset, then more immigrants die via abortion in the United States than via even the most draconian immigration policy. Nearly a million people, immigrants included, were killed by abortionists last year. The number of immigrants who died in US custody pales in comparison. Even if we limit the numbers to immigrants alone and conceding that those numbers are difficult to pinpoint, there is no comparison. Planned Parenthood claims that at least 450 minors sought to obtain abortions while in US custody at the border and were able to after a judge blocked the current administration from saving those lives in 2017. Either way, there is no comparison.

Conceding to the consequentialist viewpoint is helpful because it acts as a filter for those who attempt to use immigration as an excuse for abortion on demand. There can be no doubt that if the goal is really to save lives at the border then you would seek to eliminate abortion first. But the person who remains unconvinced really has no interest in saving lives at the border but instead seeks to create a smokescreen in which they support abortion. Apparently temporarily separating children from parents is far worse than permanently separating them. Arguing with someone who is disingenuous is fruitless, especially when they simply are looking to rationalize what they find politically expedient. This approach at least keeps us from wasting our time to be able to identify it and call it out.

Assuming the person is being genuine, then we can set out to show why something that is intrinsically evil must never be tolerated while bad policy might. Abortion and control of the borders can never be placed on the same moral plane. Governmental control of the borders is a positive and necessary component of the common good as relates to security. Abortion is always an evil because it is the direct and intentional taking of an innocent human life.

Policy and Political Prudence

There was a time when what was just said would require no further explanation, but in an age in which patriotism is dead and global nationhood is the (oxy)moronic goal, more explanation is necessary. Nations are necessary both by nature and divine decree (c.f. Deut 32:8). Governments exist for the sake of the common good, but the common good, or at least the means for achieving it, will always differ according to peoples, place, and culture. Nations and the borders that delineate them are the consequence of this natural truth. To secure the common good for the citizens of a country then, it is necessary to control those borders and who is allowed to enter. As Ronald Reagan once famously said, “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”

Governments therefore would be guilty of a grave evil if they simply allowed anyone to enter. The obligation to secure borders is absolute, but the means by which this can be carried out can be a matter of political prudence. Some policies will be objectively better than others, but there is no one best means that can be applied. How that is carried out will depend upon the current circumstances of the country in question. Do they have the additional resources necessary to allow the new citizens to flourish without, at the same time, harming those who are already citizens? If so, then what would be the best way to ensure that the new citizens will contribute to the common good? What policies would best prepare them for this? With each of these questions, there are obvious tradeoffs and people of good will may come to various conclusions as to the best policy. The point however is that there can be no debate that border security is necessary even if there is debate in how to justly set policy.

An Illuminating Example

Perhaps an example will help to bring all of this together. Suppose you had an immigration policy in which each person, upon approaching the border, was deemed wanted or unwanted by the country. Those who were wanted would be allowed to enter and those who were not were slaughtered. We would all have an obligation to oppose any politician who put this forth as his policy, regardless of where he stood on any other issue. We would in essence become single issue voters. This, unfortunately, is no mere hypothetical, but reflects what is currently happening. The border is the womb of a woman and the migrant is an innocent child trying to cross over the birth canal. We have an obligation to fight anyone who is in favor of such a policy and to vote against it. No matter how bad the immigration policy, there is no possible way these two things can be put on the same level.

Politcal Parties and Cooperation with Evil

September 12, 2020Abortion, Conscience, Culture, Culture of LifeCommon Good, Democratic Party, euthanasia, Excommunication, Hitler, Nazis, Political Parties, Principle of Cooperation, Republican Partytwowingstogod@gmail.com

At the beginning of 1931, the German Bishops collectively excommunicated members of the Nazi party and barred all Catholics in Germany from joining. The excommunication did not extend to those who voted for Nazis, but only those who joined the party. This ban was put in place even though not all the party platform was evil. In fact, there were certain policies that were in accord with the Common Good. Nevertheless, the party protected and promoted certain intrinsic evils that could never be overlooked and washed away in the political give and take that is inevitable in a party system. Although the ban was walked back slightly after the election of 1933, the German Bishops demonstrated a long-standing Catholic belief that political party affiliation can put one’s soul in jeopardy.

Party Affiliation and Formal Cooperation

Why this is the case can be seen once we examine the principle of formal cooperation. Recall that the principle of cooperation acknowledges that a number of people often participate in bringing about some evil action. Moral philosophy makes the distinction between formal and material cooperation. Formal cooperation means that a person aligns their will with the intention of the principal moral agent. Material cooperation means that a person offers some material support in the carrying out of an action, even if, they may not be willing participants in the evil itself.

The act of abortion offers an illustrative and relevant example. Suppose a woman is pondering an abortion so she seeks counsel with a friend. The friend says she should do it but says she cannot help her get one. The friend has formally cooperated in the abortion and thus bears the guilt of the act itself in uniting her will to the will of the woman. She did not, however, offer material support and thus her material cooperation is minimal if non-existent. When the woman gets to the abortion mill, she is greeted by the janitor outside who is emptying mop water. He hates abortion but only works here because he needs to feed his family and is unable to find another job currently. His cooperation too is material, he provides a clean environment for the abortion, but it is remote since it is not vital to the carrying out of the abortion (which is truer than most people would like to admit). Finally, she enters the abortion mill and is greeted by the nurse. The nurse too hates abortion (thus no formal cooperation) but her material cooperation is so proximate and vital to the act that she is guilty of cooperation with the evil of abortion.

In summary, because guilt lies in the will, a person is always guilty of sin when they formally cooperate with evil. A person who formally cooperates with a grave evil bears a proportionate level of guilt for that evil. They may or may not be guilty when they cooperate materially, depending on their role and their proximity to the act itself. Related to the topic at hand, a person who is Pro-Choice, even if they never directly assist or counsel a person to get an abortion, simply by making their position known, has formally cooperated with that evil and bear culpability.

The Democratic Party platform, in no uncertain terms, promotes and protects the evil of abortion: “Democrats…believe unequivocally…that every woman should be able to access…safe and legal abortion.” And because political party affiliation is a free association, any person who joins the party consents to all of the party’s platform. There is no “I am personally opposed, but …” type logic because of the principle of formal cooperation. A member of the Democratic Party is aligning their will with that of the other members of the Party. Why else would they join? If they did not believe in any of the tenets, they simply need not join. This was the logic of the German Bishops in 1931, a logic that can likewise be applied to members of the Democratic Party today.

An All-Important Distinction

Please note what has been said and what hasn’t. The contention is that because joining the Democratic Party constitutes formal cooperation, it is gravely sinful. This does not mean that voting for a Democrat is always and everywhere gravely sinful. To extend the arm of sin beyond formal cooperation is a bridge too far. This was the point that Cardinal Ratzinger made when in 2004 he said,

“A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.”

The key word related to material cooperation is proportionate. There must be not only a good reason to vote, but a proportionate reason. On this level this means that if Candidate A is in favor of one intrinsically evil action and Candidate B supports a different intrinsically evil action, then we might vote so as to limit the amount of overall evil present in society. For example, suppose Candidate A supported abortion but was against Euthanasia and Candidate B supported Euthanasia but was against abortion, you might vote for B because abortion constitutes a greater evil on society as a whole. The point is that you cannot simply perform moral calculus adding up the evil on each side, but instead the proportionately is related to the presence of intrinsically evil actions, or as the Church has put it, “non-negotiables”.

But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. In fact, it is really a natural outlook that would motivate a Catholic to vote for a Democrat. A supernatural outlook of the world would never allow us to vote for someone who we know to be in an objective state of grave sin. The reason for this is simple—a person in a state of mortal sin is the Devil’s pawn. Mortal sin places a person under his dominion and they are very likely to commit further evil. If Christ is not King of their heart, then most assuredly they will be working against making Him King of our Country. This principle really goes for any politician. If the person is known to be in a state of grave sin then you should never vote for them.

This sounds “judgmental” to modern ears, but it is simply a statement of fact. A person who directly wills that abortions be provided remains in a gravely sinful state until such time as they repent. Because the support of abortion was public, true repentance would have to be public, causing the person to separate themselves from the sinful Party. A person who remains in the Party has thus remained in their sinful state.

As the November election is fast approaching, we must as Catholics, come to understand that voting is not just a political action, but a moral one and thus we must shine the light of Catholic morality on our voting decisions.

On Snitching

June 27, 2020Conscience, Moralilty, SinCharity, Fraternal Correction, Gospel of Matthew, Snitchingtwowingstogod@gmail.com

What parent hasn’t told their child “don’t be a tattletale”? What child hasn’t gone to great lengths, including getting in trouble themselves, to avoid being a “snitch”? What adult has turned the other way to avoid becoming a narc or a whistleblower? Whether a child or an adult, a teen or a parent, it seems that we never quite know how to avoid pledging our allegiance to what might aptly be called the Canary Code of Honor. For Catholics, especially those committed to living a moral life, this represents a serious challenge that, unfortunately, we do not give enough thought to. How can we avoid being a “snitch” while still doing the right thing? Thankfully, St. Thomas Aquinas has already done much of the intellectual and moral legwork on this question and gives us a set of rules we can live by.

In one of his Quodlibetal questions, St. Thomas addresses the issue of correcting an erring brother. In his usual cogent manner, the Angelic Doctor takes two seemingly conflicting Scriptural commandments and helps to reconcile them. On the one hand, Our Lord says, “if thy brother shall offend against thee, go, and rebuke him between thee and him alone” (Mt 18:15). On the other hand, St. Paul tells Timothy that “them that sin reprove before all: that the rest also may have fear” (1 Tim 5:20). To reconcile them, St. Thomas begins by reminding us that the order of charity gives more weight to the common good than the good of individual reputation or conscience. Therefore, a public sin that is, one that is manifestly known and draws other people into it (through scandal and the like) takes a certain precedence over the private sin. In general then “if your brother sins against you”, that is, it is private (Mt 18:15) then it should be corrected privately. If it is public then you should rebuke publicly following 1Tim 5:20 “Rebuke the sinner before all.”

As a side note, someone might go to the individual in private to rebuke them for a public sin first. This is because it is always better for the person who committed the public sin to correct themselves in public rather than to be corrected. Nevertheless, if the person obstinately refuses to acknowledge their wrongdoing then it remains for another person to correct them.

When snitching pertains to a public sin, then it is manifestly appropriate that a man turn the offender over to some authority figure. In fact, St. Thomas says it is morally obligatory. But when it is a private sin then the snitching becomes problematic.

Snitches get…

Snitching is almost always done, not for the improvement of the offender, but in order to punish the person, get revenge upon them, belittle them or win the favor of someone in authority. When it is done for these reasons, St. Thomas says that snitching would constitute a grave sin. But he says it is also a grave sin not to follow Our Lord’s prescription for fraternal correction.

It is not that denunciation has no place within the realm of fraternal correction, but its place is not primary. It requires that there first be fraternal admonition. This admonition might come from another individual with whom the offender is more likely to receive the correction well. As St. Thomas says, “in all these cases charity should be preserved, and what seems best and most expedient should be done.” It is only when the person does not receive the correction, according to Our Lord, that denunciation to an authority figure may occur.

Forming the Potential Snitch

A young person’s abhorrence to snitching is well founded then, even if for the wrong reason. Understanding how fraternal correction works then is vitally important, especially because Aquinas thinks that a failure to properly observe the manner in which fraternal correction occurs is a grave sin. There is an art to fraternal correction and it is something that we rarely teach young people how to do. They think that the only choice is between minding their own business or becoming a snitch. Fraternal correction is an act of charity and thus it binds the corrector and the correctee more closely together.

Rather than correcting the potential corrector as a tattletale, it is a formative moment to teach them how to properly correct another person whenever they come to tell on one of their peers. In larger families and Catholic schools children often seek acceptance from the adults by snitching on their siblings and peers. It is then an obligation of parents and formators to teach the children how fraternal correction works. Any adults who encourage, or at least do not correct snitching without fraternal correction are likely to earn a giant millstone for themselves.

If we are to finally undo the Canary Code of Honor then we need to learn the art of fraternal correction.

On Contrition

June 17, 2020Church, Conscience, Divine Mercy, Mercy, Sacraments, SinConfession, Contritition, Eucharist, Forgiveness of Sins, Mary Magdalene, Our Lady of Sorrows, Reconciliation, Sorrow for Sintwowingstogod@gmail.com

If you are a “chalice is half-full” kind of person, you might be able to find a silver lining in the Sacramental suppression that the Church has to endure thanks to, what one Prelate has called, the “dictatorship of the sanitary”. With ready access to the Sacraments, there is always the danger of them becoming mere formalities. It is, after all, hard to do things well when we do them regularly. The optimist sees this as a way to overcome this temptation.

Regular Confession is a good example of this. There are many of us who go to Confession regularly, yet rarely see the kind of growth that we would expect from these regular encounters with Our Lord. When access becomes limited, we are forced to examine both our desire and our real motives. In the case of Confession that desire and motivation are one and the same thing—Contrition.

When the Confessionals were sealed, the faithful were instructed to make an act of perfect contrition and go to Confession when they could. Thanks to bad Sacramental Theology and poor catechesis over the past half century, hardly anyone knows what that means, let alone how to do it. That is why it behooves us to examine the topic of Contrition more closely in hopes that this great gift will grow in our hearts.

What is Contrition?

Contrition is the grief of soul brought about by the hatred of sins committed and marked by the resolution to avoid them in the future. This “grief” is primarily effective, that is, it is an act of the will to leave our sins behind and run into the embrace of the Father. It need not be affective to be true contrition, although often we will feel sorrow or even have tears. This internal grief may express itself in words through prayers like the Act of Contrition, but no mere lip service will do. Furthermore, true contrition is always a supernatural gift because it is based on a supernatural motive, namely a love of God. Because it is based on this motive, it must also be universal in that it covers not just a sin, but all our sins.

The supernatural motive of love of God occurs in degrees. We may love God for what He can give us or help us avoid. This mercenary love is still love, even if it is imperfect. Out of this love comes imperfect contrition or attrition. This is a sorrow for sin based on the loss of heaven or the fear of hell. What makes this imperfect is that it is still tinged with self-love. When our love is completely focused on God and we experience sorrow for our sin then it will always be based the fact that we have offended God, independent of any benefits He might bestow upon us. This is perfect contrition. Although we might not be aware of it, we make this distinction every time we pray the tradition Act of Contrition when we “detest our sins because of Your just punishments [attrition] but most of all because You are all Good and deserving of all my love [perfect contrition].”

We might be tempted to think that an act of Perfect Contrition is impossible. But God does not command the impossible. Instead He makes it possible through the gift of grace. Perfect contrition, while outside of our natural grasp, may be bestowed upon us if we ask. St. Charles Borromeo, no stranger to Sacramental crises brought on by pandemics, offered us what he called the “Three Visits” in order to prepare our souls for the gift of perfect contrition. The first two visits, one to Heaven and one to Hell, are meant to stir up imperfect contrition. We should meditate both on what we risk losing and what we are gaining so as to be sorry for our sins. The third visit is to the foot of the Cross to look upon the sufferings of Jesus all brought about by your sins. He says to stay there until you are sorry for the pain you have caused Our Lord. In so doing you have made an act of Perfect Contrition.

“Perfect” contrition then might be a somewhat of a misnomer in that it makes it seem like you have to love God perfectly, rather than loving the God Who is perfect. The Scholastics avoid the terms perfect and imperfect contrition and instead use contrition for the former and attrition for the latter. This distinction helps us to grasp that contrition may occur in degrees, degrees that are proportional to our charity. We need not be St. Mary Magdalene, whose sins were forgiven because “she loved much” and wiped Our Lord’s feet with her tears, but there can be no contrition without some degree of charity. We need not be anxious if we struggle to make such acts, but only ask God to bestow upon us that great gift.

Contrition and Confession

If an act of contrition then forgives sins, even mortal sins, then what is the connection with Confession? Contrition may have the same effect as Confession, but its effects are not independent of the Sacrament. Contrition may be sorrow expressed, but Confession is sorrow received. Even if we may an act of perfect contrition in response to mortal sin, we must still go to Confession before we can receive the Eucharist. Perfect contrition then is an extraordinary means of forgiveness provided that we avail ourselves of the ordinary means, Sacramental Confession.

The advice to “make an act of perfect contrition until you can get to Confession” that has been given during the pandemic is very dangerous without all of the proper qualifications. A person, no matter how hard they try, cannot make a perfect act of contrition without the necessary grace. To act as if God always grants it immediately when it is asked for is to be guilty of presumption. God may withhold such a gift for reasons only His loving Providence could explain. This is why Canon Law protects the Faithful from Prelates who would withhold the Sacrament. The Sacrament does not require that we have contrition; only attrition is needed to be valid. As Fr. Alfred Wilson reminds us in his classic book Pardon and Peace, when we go to Confession, Christ has already confessed those sins. He has sorrowed for them. Your task is to supplement His perfect confession and contrition the best you can.

This connection with Christ’s confession and sorrow brings us to the whole point of contrition. Perfect contrition comes from Christ Himself and thus is best understood as a participation in His sorrow. This understanding is important because it takes any of the focus off us and our faults. leaves us standing squarely on the solid ground of His Mercy. Genuine contrition is a habit then that grows out of this.

St. Therese on her death bed offers us the best example of this. The sisters had gathered around her and were singing her praises. She requested that they stop and instead to list her faults, not because she was worried about her humility, but because she wanted to have more reasons to praise God in His mercy. She was quite literally filled with Contrition because she loved God. Let us beg her intercession that during this time we might likewise receive and develop such a precious gift.

The Principle of Totality

July 20, 2019Abortion, Bioethics, Catholic Social Teaching, Conscience, Contraception, Culture of LifeAmputation, Organ Donation, Principle of Bodily Integritytwowingstogod@gmail.com

During the 1920s, the practice of compulsory sterilization in the United States became commonplace. The Supreme Court even went so far as declaring the constitutionality of the sterilization laws in the 1927 decision in the case of Buck v. Bell. In the majority brief written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Court argued in favor of this practice by saying that “(It) is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The Church for her part vehemently opposed the practice by appealing to the principle of totality. Because this principle is often cited in support of Catholic Moral teaching related to medical ethics it is instructive to examine it in some detail.

In its simplest form, the principle of totality holds that that under certain circumstances it is morally permissible to sacrifice the good of a part for the sake of the whole. However, this needs further qualification in order to see why something like the Eugenics program of the 1920s was morally wrong. Justice Holmes in his argument thought that for the sake of the whole of society, it would be better to sterilize some of the members.

Clearing Up Confusion

In a speech given to the “Leaders and Members of the Italian Association of Cornea Donors and Italian Association for the Blind,” Pope Pius XII hoped to clear up some of the confusion related to this principle. There were those who argued that the principle of totality justified the removal of vital organs from the dying in order to transplant them into the bodies of those who had a better chance of survival. While he lauds the intention to alleviate suffering he rejects this argument as erroneous by appealing to the “essential difference between a physical organism and a moral organism.” The organs of the body exist solely for the sake of the body while each human person does not exist for the sake of the whole of humanity. Instead each human person has intrinsic worth and thus cannot be coercively sacrificed for the sake of the whole (Pope Pius XII, “Speech to Leaders and Members of the Italian Association of Cornea Donors and Italian Association for the Blind”).

We see then just how important the distinction between a physical organism and a moral organism is in determining the application of this principle. A physical organism is one in which there is a unity on the level of essence. Thus, the relationship of part to whole exists if the part by its very nature has no finality outside the whole. A moral organism however is a group of individuals that are bound together in some unity of action. Each member of the group has a value that is intrinsically bound up with what (or more accurately who) they are rather than what they contribute to the community.

In this way then the Principle of Totality serves a limiting function on medical practice. For the sake of a physical whole, one may sacrifice a part of oneself assuming that the choice does not do harm to an authentic human good. However, if there is a moral unity then there is a limit on the activities of the individual at the service of the community.

It is also important to mention the fact that despite the fact that it applies to a physical organism, the principle is not merely physicalist in nature. It is meant to serve the integral good of the person by creating a harmonious relationship between the physical and spiritual elements. To emphasize this point some authors have referred to it as the principle of “Totality and Integrity.” Fr. Benedict Ashley, one such author, states the principle as follows: “Except to save life itself, the fundamental functional capacities which constitute the human person should not be destroyed, but preserved, developed, and used for the good of the whole person and of the community.”

An Example

If we examine one of the most common procedures that involve the principle of totality, organ donation and transplantation, we can further illuminate this principle and its use in medical ethics. In applying this principle, we are able to find justification for organ donation and transplantation. Provided that the functional integrity of the donor is maintained then living organ donation is morally justifiable. Ashley et al present four related principles that show how the principle of totality might be maintained. There should be a serious need faced by the patient, which can only be satisfied by organ donation. Although it might reduce “anatomical integrity” it should not diminish the “functional integrity” of the person. Thirdly the risk of donation should be viewed as “an act of charity proportionate to the good resulting for the recipient.” Finally there should be “free and informed consent” by the donor.

Many try to justify freely consented sterilization by appealing to the principle of totality. They argue that if a marriage is in general open to children then each act of sexual intercourse need not be. They argue that if the marriage would be harmed in some way by having children, the good of procreation may be sacrificed for the total good of the marriage itself.

The problem with this argument is that it violates the principle that one may never perform an intrinsically evil act (such as contraception) so that good may come about. However, there is a flaw in the logic as well. As was mentioned, the principle of totality actually applies to physical organisms (like organs) and not moral organisms (i.e. persons). The conjugal act has an intrinsic value in itself and it is not just as part of the whole that it gains its value (Pius XII, “Speech to the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the Italian Association of Urology”)..

The problem with appealing to the principle of totality in this manner is that it can lead to justifying nearly anything. For example, there is no reason why an act of infidelity, especially if it might “help” the marriage, would be wrong as long as the totality of the marriage is faithful.

In conclusion, the principle of totality is an important principle in medical ethics because it promotes authentic human good. This may require at times the sacrifice of a physical part for the integral good of the person, but it also serves to limit the activities that may be performed on a person.

On Prenatal Testing

July 6, 2019Autism, Bioethics, Conscience, Contraception, Family, MoraliltyAmniocentesis, Donum Vitae, Genetic Counseling, Genetics, Prenatal Testingtwowingstogod@gmail.com

Thanks to a noninvasive prenatal testing procedure called NIPD, a test which can predict Down Syndrome with 99% accuracy, the number of children born with Down Syndrome worldwide has greatly been reduced. This is not because they can repair the defective condition, but because it fashions the DNA into a bullseye, systematically marking them for death. Between 2/3 and 4/5 of children with Down Syndrome are aborted, reducing the overall rate by 30%. In other countries such as Denmark and Sweden nearly 100% of the children are aborted. This, of course, is an example in which pre-natal testing has been used under nefarious circumstances, but not all of them are bad. In fact, as more and more data pours in from the work on the Human Genome Project we should expect the ability to make more accurate pre-natal diagnoses on any number of conditions to increase. With knowledge always comes power, but this power can be seductive unless we are guided by solid moral principles.

What makes navigating the moral waters upon which pre-natal testing floats particularly perilous is the fact that most of the tests themselves do not carry any moral weight. There are some, like amniocentesis, which present significant dangers for both mother and child. These tests should be avoided unless there are serious medical reasons for doing so. But tests like NIPD and ultrasounds are practically harmless to both mother and child and become part and parcel of the standard of care. The moral issue comes in with the intention of the parents of the unborn child. In other words, what are they going to do with the information?

Why You Want to Know Matters

If they desire to know so that they can abort the child then it becomes morally problematic, even if they don’t actually follow through with it. Knowing that this might be a real temptation, then they shouldn’t have the test. On the flip side, a couple may want to perform the test so that they are better prepared medically and emotionally for parenting a child with serious medical needs then the test can be safely (morally speaking) performed. There continue to be many advances made to in utero diagnosis and surgical interventions that these tests can often be life-saving. Just this week the Cleveland Clinic announced that they had performed successful in utero surgery to repair Spina Bifida. This obviously was made possible through pre-natal testing.

Summarizing, The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (1994) presents these principles succinctly: “Prenatal diagnosis is permitted when the procedure does not threaten the life or physical integrity of the unborn child or the mother, and does not subject them to disproportionate risks; when the diagnosis can provide information to guide preventive care for the mother or pre- or postnatal care for the child; and when the parents, or at least the mother, give free and informed consent. Prenatal diagnosis is not permitted when undertaken with the intention of aborting an unborn child with a serious defect” (50).

With abortion off the table, what are the guidelines we can use if the unthinkable happens and a child is diagnosed with a medical problem. The Church speaks of avoiding “disproportionate risks”. This assumes a sort of calculus on the part of the parents by which they weigh the seriousness of the disease against the risk of surgery. This might include experimental procedures. Provided that there is an acceptable amount of risk involved and the surgery is done for therapeutic, rather than experimental reasons, then it would be morally permissible to do so. As the Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin, Donum Vitae, puts it, “[N]o objective, even though noble in itself, such as a foreseeable advantage to science, to other human beings or to society, can in any way justify experimentation on living human embryos or fetuses, whether viable or not, either inside or outside the mother’s womb” (DV I, 4).

Not only is abortion not an option, but also those procedures which are not inherently therapeutic. Procedures designed to influence the genetic inheritance of a child, which are not therapeutic, are morally wrong. “Certain attempts to influence chromosomic or genetic inheritance are not therapeutic but are aimed at producing human beings selected according to sex or other predetermined qualities. These manipulations are contrary to the personal dignity of the human being and his or her integrity and identity. Therefore in no way can they be justified on the grounds of possible beneficial consequences for future humanity. Every person must be respected for himself: in this consists the dignity and right of every human being from his or her beginning” (DV, I, 6).

Genetic Counseling

Genetic counseling before a couple actually conceives is growing in use and popularity. The man and the woman each submit to genetic screening that gives a genetic profile enabling them to predict how likely it is that they have a child with a serious genetic defect. Like the pre-natal testing discussed previously there is nothing inherently wrong with doing it. What matters is what you are going to do with the information that is gleaned from it. For example, suppose a couple finds one or both of them are carriers for some genetic condition such as cystic fibrosis or Tay Sachs, both of which pose serious risks to viability and lifespan of the child. They may come to learn that there is a 50% chance that their child develops the condition. Is this a good enough reason to forego having children and adopt instead?

This is one of those cases where the Church does not say one way or the other, although we can certainly apply Catholic principles to come up with a set of guidelines. First, we must never forget that the goal of parenting is to raise children for heaven. The most severely mentally handicapped child will only be so temporarily if they are baptized. I say this not to over-spiritualize the issue, but to put it in perspective. As a father of a special needs child this thought has brought me much comfort and has stifled my fears. Having a child with something wrong with them is among the worst things a parent can deal with, but it is not the worst. Having your child go to hell would be the worst. Knowing that you raised your child and got them to heaven means that you have done all God asked of you. “Well done my good and faithful servant.”

This may not be a reason then to avoid having any children, but it might be counted as a so-called “serious” reason to postpone, even indefinitely, having more children. If a couple has a child with many medical needs and knowing that they are at an increased likelihood to have another like them, they may legitimately decide to not have any more children, provided the means they use to avoid pregnancy are morally licit.

Abusing Wonder

June 29, 2019beauty, Conscience, Culture, Family, PoliticsAttack on the Family, Christian Morality, Drag Queens, Sexual Revolutiontwowingstogod@gmail.com

There is a national movement that is being played out in libraries, schools and bookstores in which drag queens read come and read to children. The Drag Queen Story Hour is touring the country and drawing publicity wherever they go. “Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is just what it sounds like—drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores” according to its website. Aimed at 4-7 year old children, these events are little more than child abuse however for reasons that ought to be readily apparent.

There probably has been “story time” for as long as there have been stories, which means almost always. From time immemorial children have loved it because it feeds their soul. Childhood is a time of wonder, a time where a child’s natural desire for truth, beauty and goodness are fed. Stories are one of the means by which wonder is sparked and truth is found. It makes use of the power of wonder to set them on the path of truth. The architects of Drag Queen Story Hour also know about the power of childhood wonder, but they abuse it. They abuse it by making the story-teller the focus rather than the story. And in this way we can accurately say that these events are truly child abuse.

Why This is Really Abuse

This seems like hyperbolic rhetoric until we examine it a little further. It was called child abuse, not just because it abuses their sense of wonder, but child abuse because it abuses childhood. Man has natural desires that need to be fed. The highest of these desires is for knowledge of the truth. It is not the strongest, that privilege belongs to sexual desire, but it is the highest and is tied to our ultimate fulfillment. Wonder is the fuel that sets man on the journey for truth. Thanks to a child’s natural development, sexual desire is curbed for almost the first decade and a half of their life. This creates room for them to develop their capacity for wonder and to find its ultimate fulfillment in Truth. For full development of the child they must be allowed space for creative play, learning and discovery. Story time is meant to fill the gaps where experience is lacking.

To manipulate this natural course of development is the very definition of abuse. Children are not naturally sexual beings nor are they particularly curious about sex. We know this because of their natural hormonal development (sex hormones remain steady and relatively low for the first 10-12 years of life), but also because they exhibit a natural (and healthy) sense of shame. These story times are meant not to sexualize children, at least not directly, but to remove their otherwise healthy sense of shame. Once they do develop sexually, the protection of shame will be gone and the child will be particularly apt to participate in sexual activity. But also, by removing their sense of shame, and this is the really important part, they also lose their natural protection against sexual intrusions. A child with no sense of shame will not tell another adult they have been violated because they think it is normal. This early sexualization is not really about them at all, but to make them into victims who offer no resistance. To see this as anything other than an attempt to normalize pedophilia is to ignore the facts.

But it also has a second purpose that is closely related to the first. The “revolution” in the Sexual Revolution is not for unbridled sexual activity. The revolution is that it is the means by which a new world order can be imposed from above. The old order, marked by Christian morality and founded upon the family, has to be overthrown. It will be replaced by slavery to vice and founded upon the fiat of Big Daddy. People who are addicted to vice are easy to control because they will regularly give away their freedom for a hit. The Sexual Revolution is a direct attack on both Christian morality and the family. And the Drag Queen Story Hour is yet another example.

The New World Order

It is an obvious attack on Christian morality by breaking down the walls that have kept people free. According to its website “in spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real” (emphasis added). Notice the subtle use of revolutionary language first of all. But the problem is that dress up can never be “real” because we are not the masters of reality. Reality is something outside of us and only those who conform themselves to it, can truly operate freely within it. Children are given wonder to discover reality, not to make up their own. To abuse that is to make the next generation the revolutionary foot soldiers. The restrictions are there to keep us free. Christian morality has, for the past two millennia, given the guiderails to reality. Remove those guiderails and all that is left is power to keep order.

Story time replaces the family. Parents have always told their children stories, even when they couldn’t read. It was the primary pedagogical tool in the parents’ teaching toolbox. It was the means by which true values were passed from one generation to the next. All of this happened within the confines of the home, enabling wonder to run free and safe, while questions abound. Parents would answer the questions and give their children not just stories but truth. But now story time must be done outside the home so that indoctrination can occur. A distinctly parental activity becomes a public one. One more chink in the armor of the family.

“It takes a village to raise a child” may not actually be true, but it will be made true unless we put a stop to this nonsense. Children are being abused and are being set up for further abuse. We are raising the lost generation unless we act counter to this movement. The Sexual Revolution is winning and if we do nothing to stop it, then we will all be living in a new world order.

Master of Your Domain

June 19, 2019Anthropology, Conscience, Contraception, Freedom, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Sexual EthicsFreud, Pleasure, Sexual Desire, Vaping, Vocationtwowingstogod@gmail.com

A couple of months back there was an anti-vaping meme that circulating in social media that encouraged teens to masturbate rather than to vape: “Pleasuring yourself with Vape? Try masturbation instead. Masturbating alone or with a friend is a great safe alternative to vaping.” Vaping may be bad, especially for teens, but the solution of masturbation is not a real moral alternative either. The meme creators reasoned that when pleasure is the goal, it is better to choose masturbation because it is a relatively harmless activity when done in private (or even with a “friend”). Unfortunately, anyone who contests this is puritanically shouting into the hyper-libidinous wind that keeps our culture sailing along. Nevertheless, one could, and more importantly should, argue that masturbation is far more harmful to the person than vaping and therefore something that should also be avoided.

Because we are oversexed any conversation on this topic will naturally require some backing up of sorts. Our culture may be obsessed with sex, but so are the apparent puritans who are always moralizing about it. We will back up in order to first understand why sex is such a big deal.

Sex and Desire

Our human desires all seem to point to some personal need that we have. Hunger and thirst point to the need to eat and drink for example. While quelling the hunger pains and slaking the thirst may bring us pleasure, that cannot be enough to decide what and how we should eat and drink. We must always keep the purpose of the desire and its fulfillment in mind. The pleasure is meant to be a motor that moves us towards something that is good for us. In other words, those things we choose to eat and drink must actually meet the needs of nutrition and hydration. Those that do not, we label as perverted. Eating plastic coated with strawberry jelly and drinking antifreeze both might bring us pleasure, but ultimately they fail to meet the need or purpose of the desire. In short, there are right and wrong things to eat, even if some of the wrong things are pleasurable. Every desire must be submitted to our reason that judges right and wrong according to the purpose of the desire.

Sexual desire is similar to hunger and thirst in that it is an innate human desire, but it differs because it is more complex. It is more complex not just because it points to the “need” to reproduce, but because it also points to two other important distinctly human aspects. First, sexual desire points to sexual fulfillment. By sexual fulfillment I don’t mean an orgasm, but to our fulfillment of what it means to be made as men and women. Our sexual desire points to our personal fulfillment in women becoming wives and mothers and men becoming husbands and fathers. I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of people finding fulfillment in other ways, but just to emphasize that we are talking about sexual fulfillment, that is, what the meaning or telos of being made as a man or woman is. Even the most ardent LGBT activist admits this truth when they preach gender identity. In any regard, because our sexual fulfillment is so vital to our personal identity, it is our strongest desire.

The vehemence of the desire is the second aspect. Not only is its tie to personal identity the reason for its strength but the fact that it is the biological motor by which we come out of ourselves. It is a social desire in that it finds its true fulfillment in uniting with another person. But its relative strength also means that it is the one which is mostly likely to become perverted, making it prone to abuse and rationalizing Therefore, it is also the one, in our fallen state, that we need the most need of instruction by which reason might govern its use.

It would be hard to dispute the fact that it is other-directed. Even the person masturbating invokes their imagination to call to mind another person. Sexual pleasure is not just a passive response to being touched, but an intentional pleasure caused by another person to whom one is attracted to. It can never be like scratching an itch where one only receives relief from some tension, but a desire directed towards another person. Kinsey and Freud might have duped us moderns into thinking is was just some physiological response that causes the arousal of the person, but we all know that it is the bodily contact in conjunction with the presence (real or imagined) of another person that one finds attractive. The object of our attraction and our arousal must be a subject.

What’s the Harm?

This other-directedness of sexual desire seems obvious so that we can see why we might label masturbation as wrong. But it seems to be little more than a “guilty pleasure” causing no real harm. The harm may be hidden, or, more accurately, we might say we are blinded to it, but it is a real harm nonetheless. The harm comes into view when we call to mind that human beings are creatures of habit, or virtues and vice. No act occurs in a vacuum but always moves us towards virtue or vice. Because sexual desire is so strong, there is perhaps no field of human activity where the law of habit is more obvious.

Masturbation by its very nature is a self-directing of sexual desire. The aim is not to unite to another person, but to gain pleasure. The turning to the self is no mere guilty pleasure but forms a habit of thinking and acting in that way. It isn’t just a self-indulgent act, but makes someone selfish. The person becomes habituated to seeking their own pleasure first and their partner’s pleasure becomes only a calculated concern. They want their pleasure only so that they will come back around.

Because sexual arousal is an intentional act, the person develops the habit of mind that makes arousal by a real person increasingly difficult. A real person does not always do what the other person wants in the way that they want. Masturbation becomes in a very real sense a gateway perversion to ever-greater perversions. Nearly all sexual deviants began with masturbation. This is not to say that everyone who masturbates will become a depraved sexual predator, but that it sets a person on that path because of what we will call the law of diminishing pleasure.

As we have said, pleasure is like the motor that moves the human engine towards truly good things. But when pleasure becomes the finish line and not the motor, it always diminishes. One then has to find new and more exciting ways in order to increase pleasure or re-direct the pleasure back to its intended end. The point is that the chaste man derives far more pleasure from the marital embrace than the “stud” who traverses from woman to woman, just as the temperate man enjoys a scotch more than a drunk or the temperate woman enjoys a fine steak more than a glutton. When we moderate our pleasures to only the right use of those things that cause the pleasure, pleasure always increases.

Returning back to the anti-vape campaign mentioned at the beginning, we can now see why masturbation is a horrible alternative. Indulging the strongest of our desires may reduce the desire for a lesser one, but it only further ensnares the teenager in a loop of pleasure seeking.

On Embryo Adoption

May 4, 2019Abortion, Bioethics, Conscience, Culture of Life, Fatherhood, Human Dignity, Theology of the BodyAdoption, Dignitatis Personae, Embryo Adoption, Infertility, IVF, JPII, Marriage, Surrogacytwowingstogod@gmail.com

According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, there are over 620,000 cryo-preserved embryos in the United States. Even though the “vast majority” of them are still being considered for use for “family building efforts” and others have been “earmarked by the creating couples for use in research,” there are still as many as 60,000 unclaimed frozen embryos currently. With the growing popularity of IVF, we should expect these numbers to rise dramatically over the coming years. All this has left pro-lifers scrambling for ethical solutions that free these children from their cryogenic prison. One Evangelical Christian group called Snowflake Embryo Adoption matches the embryos with women who are willing to “adopt” them. In essence the embryos are implanted into the wombs of women who carry them to term and raise them as their own children. This solution, as we shall see, is not without moral controversy.

We must first admit that the plight of these cryogenically preserved children represents one of the greatest injustices of our age because of the sheer numbers alone. But because many of the “consumers” of IVF are couples struggling with infertility, very few people are willing to call it out. Instead it remains hidden away in laboratories and freezers. Despite intrinsic evil of IVF, we must never forget that the children themselves are not an evil but a good that came from the evil. They are members of the human community, regardless of how they were conceived, and thus are subject with rights, including the right to a safe environment in which they can thrive. These voiceless children are crying out for justice, a cry that we are obligated not to ignore. Therefore, it would seem that “embryo adoption” offers a compassionate solution. The adoptive parents did not bring the children into existence and are simply looking for a way to “right a wrong” by rescuing these children from a frozen existence.

Adoption?

When framed in this manner, it seems rather straightforward that this type of adoption is an irrefutable good. But this is a case where we must be careful with our terms. To label this an embryo adoption is really a form of begging the question. This is why many moral theologians prefer the term “embryo rescue”. For everyone know that adoption is praiseworthy, but it is questionable whether this should be classified as a type of adoption. Adoption has always referred to a legal process by which a child (usually although not exclusively) enters into a family and assumes all the rights and duties of a biological son or daughter. Nowhere among these rights and duties however would we find the right to gestation. That right is reserved only for biological children. The question is whether this difference carries any moral weight.

The Church defines surrogacy as when “a woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of ‘donors’. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy” (Donum Vitae, A3). Based upon this definition, embryo rescue is more akin to surrogacy than to adoption. The only difference is in the intention of the pregnant woman—in one case she carries the child for another and in the other she carries it for herself. But surrogacy is not wrong because of the intention of the woman who is impregnated, but because of the nature of the act itself.

A hypothetical will help to see why this is the case. Suppose a woman and her husband go through the IVF procedure and find that the woman will never be able to carry a child to term. She approaches her sister and tells her that they still have three “extra” embryos that are destined for destruction and asks if she would be willing to rescue one of them by offering her womb to carry the child. She tells her that it would not be surrogacy, but “embryo fostering” because she is simply fostering the child for 9 months. Verbal gymnastics aside, this clearly fits the definition of surrogacy, an action that the Church has always condemned surrogacy as an intrinsically evil act because it is an offense “against the unity of marriage and the dignity of the procreation of the human person.” In other words, no matter how good the intention is, it can never be deemed morally licit. Likewise, embryo adoption suffers a similar fate.

Surrogacy and the Rights of Spouses

Understanding why surrogacy is wrong will help to see why embryo rescue is not a real moral solution. Notice that Donum Vitae said surrogacy was an offense, not against the procreative aspect of marriage, but the unitive. A woman should only become a mother through her husband. He has an exclusive right to her procreative powers and faculties. When those powers are exercised without him, then the unitive good of marriage has been harmed. She is a mother of the child, but her husband is in no way the father. He neither had a hand in creating the child nor in its gestation (both of which a biological father does even in utero). He may become the child’s adoptive father when it is born, but until then he is not a father.

The unitive good of marriage is maintained when husband and wife must become parents through each other. Even in the case of adoption, they become parents together and not independently of each other. This is why we should hesitate to call embryo rescue, adoption. This solution then introduces a new injustice, mainly against the husband’s exclusive rights to his wife’s procreative faculties. This is ultimately why the Church has said this is “a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (Dignitatis Personae, 19).

What can be done about this then? For the time being we have an obligation to keep the children already in existence alive until a solution can be found. This form of embryo adoption by which someone keeps the child from being terminated or subject to scientific testing would be laudable. When St. John Paul II spoke on the topic he made an “appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking into account that there seems to be no morally licit solution regarding the human destiny of the thousands and thousands of ‘frozen’ embryos which are and remain the subjects of essential rights and should therefore be protected by law as human persons”(quoted in Dignitatis Personae, 19). Putting an end to this sanitized barbarism then should be our primary goal.

Revisiting Our Sins

December 12, 2018Conscience, Freedom, Grace, Sin, Spiritual Life, Spiritual WarfareChurch Scandal, Sermon on the Mount, Sorrow for Sin, St. Augustine Pearstwowingstogod@gmail.com

One of the most committed sins is to re-commit our past sins—at least that is what many of the spiritual masters say. What they mean by this is not that we habitually fall into the same types of sins, but that we habitually call to mind the details of our past sins. What makes this practice so spiritually carcinogenic is that by hitting the play button we are opening ourselves up to a great temptation to reignite the pleasure of the sin. In a very real sense we can “re-commit” the sin by consenting to the pleasure it brought (and still brings) us. For this reason, they say we should never rehash the details of our sins, even if our goal is to stir up sorrow, once we have confessed them. Scripture tells us that God forgets our sins so that we do too.

We may not even be aware that we are doing this because of an ingrained habit of making “look but don’t touch” moral calculations. We reason that as long as we don’t actually “do it” then merely fantasizing about it is not a sin. But sin is an act of the will so that whether or not there is any external expression of the sin is really secondary. We can commit a sin merely by consenting to thinking about something sinful. This is precisely what Our Lord is getting at when He tells His followers that they can commit “adultery in the heart” (Mt 5:28).

Revisiting the Details

By rehashing the details of past sins, we always run the risk of taking pleasure in them, that is, in taking pleasure in something that is sinful. So rather than rehashing the details, we should only recall vagaries about them. The pleasure is in the details, the sorrow is in the offense. So when we dwell upon our sins, it should always be only to recalling the offense. St. Augustine up to the time of his conversion lived a famously reprobate life. But notice that we he speaks in the Confessions of his actual sins that he provides what seems to be a rather absurd example of stealing pears. What little detail there is, focuses not on the details, but on the offense itself. And for all the rest of his sins, he is silent on the details.

Augustine’s approach is also instructive in another key way. One of the evangelical devices that is often employed is the “witness talk.” Often, rather than modeling it on Augustine’s Confessions, they treat it like a Confession. The convert will go into great detail to show just how degenerate they had become, usually pointing to specific acts. The focus then is not on God’s mercy, but their sin. The speaker may no longer take pleasure in the details, but the details satisfy a certain curiosity of the listeners who have been conditioned by the world to take pleasure in the salacious details of other men’s sins. Instead of edifying the audience however they end up scandalizing them. Better to take Augustine’s approach and focus only vaguely on the sin.

This is especially relevant in the ecclesial climate, rocked by scandal, that we find ourselves in. There are many bloggers/podcasters who devote entire episodes that detail the particular sins of particular men involved in the scandal. By so doing they are simply expanding the reach of the active scandal of the men who have done these horrible things. Not only are they feeding their curiosity but by providing all the gory details they may be leading others away from the Church. Again, it is not that we should be silent in the face of great evil perpetrated by clergy, but there is no need to include specific details. You can get your point across by simply saying a priest engaged in homosexual behavior without telling all the gory details surrounding the acts themselves. This is sensationalism and only further glamorizes the evil. We should avoid listening to these tabloid approaches to the scandal.

Opening Up to Grace

Jesus’ admonition to avoid “adultery in the heart” was not only an appeal to try harder, but a call to embrace the freedom He paid so dearly to secure for us. This should not be seen as an accusation but an invitation to remove the impediments to grace. Our memory and imagination are a battlefield in which we are engaged by the enemy of our soul. Because they are material faculties the demons may be granted access to them in order to tempt us. The demons can call upon our memory banks and stimulate certain images in an attempt to get us to go down a particular train of thought. This is an attempt to gain control of our will. Simply being aware of this can help us go a long way in the spiritual battle.

But we absolutely must learn to mortify our memory and imagination. This is why the saints all caution us against what would seem like otherwise harmless daydreaming. By giving attention to every image and memory that pops into our minds we become conditioned to being controlled by them. Same also with a constant barrage of images that comes through modern technology. We crave (even chemically as many studies are coming to show) the constant stimulation and lose all control of our imagination. In this state, the demons can run roughshod over us because we do not even see them coming. They are simply cooperating with the process and leading us away from the harmless to the harmful.

By training ourselves to ignore these random images and memories our bodies become habituated to only producing them when they are willed. This makes us less susceptible to the attack of the demonic because we know immediately when they are acting. The memory and imagination, the source of all of our distractions in prayer, now become prayer’s servants and grace becomes completely operative. We are free from the tyranny of the imagination and memory and free for Our Lord to fill us with His life. Our past sins no longer have any power over us.

The NFP Lifestyle

October 13, 2018Bioethics, Conscience, Contraception, Culture of LifeCatholic Birth Control, Feminism, NFP, The Pilltwowingstogod@gmail.com

In recent years there have been a number of sociological studies linking marital happiness/success with methods of birth regulation. Most of them show positive differences between those couples who practice NFP and those who use other methods of birth control, although not always to the degree that NFP Catholics like to advertise. This is mostly due to the fact that couples practicing NFP fall into two categories—those who do so with a contraceptive mentality and those who live an NFP lifestyle. It is the latter group which would likely show a significantly higher marital satisfaction.

I called it a “lifestyle” because it is about so much more than just family planning. NFP reinforces the one flesh union of marriage even when the couple is not engaged in the marital embrace. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, I will mention that, unlike woman, man’s fertility is non-cyclical. He is fertile all the time. This means that the burden of self-mastery often falls upon him. In fact one could say self-mastery is at the heart of being a man. The man, as he finds stamped into his body, is made to make a gift of himself. But to give oneself away, you must first own yourself, that is, have total self-mastery. Your yes only means something when you are free to say no. Without this requisite self-mastery comes the constant temptation to “lord it over the woman” (c.f. Gen 3:16). When you do not have control over yourself, you will attempt to control other people, especially those that are close to you.

The Burden of Fertility

While man does not experience his fertility as a burden per se, the woman does. This doesn’t mean that it is a bad thing, only that it carries with it “labor” even if that labor is joyfully and willfully endured. She is the one who, ultimately, must bear the consequences of fertility. Family planning and birth control often fall upon her. As proof of this, despite all the nasty side effects, a woman is willing to take a birth control pill. This is also the arena in which NFP can facilitate a true one flesh union by enabling the man to help carry the load of her fertility with her.

The most obvious time of her cycle is during menstruation. The man experiences his constant fertility as a burden so as to be united bodily with his wife during a particularly painful period of time. The burden of fertility that she is feeling can also be felt, albeit in a different way, in his body too. He literally is practicing compassion, that is suffering with. When borne with love and patience he is making a bodily gift of himself to his wife.

Most men already do this, although perhaps in not such a deliberate way. But for those men who practice NFP and have experienced the “disappointment” of the arrival of an early period, this can enable them to see how the one flesh giving might continue. Likewise, when for “just reasons” the couple is using NFP to avoid pregnancy the man puts aside the drive of his constant fertility so as to share in and through his body her fertility. This is where real manhood, that is manhood founded upon self-mastery, is particularly felt because he feels an increase in the burden of his fertility because of the inviting presence of her pheromones signaling her fertility. Even in abstaining from the marital embrace the couple is experiencing a type of one-flesh union when they join their wills together in postponing pregnancy.

NFP’s Effect on Family Life

An NFP lifestyle also makes for a happier home life in general in the relationship between the parents and children. Schooled in self-mastery by NFP the parents are better able to love their children in a disinterested fashion. As John Paul II, in a defense of Humanae Vitae once said:

“[parents that are contracepting] cannot sacrifice their egoism to the good of their spouse, will likewise lack generosity, patience, serenity and calm assurance in their relations with their children. They will love their children to the degree to which their children bring them joy—that is selfishly and not for their own sakes; they will cajole them and teach them self-indulgence and self-love. Instead of the peace given by self-mastery, unrest will reign in the family, because the state of tension created by a truncated sexual act surrounded by precautions, an act that is to be an unreserved gift of self, must in the long term be communicated to the children. It seems that the increasing prevalence of anxiety and even certain neuroses results in large part from contraceptive practices.”

For the better part of the last half-century, the teaching Church has been (at best) silent promoting her teachings on birth control. It is time that the rest of the Church step out into the void and preach the freedom that comes from ditching contraception. The one flesh union within marriage is a daily lived experience.

The Myth of Moral Neutrality

July 11, 2018Conscience, Freedom, Moralilty, Relativism, SinMorality, Morally Neutral, Summa, Three Determinants, Veritatis Splendortwowingstogod@gmail.com

There is an ongoing debate among philosophers and ethicists as to whether or not a man is capable of performing a morally neutral act. Like all of moral philosophy this seemingly theoretical question has practical and, more importantly, eternal consequences for the rest of us. In performing an impromptu poll among Catholics I know, most of them said “of course there are morally neutral acts” and then proceeded to list off a few, none of which were morally neutral. In this post then I would like to address this question in hopes of not just solving a problem, but changing the way the reader approaches everything that he does.

In approaching this question there is an important distinction that must be made. St. Thomas in his treatise on human actions (ST II-I q.6) reminds the reader that there are two “types” of actions in which a human being is the agent. First there are what he calls “acts of man.” These are natural acts of man that involve his vegetative and sense faculties such as digestion, growth, heartbeats, sensual perceptions (like seeing and hearing) and so forth. These acts are performed without any movement of the intellect and will and are in no way voluntary. Once they do become voluntary (such as when we choose to look at something) they fall into the second category; what St. Thomas calls human acts. These actions, because they involve deliberation and choice, are voluntary actions. Morality concerns itself only with human acts.

Just because acts of man are not voluntary does not mean that they are morally neutral. Just as we would not say actions of an animal are morally neutral because they do not proceed from a voluntary action, so too we would not say that these acts of man are morally neutral. They are not morally anything because they are not morally evaluable.

Human Acts

Once this distinction is made and we focus only on moral acts, we can begin to see why no action is morally neutral. In evaluating the moral status of any given human act, St. Thomas suggests that one should look at four particular components; its genus, its species, the circumstances surrounding the act and its end (ST I-II, q.18).

It is the first two components, genus and species, that define the object of the human act. The object of the act would be how one would define it if they were to witness the act. These moral objects can be good, evil or indifferent based upon their relationship to reason. It is the object that determines whether a given act can be ordered to the good or not (Vertiatis Splendor, 79).

Yes, I said that the moral object can be indifferent or neutral, but that does not mean that the action itself is morally neutral. Because no human act takes place in a vacuum, it is also necessary to examine the circumstances surrounding the act. In saying that the circumstances “surround” the act one is able to catch a glimpse into their relationship with the exterior action. Circumstances are related to the exterior action as accidents. This means that because they are truly exterior to the moral act they are not good or evil in themselves. However some circumstances are morally relevant and thus add a character of good or evil to the action. The morally relevant circumstances would be those that affect the relation of the act to man’s ultimate end according to reason.

We can imagine actions that are both indifferent in their object and in their circumstances. Yet still this does not prove there are morally neutral actions because one needs to evaluate the act from the point of the view of the moral agent in considering the end that is intended. While the external act and the circumstances may be morally neutral, no voluntary action can be considered neutral from the point of view of intention. Every voluntary act is done for a purpose. The purpose is either in accord with right reason and thus is a good act, or it is contrary to right reason and thus considered an evil act (ST II-I, q.18, a.9).

It becomes evident then that one can say there are two ends to each exterior act: the end of the act itself and the end which the agent intends. How these two ends are related can be understood by relying on St. Thomas’ use of matter and form. He says “(H)uman activity is defined formally by its goal and materially by its external object” (ibid). This is an important point that follows from this.

The intention of the agent is more important than the end of the act itself in evaluating the act morally. However, because the exterior action is the means to carry out the end the agent intends, it must be a good means for accomplishing that end. That is there are some objects like murder for example that can never be ordered to a good end. Secondly, although one can separate the two ends in theory, they both form a single act. In other words for the act to potentially be good, both must be good. Likewise, while a good intention may lessen the moral gravity of an objectively evil act, it cannot make the act itself good. However, a bad motive can change the moral quality of an otherwise good action.

The exterior act itself is objective but to only emphasize this component is to fall into legalism. The intent is subjective, but to only emphasize this principle is to fall into subjectivism. Finally, the circumstances are relative, but to only emphasize this is to fall into moral relativism.

Clearing Up Any Confusion

A few examples may help to make all that has been said clear. Suppose a man sees an older woman carrying a large heavy bag and looks like she is preparing to cross the street. He decides to carry the bag for her (the object). She really is going to cross the street (circumstances). He wants to perform a kind act (intention). This is a morally good act because all three components are good. Now take the same object and intention, but now the woman tell him she does not want to cross the street. This becomes a morally bad act because it is contrary to reason to carry a bag for someone across the street who is not going to cross the street. Finally suppose that the object and the circumstances are the same as the original example but now the intention is to impress the woman’s daughter. Now the act becomes morally bad because it is done with a bad intention.

That exercise is clear but what about something like eating lunch, or more specifically eating a sandwich for lunch? The object is good—providing nourishment to your body, but the other two components are what determine whether it is a morally good act or not. Have you already eaten enough? Is it the last sandwich? Are there other people that need to eat? All of these circumstances have bearing on the moral evaluation of it. What about the intention? Are you eating because you are nervous or because you are hungry? Are you eating because you want to keep someone else from eating or are you leaving half the sandwich because someone else needs to eat as well? Each of the circumstances and intentions will determine whether it is a morally good or bad act, but none of them will make it morally neutral. To eat when you are hungry is in accord with right reason and therefore a good action. Eating a sandwich for lunch can be a morally good act!

Herein, I think, lay the confusion. We think of morality in terms of breaking rules and not primarily as acting in accord with right reason. There is no moral law against eating a sandwich for lunch therefore it is permissible. Permissibility implies neutrality. But once we slide into the realm of thinking in terms of permissibility and not in terms of right reason we only try to avoid doing anything wrong and lose our desire to do good all the time. And this is why this question is completely practical. Once we see right and wrong in this light and not necessarily as not breaking a rule, we begin to thrive as persons. When we recognize that the good is always an option for us, we develop all the virtues at a faster pace. When we begin to taste the sweetness of the fruit of virtue, we desire to have our reason rightly formed so that conscience may judge the good to be done at all times. There are no morally neutral acts, indeed.

The Unforgivable Sin

June 9, 2018Bible, Conscience, Divine Mercy, Holy Spirit, Last Things, Mercy, Sin, Spiritual LifeAquinas, Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit, Jesus, John Paul II, Unforgivable Sintwowingstogod@gmail.com

If Jesus does not both shock and disturb when He speaks to us through the Scriptures, then we aren’t taking Him seriously enough. Take as an example this Sunday’s Gospel when Jesus, Mercy Incarnate, returns to Galilee and accuses the scribes of doing the seemingly impossible—committing a sin that will not be forgiven. “Truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mk 3:28-29). These words ought to shake us, especially in an age of exaggerated mercy. While Jesus leaves us clues as to the nature of this unpardonable sin, He does not really come out and tell us what it is. Therefore, there can be great spiritual benefit in investigating this question more deeply.

St Thomas Aquinas found this to be a question of particular importance as well and includes it among the questions dealing with sins against faith. Standing on the shoulders of his saintly predecessors, the Angelic Doctor says that there are three traditional ways in which this has been interpreted.

The First Two Interpretations

The first is the literal meaning based on the context in which Christ said it. To utter a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (or God in general) is to ascribe to the devil that which comes by the power of God. The best historical example of this is the Golden Calf in which an Egyptian god (which St. Augustine says was actually a demon) is said to have led Israel out of Egypt. So clear was the action of God in rescuing them that the Israelites could not have acted out either weakness or ignorance. Therefore there is no excuse in receiving punishment and the sin is unpardonable. Returning to the passage however, Jesus is not condemning the Scribes per se, but instead issuing a warning. Because Our Lord had yet to reveal His divinity, they acted out of ignorance, an ignorance He reminds the Father of from the Cross (c.f. Lk 23:34).

This is related to the second interpretation that Aquinas mentions. He says it is a sin against the Holy Spirit specifically because it is a sin of malice. Because power is appropriated to the Father, to sin against the Father is a sin of weakness. Likewise, because wisdom is appropriated to the Son Who is the Word, ignorance is a sin against the Son. And because goodness is appropriated to the Holy Spirit, then a sin against the Holy Spirit is a sin of malice. With full consent and full knowledge, a sin against the Holy Spirit is a sin of malice, that is in essence saying “evil be my good.” This particular sin is the eternal sin because it removes all of those things from us that might be a cure. It creates a hardening of the heart like Pharaoh in which the grace of conversion cannot penetrate.

As a fruitful tangent, the doctrine of appropriation in which we ascribe to specific persons of the Trinity that which in truth is an action of all three is not only a way in which we learn more about the life within the Trinity, but also a way to develop a relationship with each of the Persons individually. When we need strength we should pray directly to the Father, wisdom to the Son and power over evil the Holy Spirit. This habit of prayer and personal relationship keeps us falling into the trap of believing the doctrine of the Trinity while not really believing in the Trinity.

A Third Interpretation

The third interpretation that Aquinas mentions is also the most favored today, although often in an overly simplistic way. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit can be viewed as final impenitence. In this interpretation, the blasphemy occurs not necessarily in word, but in thought or deed. It is against the Holy Spirit because it acts contrary to the forgiveness of sins which is the work of the Holy Spirit (c.f. Jn 20:22). It is also the favored interpretation of the Great Mercy Pope, St. John Paul II. In his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et Vivificantem he says that “the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit consists precisely in the radical refusal to accept this forgiveness, of which he is the intimate giver and which presupposes the genuine conversion which he brings about in the conscience” (DV, 46).

Standing on the shoulders of these saintly giants then, why is this most widely accepted answer overly simplistic? Because there are two ways in which final impenitence can manifest itself. First there is the obvious stubborn refusal even on one’s death bed, call it an impenitence of the will, to repent. But there is a second, and for many of us more dangerous way, and that is through what we might call an impenitence of fact. Although many of us envision our deaths being something we can plan for, the truth is that many of us die suddenly without much warning at all. That means our temporal impenitence can become final impenitence.

This final impenitence in fact is not necessarily brought about by a hardness of heart, but we become victims to Aquinas’ insight that the sin “unforgivable by its very nature, insofar as it excludes the elements through which the forgiveness of sin takes place.”

In short, we simply a refusal to examine ourselves well and are blocked by presumption. Fear of the Lord, through which we seek the forgiveness of sins is a certain (healthy) anxiety by which we recognize that in truth we are fugitives from hell and that it is only God’s mercy that saves us. This is healthy not because we are morbid, but because each time we accuse ourselves of a sin, we are humbled and God is glorified in His mercy. Each time we stir up sorrow for our sins, God is glorified in His mercy. And ultimately this is why, no matter how we interpret the passage, we should take Our Lord’s warning to heart: to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit is to refuse God the glory of His mercy.

The Truth on Lying

December 9, 2017Conscience, Defending the Faith, Dialogue, God's Will, Moralilty, Natural Law, SinLying, Spin Zone, Truth tellingtwowingstogod@gmail.com

One of my favorite all-time commercials is a Geico ad in which President Lincoln is asked by his wife whether or not the dress she is wearing makes her backside look fat. As cleverly designed as the commercial is, and as refreshing as “Honest Abe” might be in our current political climate, this short ad is particularly compelling because it forces the viewers to think about the nature of lying. Drenched in a culture that has shown a particular allergy to truth-telling, we “spin the facts” and color-code our lies, bleaching them of any wrong doing. As lies increase, trust decreases, turning us all into masters of suspicion. Lies will break down any society, the family included, but there is an ever-greater danger hidden in the weeds of lying—losing a grip on what is real. Telling a lie over and over, we can easily forget the truth. As philosopher Hannah Arendt put it, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth…but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world…is being destroyed.” It is time to tell the truth about lying.

Most of us know a lie when we tell it, but there is a shadow over truth telling that creates a grey area. That is because we lack a really good definition. Even the Church has struggled to come up with a good definition. In the 1994 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the definition of lying was “to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth”(CCC 2483). When the official Latin text was released 3 years later, the italicized part was left out, rendering lying as “speaking or acting against the truth in order to lead someone into error.” This is true as far as it goes, but it does not shine enough light to remove the shadow. This is why St. Augustine’s definition is especially helpful. He says that lying is deliberately speaking (verbally or non-verbally) contrary to what is on one’s mind. In other words, there is an opposition between what one speaks and one what thinks in lying.

Loving the Truth

Because most people look at lying as mostly a legal issue, it is first important for us to discuss what makes lying wrong. Our communicative faculties have as their end the ability to convey our thoughts. When we lie, that is when we say something that is contrary to what we are thinking, we are abusing that power. Notice that in this teleological (looking at the purpose of the power) approach circumstances do not matter. Lying is always wrong.

Seen another way, we can make further sense of the intrinsically evil nature of lies. Our Lord is pretty harsh in His condemnation of lying; calling those who lie the devil’s offspring “because he is the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44). There are no such thing as white lies. A lie is an offense against the truth, the same reality that God, in His Providence, has orchestrated. That is, all lies, are primarily offenses against God because we are rebelling against the way things are and revolting against His ordering of things. It is our love for God and with gratitude for His Providential care that we should love the truth so much that we would never lie.

In this case, removing the white does not necessarily remove the grey area until we can answer what constitutes lying. Recall Augustine’s definition of a lie as the willful communication of an idea that is contrary to what one is thinking. This definition is preferred because it removes the situation where the speaker is wrong in their thinking from the realm of lying. If your son did not know he had homework and then told you he didn’t then that would not be lying. He communicated the truth as he understood it. Similarly with joking or story telling where the purpose is to convey irony or illustrate a deeper truth. Many people say “I was just kidding” when they are caught in a lie, so again this is something we all naturally seem to grasp. Regardless, at a certain point—like when the person asks “are you joking?” –it ceases to be a means of laughter or truth telling and becomes lying

Intuitively we grasp that to forget or joke around is not the same thing as lying. But it is the so-called hard cases that make it more difficult. For example, there is the oft-cited situation of the Nazi asking where the Jews are hidden. It was an attempt, although not precise enough, to deal with these hard cases that motivated the authors of the Catechism to include the clause “who has a right to know the truth” in the original definition. It would seem that the only way out of this Catch-22 would be to lie because it is “the lesser of two evils.”

Living the Truth

It is necessary as this point to make the distinction between deception and lying. All lies are deception, but not all deception is lying. There are times when deception might be necessary, especially when the interlocutor plans to use the information in order to commit some evil. Although our communicative faculties have as their purpose the communication of the truth as we know it, this does not mean that we have an obligation to communicate the truth. In fact, the obligation may be to remain silent such as when you are keeping a secret. Likewise the obligation to communicate the truth does not mean it has to be communicated in the clearest fashion. But because lying is intrinsically evil, that is, it can never be ordered to the good, it can never be a means of deception.

Protecting the truth from those who have no right to the truth is done then not through lying but through what is called Mental Reservation. A mental reservation is a way of speaking such that the particular meaning of what one is saying is only one possible meaning. There are two classes of mental reservation—a strict mental reservation involves restricting it in a way that the listener could never guess what you mean. This would be a form of lying. A broad mental reservation means that the average listener could figure out one’s meaning, even if it is not very clear. Blessed John Henry Newman uses the classic example from St. Athanasius’ life when he was fleeing persecution and was asked “Have you seen Athanasius?” The great enemy of the Arians replied, “Yes, he is close to here.” Obviously there are a number of ways this could have been interpreted, but it was not a falsehood strictly speaking. A similar approach could be taken with the example of the Nazis and the Jews but never in a way that would constitute lying.

What if however the soldiers had continued to probe Athanasius, forcing him to answer directly? Broad mental reservation may be employed for as long as possible but when it fails, one may, out of a love for the truth, simply remain silent and suffer whatever consequences may come from that. Likewise, many people tell other’s secrets simply because the other person asked and “I wasn’t going to lie.” One can keep a secret without lying, but it may mean suffering at the hands of the interrogator. However, before my teen readers see this as a Jedi mind trick and add it to their war-chest to use against their parents, this only applies when the person in question does not have a right to the truth. When the person has a right to the truth, you have an obligation to give it to them in as clear a manner as possible. There are some, especially in the Church, that rely on mental reservation to mask heresy.

In the commercial, Honest Abe, wanting to avoid lying, answers that the dress does make Mary Todd look a little fat. Is this the only possible answer he could have given, or could he have exercised a mental reservation? I’ll leave that for the readers to answer and debate in the comments section below…

The Primacy of Conscience

November 15, 2016Church Authority, Conscience, FreedomPrimacy of Consciencetwowingstogod@gmail.com

Could it be that the” primacy of conscience” will lead to its ultimate demise? With Church leaders like Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago saying things such as: “If people come to a decision in good conscience then our job is to help them move forward and to respect that. The conscience is inviolable and we have to respect that when they make decisions, and I’ve always done that” one has to wonder if it already has. As Pope Benedict XVI once said, the greatest danger facing the West is the “self-destruction of conscience.” Conscience is being destroyed from within because we no longer understand what it is. Therefore it is instructive to look at conscience and see why those who profess the primacy of conscience are misguided.

Thanks, in no small part to the magic of Disney, Conscience is often spoken of as a thing, like the proverbial angel on one’s shoulder or Jiminy Cricket guiding Pinocchio. Conscience is not, however, a thing but an act of the intellect. More specifically it is a judgment reason. Conscience is not just any judgment like whether I should bring along my umbrella or not, but a moral judgment about what one ought to do in a certain situation. The Catechism, succinctly defines conscience as “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (CCC 1777). Rather than being something outside of us, conscience is as Gaudium et Spes defines it, “the most secret core and sanctuary of a man” (GS 16).

Before looking more closely at the idea of the so-called primacy of conscience, it is helpful to examine the underlying cause for its unquestioned adoption. The moral life seems to present us with a Catch-22. Either one sacrifices their freedom by obeying an authority or embraces that freedom and becomes one’s own authority. In other words, there seems to be a great divide between authority and freedom and we must choose one or the other.

Those who embrace the “primacy of conscience” have decided to assert their freedom. One would be hard pressed to find a single mention of this phrase in any magisterial document. Those who refer to it often cite the same passage from the Catechism that the author did — namely, a “human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience.” While this does put an emphasis on the necessity of following one’s conscience there is a key modifier that can’t be overlooked. Advocates of the primacy of conscience consistently omit the modifier “certain.” The Catechism says that we must obey a “certain” conscience so that if we are to speak of a primacy of conscience it is a primacy of a certain conscience.

Fr. John Hardon in his Modern Catholic Dictionary defines a certain conscience as “a state of mind when it has no prudent fear of being wrong about its judgment on some moral issue and firmly decides that some action is right or wrong.”

In other words, a certain conscience has two components. It is a judgment that follows from sound deliberation and second it refers to the moral law. It is not a mere moral opinion based on a superficial assessment of a situation nor is it looking for reasons why what we want to do can be justified. We call that rationalizing. Instead it is principled reasoning as to how the moral law applies to the situation at hand.

Interestingly, those who appeal to the primacy of conscience rarely ever actually refer to whether they are right or not. All that matters is whether or not the person acted in accord with it. Think of Archbishop Cupich’s respect for the fact that the individual has been true to themselves. Conscience trumps truth. So embedded in our language is this understanding of conscience that we even refer to St. Thomas More as a “martyr for conscience.” It is as if he merely made up his mind that the Church was right and Henry VIII wrong and dug in his heels. But St. Thomas More died not as a “martyr for conscience” but, like all martyrs, as a witness to the truth. Herein lies the problem for those who hold the mistaken idea of “primacy of conscience.” By their logic, both St. Thomas More and someone like Adolph Eichmann who said during the Nuremburg trials that he was only being true to his conscience were equally laudable

Within the Catechism’s definition of conscience, we find the blueprint for the bridge between freedom and authority. Recall that conscience is “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act.” By what standard does one determine the “moral quality of a concrete act”? Before we can answer that question, we must clarify what we mean when we speak of “morality.”

Morality, simply put, is the relationship between a human act — i.e., one done with knowledge and freedom — and the use of man’s nature in fulfilling his ultimate purpose, communion with God. Some acts are in accord with the proper use of man’s nature and lead us to thrive (we call these good) and some are not and cause us to become slaves (we call these evil). Because human nature and its fulfillment are objective, certain goods are common to all men. Reason recognizes these goods as true goods, and commands that they be protected, preserved, and promoted. These commandments of reason comprise the moral law. Therefore, the “moral quality of a concrete act” can be determined by how it measures up to the moral law. The moral law acts as a bridge between freedom and authority.

It remains to investigate where the moral law comes from. How can we see obeying a law as not somehow inhibiting our freedom? The word for conscience in Latin, conscientia, gives us a clue. It is translated literally as “knowledge with.” Conscience is literally the “co-knowledge” that man shares with God. This shared knowledge about reality shows why conscience has authority.

God governs all of creation by His Divine Providence. Because He always acts in accord with reason, all things participate in His eternal law. He has made all things with natural inclination towards those things that will fulfill its purpose or end. Think of how a tree naturally grows towards the sunlight. But unlike the tree, man, because he has an intellect and will, can know and choose to participate in this eternal law. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, it is our participation in the eternal law of God that is called the natural law. Therefore, the natural law comes from within insofar as it is mediated by God through reason. But because it is a participation in the divine law, it has its source outside of man, in God Himself who is the Author of human nature.

It is in light of this understanding that St. Paul refers to the Gentiles, “who have not the law,” as a “law unto themselves” because they “do by nature what the law requires” (cf. Rom. 2:12) without any contradiction of either their freedom or the objective moral law.

The moral law comes to us through our intellect, but because of our fallen condition we also share in the “knowledge of good and evil.” Although our innate desire for the good cannot be extinguished, the darkening of the intellect that accompanied the Fall causes us great difficulty in discovering the good. Our reason, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, must now be “suffused with the light of God’s truth. In fact, when human reason humbly allows itself to be purified by faith, it is far from weakened; rather, it is strengthened to resist presumption and to reach beyond its own limitations.” The light of God’s truth flows through the Church. The Church informs conscience in much the same way the soul informs the body — giving it life and making it what it is.

St. Thomas teaches that we need revelation in the practical order for two reasons. First, since we are fallen creatures without revelation, the truth “would be known only by a few, and after a long time, and with the mixture of many errors.” Second, because man has a supernatural end, there are certain truths that surpass human reason. The Church, as described in Veritatis Splendor, is at “the service of conscience, helping it to avoid being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine proposed by human deceit (cf. Eph. 4:14), and helping it not to swerve from the truth about the good of man, but rather, especially in more difficult questions, to attain the truth with certainty and to abide in it” (no. 64). The Church does not impose the truths of man’s proper use of his nature from the outside, but instead proposes those truths to man’s reason so that he may recognize them as true internal values and accept them as his own. Conscience indeed is primary, but only a conscience that is animated by a desire to become what we were made to be—saints.

Voting and Conscience

June 7, 2016Church and State, Conscience, Natural Lawtwowingstogod@gmail.com

As the primary season comes to a close and clear candidates begin to emerge, we should expect to hear more and more about how to vote as Catholics. The discussion will center on “voting according to conscience.” If we are not careful however, we will fall prey to the vague notion of conscience that has plagued the Church in the last 50 years. Instead we should strive to vote according to an informed conscience. In an age in which fact is often equated with truth it is necessary to speak of what we mean when we say that a conscience is informed. We don’t mean that it is full of information or data, but instead it is alive in the way that a soul informs or brings life to the body. An informed conscience is a conscience which is fully alive.

An informed conscience is able to recognize that not all goods and evils are equal. An informed conscience has no room for a seamless garment approach to morality. Instead it recognizes that there are certain acts that are intrinsically evil and cannot be ordered to the good no matter what the intention of the person.

To aid us in discerning how these evils present themselves in political life, the Church for her part has listed the so-called five non-negotiables. The first four are related to the protection of life at its most vulnerable stages including abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and human cloning and the fifth is support for so called “same-sex marriage.” These are non-negotiable not because we are stubborn but because they are aligned so closely to the intrinsic goods of man that form the basis of the natural law.

It is grave matter to vote for candidates that support policies that promote these. When we vote for these candidates, even when it is not our intention to support those particular policies, we still cooperate in the evil. Certainly our level of cooperation may be remote, it is still true that without our votes these evils could not be promoted by civil law.

It would seem based on this then that the Catholic position is that we should be single issue voters. The response to this is rather nuanced so that an example should make the distinction clear.

Suppose I take you in my time machine parked outside to Berlin in 1932 and ask you to cast a vote for or against Hitler. How would you vote and why?

Despite all the robust economic policies that brought Germany out of the ashes of World War I and the restoration of German military might, you would hopefully vote no. Why? The reason is simple—no matter how much good he may do in those other realms you would not vote for him because his platform advocated mass murder of innocent people. This means a single issue would cause you to withhold your vote.

It is the same with us today. We should not vote for a particular candidate based on their stance on a single issue, but their stance could be a reason to disqualify a candidate from consideration. Even if a candidate is pro-life for example, this does not mean that we should vote for them. That just means they can be in the running. We must then also look at his other policies and see how they promote and protect the common good. In this way we are not single issue voters.

This principle is summarized well in a document that then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that deals with when Catholics may receive Communion:

“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia”

What about voting for candidates that may be in favor of one of these non-negotiables but whose office has no effect on policies related to these non-negotiables? Even though these issues may seem tangential, they are still important indicators. The first virtue we should look for in a candidate for any office is prudence. A person who cannot identify something that is intrinsically evil shows a lack of prudence. Secondly, these offices are often stepping-stones into higher and more influential offices. It is better to stop their ambitions before they get any steam going.

An informed conscience is an uncompromising conscience. All too often someone will say something like “since there is no hope of overturning Roe v Wade we should not even worry about whether someone is pro-choice or pro-life but instead focus on the candidate whose social programs will also reduce the number of abortions.” This position however amounts to a compromise with evil and in fact is untenable upon closer inspection.

Pope John Paul II spoke of what he termed the “art of the possible” in Evangelium Vitae. He said that in some societies it may not be possible to completely overturn laws that support intrinsic evils such as abortion in one fell swoop. Instead we might need to enact legislation in pieces that seek to limit the number of abortions while moving the social consciousness towards laws that abolish it altogether. This sounds similar to the position of “social programs to reduce abortions” with an important exception. The legislation that the Holy Father speaks of must have the intention of reducing the number of abortions and not just as a mere side effect. Social programs that may reduce poverty may also have the side effect of reducing the number of abortions, but that is only accidental, especially when the overall policy is to promote and even provide them.

An uncompromising conscience is one in which the Catholic will call an evil for what it is and not simply attempt to make the evil “safe and legal.” Still an uncompromising conscience may have recourse to the “art of the possible” and fight intrinsic evils piecemeal if necessary.

During the Vice Presidential debate in 2012, Congressman Ryan gave us an example of how an uncompromising conscience uses “the art of the possible.” He was even criticized for it—but he has been very clear from the outset that abortion is always gravely evil. Still he was part of a ticket which would not make the so-called abortion “hard cases”—rape and incest—illegal. This is not because he was capitulating but because he recognizes that making abortion illegal in 99.9% of the cases will not only significantly reduce the number of abortions but lead to a greater awareness that abortion is always wrong even in the cases where the mother was a victim of a violent crime.

There are many who will argue that the best approach when confronted with two candidates, both of whom support an intrinsic evil, is to refrain from voting at all. This ignores the fact however that one of those candidates will in fact win the election. One should vote then consistent with their judgment as to which candidate will do the least amount of moral harm.

Imagine if you can, an America in which the nearly 70 million Catholics voted as a single block. Imagine how far candidates would be willing to go to cater to 22% of the voters. This is why we must understand these principles and be able to clearly articulate them and present them to our friends. It starts now, not in October and November when everyone has made up their minds. St. Thomas More, pray for us!

The Meaning of Conscience

April 5, 2016Conscience, Moraliltytwowingstogod@gmail.com

Pope Benedict once said that one of the greatest dangers facing the West was the “self-destruction of conscience.” The Church is not immune to this danger as more and more Catholics invoke the “right to dissent” from long held teachings of the Church under the guise of the Church-sanctioned “primacy of conscience.” Yet one would be hard-pressed to find a single magisterial document in which the term “primacy of conscience” is used. This type of language leads to great ambiguity in the understanding of conscience.

In order to understand conscience it is helpful to begin with a definition. Often, conscience is spoken of as a thing. Conscience is not, however, a thing but an act of the intellect — or, more specifically, a judgment. Like all judgments, conscience is an attempt by man to use his reason to conform his personal knowledge to objective reality. Specifically, it is a practical moral judgment of what one ought to do in a specific situation. As the Catechism says conscience is “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (no. 1777). If conscience is not a thing, then we must put away the childish notion of conscience as something external to us like the proverbial angel on one’s shoulder.

But this is not the only immature way of looking at conscience. Many Catholics labor under a false conception of conscience born of two distinct kinds of moral immaturity. First there are the “rebellious teenagers” who must assert their freedom by embracing “the primacy of conscience”. On the other hand there are the “obedient children” who must submit to authority and be told what to do all the time. While these two approaches seem to differ, they both make the same fundamental error in assuming that that there is an insurmountable chasm between freedom and authority. One rejects freedom in favor of authority while the other rejects authority in favor of freedom.

Those who overemphasize the primacy of conscience often cite a passage from the Catechism — namely, that a “human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience.” This definition does lend itself to a “primacy of conscience” of sorts, but not in the manner often assumed. When the Church refers to conscience it is almost always attaches a modifier to it such as “right,” “well-formed,” “Christian,” or, as the Catechism has it, “certain.” These adjectives define the necessary standards for conscience.

Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary defines a certain conscience as “a state of mind when it has no prudent fear of being wrong about its judgment on some moral issue and firmly decides that some action is right or wrong.” A certain conscience is not a mere moral opinion, but a judgment based upon sound reasoning and deliberation and with reference to the moral law. Those who espouse the “primacy of conscience” really are masking what amounts to rationalizing—coming up with reasons why it is OK to do something that is objectively morally wrong.

The key in distinguishing between mere moral opinion and a genuine judgment of conscience is in the cultivation of the virtue of prudence. This is why St. Thomas Aquinas treated prudence and conscience as though they were synonymous. Prudence is the habit of applying right reason to practical matters. The prudent person habitually knows the good and therefore conscience is a consistent guide.

Even when an action flows from a certain conscience, appeals to “primacy of conscience” suggest that it releases the person who seeks its refuge from a certain level of responsibility. Normally, no reference is made as to whether the dictates of one’s conscience are wrong or not. All that matters is that one acted in accord with it. This subjective definition of conscience is so embedded in our language that we refer to St. Thomas More as a “martyr for conscience” — as if he merely made up his mind that the Church was right and Henry VIII wrong and “stuck to his guns.” But St. Thomas More died not as a “martyr for conscience” but, like all martyrs, as a witness to the truth. Herein lies the problem for those who hold the mistaken idea of “primacy of conscience.” Are they really willing to admit that someone like Adolf Eichmann who, when on trial said he was only being true to his conscience, and St. Thomas More are equally laudable?

Within the conservative Catholic milieu, one often hears something akin to “if all Catholics would obey the Magisterium, the world would be better off.” This proposition contains a good deal of truth, but only to a point. The problem with this view is that conscience is likened to a moral GPS by which man occasionally downloads maps from the Magisterium that lead him to where he really does not want to go. Again the dictates of conscience are understood as coming from outside of man who must force his will to conform to that of “the authority of the Church.” Despite the conventional wisdom of popular culture, obedience is still a virtue. But like all the virtues, it must be rooted in charity in order to be a true virtue. The problem with this view is that it undermines our freedom in favor of obeisance to authority. Constant appeals to authority in matters of morality eventually stunt our ability to develop conscience freely without relying on some outside authority. It keeps us trapped in a state of moral immaturity.

Being an “obedient child” is the surest path to the legalism Jesus condemned in the Pharisees. It leads to a moral minimalism that asks, “How far can I go until this is considered sinful?” This is not the language of a man who is free to love but of one who feels himself bound by legal constraints. Our Lord came so that we might be free, because only in freedom is love possible (cf. Gal. 5:1; Jn. 8:36). Obedience does not lead to love; instead, love includes obedience.

Finding the bridge between freedom and authority enables us to grow out of the “obedient child” or “rebellious teenager” roles in which many have been stuck. Recall from the Catechism definition that conscience is “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act.” By what standard does one determine the “moral quality of a concrete act”? Before we can answer that question, we must clarify what we mean when we speak of “morality.”

Morality, simply put, is the relationship between a human act — i.e., one done with knowledge and freedom — and the use of man’s nature in fulfilling his final end, communion with God in Heaven. Some acts are in accord with the proper use of man’s nature (we call these good) and some are not (we call these evil). Because human nature and its fulfillment are objective, certain goods are common to all men. Reason recognizes these goods as true goods, and commands that they be protected, preserved, and promoted. These commandments of reason comprise the moral law. Therefore the “moral quality of a concrete act” can be determined by how it measures up to the moral law. The moral law serves as the bridge between freedom and authority.

It remains to investigate where the moral law comes from. The rebellious teenager says that moral truth comes from within the individual. The obedient toddler says the moral law is imposed on us from the outside. Which one is right?

The word for conscience in Latin, conscientia, gives us a clue. It is translated literally as “knowledge with.” Conscience is literally the “co-knowledge” of man with God. As such, it is a correct perception of the way things really are and clarifies why conscience asserts authority.

An accurate understanding of conscience involves a synthesis of the two mistaken views we have examined. Because all creation is governed by divine providence, all things partake in the eternal law of God. From this law, all things are inclined to their proper ends. As a rational creature, man can both know his end and freely choose to participate in this eternal law. Man’s participation in the eternal law of God is, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, the natural law. Therefore, the natural law comes from within man insofar as it is mediated by God through reason. Because it is a participation in the divine law, it has its source outside of man, in God Himself. Man’s knowledge by participation is referred to by St. Thomas as “connatural knowledge.” It is in light of this understanding that St. Paul refers to the Gentiles, “who have not the law,” as a “law unto themselves” because they “do by nature what the law requires” ( Rom. 2:12) without any contradiction of either their freedom or the objective moral law.

The moral law comes to us through our intellect, but because of our fallen condition we now also share in the “knowledge of good and evil.” Although our innate desire for the good cannot be extinguished, the darkening of the intellect that accompanied the Fall causes us great difficulty in discovering the good. Our reason, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, must now be “suffused with the light of God’s truth. In fact, when human reason humbly allows itself to be purified by faith, it is far from weakened; rather, it is strengthened to resist presumption and to reach beyond its own limitations.” The light of God’s truth flows through the Church. The Church informs conscience in much the same way the soul informs the body — giving it life and making it what it is.

St. Thomas teaches that we need revelation in the practical order for two reasons. First, since we are fallen creatures without revelation, the truth “would be known only by a few, and after a long time, and with the mixture of many errors.” Second, because man has a supernatural end, there are certain truths that surpass human reason. The Church, as described in Veritatis Splendor, is at “the service of conscience, helping it to avoid being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine proposed by human deceit (cf. Eph. 4:14), and helping it not to swerve from the truth about the good of man, but rather, especially in more difficult questions, to attain the truth with certainty and to abide in it” (VS, 64). The Church does not impose the truths of man’s proper use of his nature from the outside, but instead proposes those truths to man’s reason so that he may recognize them as true internal values. It is not, however, the case that the Church is merely making suggestions.

Not surprisingly, once the thinking on conscience, which the Second Vatican Council called “the most secret core and sanctuary of a man” in Gaudium et Spes (GS, 16), becomes muddled, moral chaos quickly ensues. To stem the tide, the Church must be free to exercise her role in forming the consciences of all men of good will, and men of good will must freely assent to the proper formation of a certain conscience. This starts by clarifying what conscience actually is and separating it from its immature conterfeits.