Moral Conscience

What is Moral Conscience

JANUARY 1, 2012 BY REV. THOMAS V. BERG

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Refuting four mistaken ideas about conscience in light of the natural law tradition.

My experience as a teacher, counselor and confessor has repeatedly confirmed that there is a tremendous amount of confusion, especially among Catholics, about the nature of moral conscience.  That experience has also taught me just how sensitive this topic is. Want to make a group of people immediately uncomfortable? Start talking about conscience—and worse, suggest that the ideas they have about conscience are perhaps mistaken. In what follows, I will offer a sketch of the perennial, Catholic, natural law (NL) understanding of conscience—in a hopefully accessible, non-scholarly, and pastoral fashion—by first sketching out and  refuting four popular misconceptions about moral conscience.1

To begin with, I hope most of us would agree that conscience is not the proverbial angel on my shoulder, the antagonist of the little devil who whispers temptations in my ear perched on my other shoulder.  Yet, while most of us have progressed beyond this childish understanding of conscience, I fear that a large percentage of Catholics still labor under some form of misconception about the nature of moral conscience.

Allow me to suggest that most if not all of those problematic notions about conscience—having trickled down to us historically from different schools of moral philosophy, psychology and related fields—generally fall into one of the following broad categories:

(a) Conscience as emotive response. On this view, conscience is nothing more than an emotive response conditioned over time by genetic factors, environment and other socializing factors, in addition to psychological forces deep at work in our own psyche.  So conceived, conscience—particularly when manifested as guilt—is to be overcome or ignored or otherwise harmoniously integrated into our own everyday life in a way that it does not become an obstacle to our “life style choices,” “values,” “self-projects,” and so on.

(b) Conscience as built in moral guidance system. Here, conscience is understood to be a kind of natural faculty or power. Some depict it as the very voice of God who, through conscience, can guide our actions directly.  If not so depicted, it is presented as at least responding to the external dictates of moral authority in the manner of an internalized moral GPS: “do this,” “avoid that,” “too much more and you will cross the line,” and so on.

(c) Conscience as moral sense. A third misconception, presents conscience as a kind of intuition which simply cannot be accounted for or explained in terms of human reasoning. Sometimes called the “moral sense,” conscience, from this viewpoint, must be developed much like developing the ability to judge a good wine, pick a winning race horse, assess a person’s character, or keep a group of school children well behaved and attentive.

(d) Conscience as moral opinion. Finally, a fourth misconception presents conscience as simply that process by which I give consideration to moral matters and come up with my best judgment—essentially my opinion—about what I, or others, ought to do or not do.  When I am convinced of this judgment, it enjoys primacy over all other moral points of reference, trumping any other considerations. As such, my “judgment of conscience”—that is, my best formed opinion on the moral matter at hand—is infallible and absolute:  my conscience is my moral compass, period.2

Now, some readers might be surprised by my suggestion that none of these definitions is a good fit for the notion of conscience that has come down to us from the NL tradition. That will become apparent as we work our way toward the tradition’s understanding of conscience by briefly critiquing each of the misconceived notions in (a) through (d).  To be sure, a point of agreement between these versions of moral conscience, and that proposed by the NL tradition, is that conscience is something very personal, whose locus is to be found within the realm of one’s own personal subjectivity. Beyond that common element, however, we have some strikingly diverse conceptions of what moral conscience actually is, each emerging from its own unique intellectual history.

To begin, I will discard notion (a) as grossly inadequate. Notwithstanding the importance of psychology and upbringing in the overall task of conscience formation, this account of conscience is highly problematic from the moment we consider how poorly it accords with our shared human experience of moral obligation. While the experience of conscience can indeed be accompanied by emotional responses (both positive and negative, both guilt at doing wrong, and delight at doing good), moral conscience itself is not simply reducible to emotional responses. Furthermore, we must reject the negativity of this notion of conscience. The NL tradition conceives of conscience as a profound aid to a healthy and fulfilling existence, not as an onerous quirk of human psychology that one must essentially learn to ignore.

Notion (b) is often taken to be the true NL, or Catholic, understanding of conscience.  This notion entails a kind of legalism, however, and the least imprecise sense that conscience—whether innate or internalized through experience—is like an interior voice that would direct our every action, understood by some to be the voice of God himself (or the Holy Spirit) speaking interiorly. While it is true that the Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes, speaks of conscience as our “secret core” and our “sanctuary” where we are “alone with God” whose voice “echoes in [our] depths,”3 such metaphors must be properly understood. While the Holy Spirit certainly can, and does, speak through a correct judgment of conscience, conscience cannot simply be reduced to “the voice of God.” As we will explain just ahead, conscience can in fact err, a reality that notion (b) fails to countenance. Notion (b) also inaccurately depicts  conscience as a kind of separate faculty of the soul, a notion which needs a some considerable specification.4  That notwithstanding,  notion (b) falls very short of the mark. It presupposes that the moral life is tantamount to the following of external norms. The Catholic tradition has consistently indicated the dangers of such a legalistic understanding of the moral life, which can easily stunt human moral growth, lead to scrupulosity, moral shallowness, misplaced rigidity, and imprudence in making moral judgments. As such, notion (b) constitutes an impoverished notion of what the NL tradition has genuinely maintained.5 is a sort of angelic voice distinct from our own reasoning which comes, as it were, from outside us, even if we hear it in our heart; it is generally trustworthy, but we must decide to obey it or not. There is more than a hint of this at several points in our theological tradition. But whatever these texts mean, they clearly do not mean a divine or diabolical voice intrudes into our ordinary reasoning processes, commanding or complaining, a rival with our own moral thinking… Were conscience really a voice from outside our reasoning it would play no part in philosophy and there might be some kind of double truth in the moral sphere. Late scholastic voluntarism and post-scholastic legalism took moral theology down just such a blind alley. [The Church’s] Magisterium became the satellite navigator and the role of conscience was to hear, interpret and obey. Many contemporary theologians and pastors are heirs to this. For some the solution to the crisis of moral authority is to keep calling for submission to the navigator. Moral tax lawyers, on the other hand, try to find ways around the moral law, or ways to “sail as close to the wind as possible” without actually breaking the moral law. Can you do a little bit of abortion or embryo experimentation or euthanasia without breaking the moral law?” (Op. cit).

Notion (c), though very popular over the past hundred years or so, and enormously influential, is also problematic.6 Consider, among other things, that notion (c) leaves no room open for appeal to objective criteria on which basis I could challenge someone’s “moral sense.” A member of a Sudanese Janjaweed militia might argue a few years back that his moral sense indicated that dark-skinned African inhabitants of the Darfur region should be exterminated. Preferably, we would want a theory of moral conscience that leaves us grounds to challenge such a claim. Notion (c) does not afford us that, however. This notion presupposes, moreover, that morality is essentially something lying outside the bounds of our use of reason, and that conscience is quite literally non-rational—hardly the notion of conscience we discover in the NL tradition.7

Notion (d) requires more sustained consideration for the several valid elements it contains, for its degree of overlap with the NL notion of conscience, and for the predominance of this view, including the remarkable degree of confusion such a view has engendered, especially among Catholics.  I would go so far as to assert that notion (d) is, by and large, a kind of default understanding of conscience in our contemporary culture.  Its highly problematic reduction of conscience to the level of moral opinion, however, sets it deeply at odds with the perennial Catholic, natural law understanding of conscience.

In the NL tradition, conscience is understood to be a judgment emanating from human reason about choices and actions to be made, or accomplished, or already opted for and performed.8 Conscience judgments will become manifest in our personal lives to the degree that conscience has been developed. Conscience can be antecedent (while my willing has not yet settled on an option); it can be concomitant (presenting itself in the very act of choosing); or it can be consequent (presenting itself after I have settled on an option).

Antecedent conscience presents itself as a judgment with regard to the pending choice to accomplish, or a refraining from committing a possible action, the consideration of which is the result of our deliberation process. Through deliberation, we come up with options.  We may be leaning toward choosing one of those options, when that judgment becomes interiorly manifest: “this option is good,  I may go ahead with it; this other option is wrong, I must shun it and refrain from choosing it.”9 In the virtuous individual, who finds herself deliberating about a morally objectionable course of action, the judgment of conscience will make itself present, then and there, and direct her not even to consider such possibilities, suspending that part of her deliberation process.

Aquinas held that conscience, in the strict sense, was as an act of human reason—called a judgment—following upon, and concluding, a time of deliberation.  In this sense, I like to explain conscience as the interior resounding of reason. Conscience is reason’s awareness of a choice, or an action’s harmony or disharmony, with the kind of behavior which truly leads to our genuine well-being, and flourishing.

If our choice or action is not in accord with the judgment of a rightly formed and active conscience, then that judgment will linger in our conscious awareness, presenting itself as a felt disharmony between the choice, and the moral norm (and corresponding virtue), being violated. While such felt disharmony is indeed of an emotive nature (e.g. a healthy emotional guilt), the judgment of conscience remains something distinct and irreducible to the negative feeling which happens to accompany it.10

While the experience of conscience is, indeed, something intimate and personal, the NL tradition holds that conscience will always require points of reference which can be acquired through education and moral training. These points of reference are normally embodied in moral norms; the habitual living out of behaviors in accord with those norms is called virtue. Both the norms, and the virtues, become guides to conscience.  The virtues and norms reflect what the tradition holds to be reasonable human behavior; that is, human behavior in accord with the genuine and true manner of human flourishing and happiness intended by the Creator.  Some of those norms are so basic that they are accessible to all sane human beings: do no harm to the innocent; treat others as you would have them treat you; do not commit adultery.  Other norms and virtues deal with more specific aspects of the moral life.

Reference to moral norms, and the virtues which embody them, does not have to take the form of a kind of legalism (as represented by notion (b) concerning conscience). Rather, docility to these moral norms, and the acquisition of corresponding virtues, is an expression of healthy, sound, indeed, reasonable living. Now, we are hopefully poised to draw into clearer distinction the difference between mere opinion about moral matters on the one hand, and the genuine judgment of conscience. How would the NL tradition distinguish genuine conscience from mere moral opinion? Consider the following examples of what are arguably the expressions of mere opinions on moral matters:

“If I were Uncle Charlie, I wouldn’t want to be hooked up to that feeding tube; I think we should have the doctors remove it.”

“Whether my college-age kids are sexually active is none of my business.”

“We know what the Church teaches, but my wife and I think contraception is what we need to do right now.”

Again, one could, in good faith, hold any of these determinations to be a sound and genuine judgment of conscience, especially if arrived at after a good deal of deliberation, consultation with friends, even prayer.  They could also be, on the contrary, the articulation of “gut feelings,” and otherwise rather superficial assessments—mere opinion—about what is right for Uncle Charlie, or my kids, or me and my wife. The process here may have been somewhat muddled; there may be an oblique reference to a relevant moral norm, or—as in the third instance—to “what the Church teaches.” But, it also may have been determined, without a great deal of effort in trying to understand Church teaching, before discarding that teaching. Such expressions could also come encased in an impenetrable sense of infallibility: “That’s my judgment, case closed.”

Authentic moral conscience, however, is not merely something that I roll up my sleeves and produce—the product of having weighed my feelings, likes, dislikes, my friend’s opinion on the matter, advice from others, and so on.  While all of this might serve to help me arrive at a genuine judgment of conscience, that judgment—if sound and genuinely proceeding from conscience—will proceed from the core of my being, and will correspond to objective moral norms  anchored in the truth about what perfects us as human persons.  It will be a weighty and carefully distilled judgment of what—given the objective ends of human nature—is reasonably required of me (or someone else) in the present circumstance.

What most often distinguishes genuine conscience, from mere moral opinion, is the role that the virtue of prudence normally plays in arriving at a judgment of conscience.11 Prudence, as the tradition holds, is right reason applied to practical matters. It is the principal cardinal virtue, and also an infused virtue. In the prudent individual, judgments of conscience will be consistently right. The process of arriving at the judgment of conscience will have a subjective sense of anchoring in moral experience, an habituation to moral determinations of soundness and personal security, which are simply lacking when one is left to come up with mere opinion.

In the prudent individual, arriving at a right judgment of conscience can at times happen with ease; or in areas of greater complexity, the process will be characterized by caution. The prudent individual is aware that his judgment of conscience could potentially err. So he seeks direction from objective moral norms, and from proven moral guides.  His judgment—when based on those objective points of reference—will have a far greater solidity than a mere opinion about what’s right or wrong in a given situation. One might even discover, upon closer examination, that the authentic judgment of conscience is at odds with one’s opinion, or that in arriving at that opinion, one never made genuine contact with one’s conscience at all!

Granted, it can be hard to distinguish the experience of a certain judgment of conscience from the experience of formulating an opinion. Generally speaking, the latter, even when it is an opinion shared by many people, is nonetheless characterized by that unmistakable taste of subjectivity—it’s my opinion. It can often conceal a lot of vested self-interest. The person clutches to his or her opinion perhaps in a state of interior uncertainty, even turmoil. Opinions are often more the product of emotion, and affective responses, than of sound reasoning. The judgment of conscience, by contrast, is normally characterized by its flavor of objectivity and consistency with moral principle. When that judgment of conscience is certain, it is held with interior serenity, not being swayed by emotion. It can even be embraced independently of one’s own self-interest: think of men and women (Thomas More, Maria Goretti) who have gone to their own deaths out of fidelity to conscience.

To conclude, let’s say a word about the notion of “forming” one’s conscience. The USCCB has written a fine and succinct paragraph about this, especially aimed at Catholics:

The formation of conscience includes several elements. First, there is a desire to embrace goodness and truth. For Catholics, this begins with a willingness and openness to seek the truth, and what is right by studying Sacred Scripture, and the teaching of the Church, as contained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It is also important to examine the facts and background information about various choices. Finally, prayerful reflection is essential to discern the will of God. Catholics must also understand that if they fail to form their consciences, they can make erroneous judgments (§17-18).

To the notion that a person must “form” his or her conscience through docility to sound moral guidance, or from example, or from Catholic moral teaching, that person might object, insisting that:  “I have always been taught to ‘follow my conscience’ no matter what others think, including the Catholic Church.”

Now, the perennial moral principle, directing us to “follow your conscience,” holds true for all persons everywhere.  However—and here are some key details that too often get lost in the exuberance to affirm one’s own judgment—that principle holds true only when it presupposes two things:  (1) that what we’re calling conscience in this case is not just mere moral opinion, and (2) that what we’re calling conscience here presents itself with clarity and certainty (one should not act on an uncertain or doubtful conscience without clarifying the doubt).

In light of the foregoing, it should be clear that this principle is not directing us to “follow your best opinion about what you consider to be right or wrong.” Rather, the principle is directing us to be faithful to the authentic judgment of conscience, arising from within, when (and only when) that judgment is firm and certain: e.g., “I am not in doubt about what I ought to do, and I am not vacillating; rather I perceive interiorly what I ought to do as harmonious with the objective moral order of reality.”

Now, the tradition also holds that moral conscience, although anchored in human reason, is not infallible. Conscience can err. Consequently, one can have a subjectively certain judgment of conscience about moral matters; but it can simultaneously be an erroneous and objectively incorrect judgment. In the latter case, persons working in good faith are normally only aware that their judgment is clear and certain; they are not aware that their judgment is out of sync with objective moral norms. Think for example of the mother who believes, for certain, that she would transgress the moral order in allowing her gravely ill child to receive a blood transfusion; or, the OB/GYN, who is personally opposed to abortion, but judges it a grave omission in failing to perform an abortion on a pregnant fourteen-year-old who is seeking one with parental consent. Such judgments, even though appearing certain, are at odds with the objective moral order.12

This brings us to the question of why conscience must be “formed.” What specifically does the notion of conscience formation—from the Catholic and natural law perspective—entail?  First, conscience formation begins with the deep-seated decision to seek moral truth. One adopts, as a way of life, the habit of seeking out answers to questions about right and wrong, persevering in that quest until one arrives at a state of moral certainty, after having made the most reasonable effort possible to arrive at those answers.  Second, a sound conscience must stand on the firm foundation of integrity, sincerity, and forthrightness.  Duplicity, personal inconsistency, and dishonesty undermine any hope of forming a properly functioning conscience.  Third, conscience formation is sustained by the habit of consistently educating oneself by exposure to objective moral norms, and the rationale behind those norms.

Conscience needs a guide. Catholics, and all people of good will, find that guide in the moral tradition of perennial validity—the natural law tradition—as sustained and enriched by the constant and universal teaching of the Catholic Church. The Catholic who believes that: “The Church can think what it wants on moral matters; and I can think what I want,” may believe this to be an expression of “moral maturity.” In fact, it is the expression of quite unsound reasoning.  Catholic moral teaching is nothing other than the continuation of a tradition of moral thought which extends all the way back to Aristotle, well over two millennia.  The Church’s moral teaching, while certainly enlightened by divinely revealed law, is, at its core, the application of what this tradition has discovered over the centuries about the kinds of behavior that lead us to live genuinely fulfilling, human lives. One does not place oneself at odds with such a tradition lightly.

Consequently, conscience formation requires a habit of on-going self-formation (what we might call moral information gathering) through study, reading, and other types of inquiry. This includes consultation with persons whose moral judgment we know to be sound and in accord with the Church’s moral tradition.  Finally, conscience, if it is to be correct, needs the assistance of the virtue of prudence.  By “prudence,” we mean the virtue as understood within the NL tradition. This should not be confused with timidity, “covering one’s back,” or dissimulation (hiding the truth).

Prudence is the virtue that enables us to discern right moral options in a wide range of practical and complex circumstances. It is prudence which lends immediate guidance to conscience. The prudent individual, in arriving at a judgment of conscience, will do so under the influence of this fundamental virtue. As the Catechism affirms, “with the help of this virtue we apply moral principles to particular cases without error, and overcome doubts about the good to achieve, and the evil to avoid.”13  In sum, conscience formation is a life-long project.14 It is something like playing tennis: if you stop playing long enough, you can lose your backhand. As with an athlete’s body, conscience formation is not a question of getting it in form, once and for all, but of maintaining it in form for a lifetime. It is a project that is foundational for all other life-projects, for a genuinely human existence, and—not to mention—for eternal happiness.

1. Readers interested in a more scholarly approach to this vital subject should read an extremely helpful exposition on conscience authored by Anthony Fisher, O.P., auxiliary bishop of Sydney, Australia, prepared for the March 2007 meeting of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and titled “The moral conscience in ethics and the contemporary crisis of authority.” It can be found at: http://www.zenit.org/article-19058?l=english ↩
2. A corollary to this latter concept of conscience might be termed “conscience as social convention.” On this view, conscience is little more than the internalized and subjective echo of societally held values. ↩
3. Cf. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, §16.↩
4. We can understand conscience to be something like a faculty if we consider that conscience partly has to do with a habitual kind of knowledge that we acquire as we go through life, namely, the habitual awareness of moral norms and principles. St. Thomas observed that we have habitual knowledge both in the speculative realm and the practical realm. For example, in former, we have an habitual understanding of the principle of non-contradiction. Likewise, according to Aquinas, we have an habitual knowledge of the first principles of right reason (such as >one ought to do unto others as he would have others do unto himself=); and we can also acquire an habitual knowledge of more specific moral principles and norms. Aquinas, following the tradition that preceded him, calls such habitual knowledge synderesis:  “Synderesis is the law of our intellect consisting of the habitual awareness of those precepts of natural law which are the first principles of human action” (STh I-II, q. 94, a. 1, ad 2). In this sense, as Aquinas did, we might consider conscience to be—in the sense of syndersis—a capacity of the soul. But Aquinas denies that it is literally a separate power or distinct faculty of the soul. See note 8 below. ↩
5. As bishop Anthony Fisher explains: “Many people think [conscience ↩
6. At the turn of the century, G.E. Moore proclaimed (in his 1903 Principia Ethica) the startling discovery that “good” is the name of a simple, non-natural property, indefinable, accessible through a sort of intuition and not subject to proof, disproof, evidence or reasoning.  His insistence on intuition would appear simply to remove the question about the good and the right from the realm of reasonable consideration, once and for all.  In the wake of Moore, some of the greatest names in 20^th century philosophy offered their own individual nuances to the moral sense theory. Perhaps, most notable among these are C.L Stevenson, who held that evaluative propositions express approval or disapproval (↩

There can be a valid sense in which we think of conscience to be “intuitive.” By that, we mean that the judgment of conscience comes to us in a non-discursive manner, that is, with ease, instantaneously, without the need for reasoned consideration.  This is conscience in the sense of synderesis (see note 4 above). Synderisis, the habitual (virtuous) knowledge of principles and moral norms, is, as such, non-discursive, and could be referred to as a kind of intuition. But, this is a far cry from the modern, non-rational sense of “moral intuition” or “moral sense” which remains problematic. ↩

Thomas identifies it specifically as the judgment of practical reasoning. As such, he excludes the possibility that such a judgment is a separate power of the soul (Cf.STh I, q. 79, a. 13). Practical reasoning is anchored of course in reason itself. ↩

The interior manifestation of such a judgment is a far cry from the caricaturized “little voice” telling me what to do, or not do. ↩

The judgment of conscience, when genuine, can be characterized as being firm, yet serene; and its interior manifestation as persistent, clear, deep, simple, and to the point. ↩

There is much, much more that could and should be said about the relationship between conscience and prudence, but space limitations in the present essay preclude this.  (See Aquinas,  STh II-II, qq. 47-51.)  The exercise of prudence also culminates in a judgment of reason that is, at least in principle, distinct from the judgment of conscience; since the latter can err, it must be informed by the former. The intimate relationship between these two judgments also suggests the intricate relationship that prudence plays throughout the entire process of moral reasoning which culminates in choice.  It is easy enough to see that the two judgments are distinct from the simple fact that one’s judgment of conscience could conceivably differ from the judgment of prudence. Such a situation, however, would appear to entail some degree of imperfection in the exercise of prudence, as well as error in arriving at the judgment of conscience. For example, a young woman might have some basic grasp that it is unreasonable to be living with her boyfriend prior to marriage (prudence); yet she is conflicted, and in good faith, believes it would be irresponsible, or unfair on her part (conscience), to move out now that she is financially supporting her unemployed, and physically disabled, live in boy-friend. The latter represents an erroneous judgment of conscience that has succumbed to emotional interference and confusion with regard to specific moral norms. ↩

For more on the matter of erroneous judgments of conscience, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church §1790-94. ↩

See CCC §1806. ↩

“The education of the conscience is a lifelong task. From the earliest years, it awakens the child to the knowledge and practice of the interior law recognized by conscience. Prudent education teaches virtue; it prevents, or cures, fear, selfishness and pride, resentment arising from guilt, and feelings of complacency, born of human weakness and faults. The education of the conscience guarantees freedom, and engenders peace of heart”; CCC §1784. ↩

Advent

...and we're definitely over the advent calendar thing you buy at the store...the one made of paper with dusty gray chocolates (surprise!) hidden behind the doors. They were given to us as gifts recently and the kids just tore em up (when I was not looking), ate up all the stale chocolates and fell asleep on the couch with stomach aches......not FUN!


Enter,  the Jesse Tree.......definitely FUN, slightly hair-pullin-messy, and grounded in truth..
enjoy the pics...

 

 

 

sqeeze Clari break

 

 

Misrepresentations

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Imagine someone appealing to Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, to justify the activities of gangs in Los Angeles. Why not?  Lord Baden-Powell wanted boys to do risky things, and what’s more dangerous than running guns or smuggling cocaine or fighting another gang in a shooting spree?  He enjoined upon the Scouts a stern code of honor and loyalty, and who is more loyal than a new recruit for the Crips?  Who is more willing to shed his blood for the honor of the gang?

Imagine someone appealing to Michelangelo to justify porn.  Why not?  Michelangelo painted nudes all over the Sistine Chapel, and Hustler and Penthouse are full of nudes.  Michelangelo endured the disgruntlement of the prudish, so that the figures in his Last Judgment were later provided with discreet veils and tunics and loincloths.  And aren’t Hustler and Penthouse stuck underneath the counter at convenience stores?  Michelangelo admired the sculpture of ancient Greece; those ancient Greeks, for their part, traded in vases depicting acts of pedophilia.  So why should a busy stockbroker in a hotel not be allowed to relax in front of a television, watching whatever delights his sophisticated tastes?

Imagine someone appealing to Florence Nightingale to justify doctor-dosed suicide.  She wanted to relieve suffering, didn’t she?  Imagine someone appealing to Saint Francis of Assisi to justify looting for fun and profit.  His heart was with the poor, no?  Imagine someone appealing to Saint Catherine of Siena to justify the modern feminist.  Why, Saint Catherine dared to rebuke cardinals and popes!

finish her up here !

Chillingly Awesome words

please do me a favor and share this bone shakin' piece written by a real woman approaching 100 yrs old (she's 90) and her mind is golden and in the sharpest condition. Alice Von Hildebrand is just beautiful!

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September 25, 2012

A plea to confused Catholics

By Alice von Hildebrand *

Virgil was right: there are things that call for tears (“sunt lacrimae rerum”). This famous quote recently came to my mind when watching Raymond Arroyo’s program “The World Over.”

He was interviewing Dr. Stephen Schneck, an associate professor at Catholic University of America and co-chair of Catholics for Obama. The latter told the hearers that he is a sincere and committed Catholic. This is precisely why his decision to vote for Obama – dubbed the most “pro-abortion” president we have ever had – left me dumbfounded.

How is it possible that a son of the Church – founded by Someone who declared that He was the Truth, the Way, and the Life – can justify his choice? He personally rejects abortion, gay marriages, embryonic stem cells research (all three strongly endorsed by our present president), and yet is trying to convince us that to vote for him can be justified on moral grounds.

What are his arguments and do they have any validity? The key one is that, according to him, Romney intends  to make deep cuts in the Medicaid budget, and that this decision will inevitably lead  to a notable increase in the number of abortions. Therefore to give one’s vote to Obama will in fact benefit the pro-life cause! This is a type of twisted logic that only “intellectuals” can concoct. It would be difficult to convince a peasant that a purely abstract projection (cuts in Medicaid will lead to more abortions) justifies voting for someone who is “pro-choice,”  endorses not only late term abortion, but also the murder of those little ones who survived this “scientific” torture. This is typical intellectual prestidigitation, a sleight of hand of such “cleverness” that it justifies the words of St. Peter Damian: the Devil was the first grammarian: he “taught us to decline god in the plural.” By endorsing Obama, Professor Schneck inevitably gives his place to same sex marriage (which he rejects), assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research. Indeed, evil engenders evil.

That Romney opposes these grave moral aberrations, does not seem to have any weight in Professor Schneck’s mind. Am I wrong in suggesting that when St. Paul writes that there are things that “should not even be mentioned among Christians,” he might had had “same sex marriage” in mind, an inevitable consequence of the endorsement of homosexuality so severely condemned by Plato – a pagan – as being not only against nature, but as being a moral disease of such gravity that it inevitably leads to the downfall of any society. History teaches us a lesson: the great nations of the world now extinct, were victims of the immorality of their customs. Their problem was not economic; it was moral, and inevitably, as a punishment, it affected the economy.

Abortion, i.e. murder of innocent human beings,  is intrinsically evil at all time, in all places, under all circumstances. The same applies to embryonic stem cell research; a human being is a human being from the very moment of conception; if it became one only when fully developed, it would be a typical case of magic: namely a change of nature, as we read in fairy tales. The Devil who is a master at deceit, covers the horror of this crime by inserting the term “scientific research,” and the word “scientific“ fills with awe those who believe in “progress.”

May I suggest that if abortions were no longer paid by “other people’s taxes” (forced to do), quite a few people would think twice before having one. Money matters in our society, and if this barbarous practice was not covered by insurances, it is likely that fewer would be performed, and  that women would consider carrying the baby to term and give it up for adoption. We know that there  is such a high demand for babies that many are those who have to turn to foreign countries to find one.

Upon hearing Professor Schneck’s words, I was not only grieved: I was stunned.  Unwittingly, he assumes that the end justifies the means: that to vote for a pro abortion president, by some mysterious twist, will in the long run, protect life.

Like all decadent societies, we have lost sight of the crucial importance ofhierarchy in human life. We have in mind not only the ontological hierarchy placing the Creator above creatures, angels above men (except for the Blessed one among women), man over animals (challenged by Peter Singer: a healthy whale ranks higher than a crippled baby), but also of the epistemological hierarchy of revealed truth above all other truths, of veritates aeternae over empirical truths, and last but not least, of the solemn command to abstain from committing murder. This was formulated by St. Augustine. He tells us that man’s first duty is to abstain from moral evil (I.e. sin); the second is to do as much good as possible. By sin, we mean an offense of God – the infinitely Holy one – which also stains the soul of the sinner, endangering his eternal welfare, and in the majority of cases harms his neighbors.

It is worth mentioning that Plato’s admirable ethics, clearly endorsing the natural moral law, is limited because having no access to revelation, this noble thinker had no clear conception of God’s nature. Therefore he could not perceive that moral evil is an offense against God, even though he came close to it when he wrote that, “he who honors his mother pleases the gods.” His ethics is  “open” to the  message of New Testament; therefore he had been called: “a preparer of the way to Christ,” something that cannot be said of Aristotle for the plain reason that  the latter having denied any possible relationship between God and man, eliminated the notion of sin from his philosophical horizon.

Man’s second  obligation is to do as much good as possible. This calls clarification. For “good” is so rich in meaning and it inevitably opens the door to equivocations. It can clearly refer to “pleasure,” or to what is beneficial to man, or to moral qualities. Whereas it is indeed a duty  to try to benefit mankind by spreading  moral values (mainly by practicing them ourselves), and beneficial goods, there is no moral obligation to intensify “pleasure” either for oneself or for others. It may be laudable, but not obligatory. This is one of the very many pitiful equivocations in Jeremiah Bentham’s so called Ethics: advocating as our duty to produce the greatest possible good for the largest possible number of people. Which good?

In our society, “educated” by the news media, a high percentage of people assume erroneously that our concern for “social issues” should be given pride of place. They forget that the first commandment is to “Love the Lord our God.” This is our very first obligation. It is meaningful  that several of  the ten commandments are “negative”: “thou shalt not.” It clearly reminds us that beingcreatures endowed with free will, we are granted this privilege to freely obey the divine law. It is fashionable to interpret this as a “negative” attitude and to claim that “positive” ethics – the ethics commanding us to do “good” –  should be our primary obligation. As mentioned above, this claim is dangerously misleading.  This type of  “positive” ethics is  favored today. Modern man is sick of “prohibitions” and commands. He has “come of age” (typical claim of all adolescents) and should himself decide what his priorities are.

That “to do good” sounds so attractive to modern ears explains why so many Catholics are tempted to endorse the agenda of a president who  claims to be “socially minded.” We live in a society of “doers” who value “accomplishments” and  place “efficiency” above holiness.

It is noteworthy that a Joseph II, emperor of Austria in the 18th century closed numerous Carthusian monasteries, while respecting “active” religious organizations. The latter “achieved” something. The others did not benefit society. That the prayers and sacrifices of these holy monks were in fact the spiritual foundation of charitable works, is something that he did not and could not be perceived by a ruler fed on the philosophy of Voltaire, Rousseau and their ilk.

Cavour – as anti clerical as he was – was favorable to the work of Don Bosco: his “taming” of wild street boys in Turin, clearly benefited the State. But “contemplative” orders had no right to exist in this upcoming brave new world. The same philosophy motivated Clemenceau in France in the 20th century.

This leads me back to my topic: how can devout Catholics favor a man who has shown total disregard for fundamental moral commandments: thou shalt not murder, because he gives full priority to social improvements?

In this context, it is worth mentioning that when we abstain from committing evil acts, such as murdering, perverse sexual practices, to mention only two, we have no reason whatever to “feel good about ourselves.” We have just done our duty. (“We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.” Luke 17:10) Never has a man received an award for paying his debts, for telling his truth, for being faithful to his wife: such a man has only done what he ought to have done.

But throughout the year, people rightly receive awards for having founded a school, or a hospital, or given huge sums to worthy causes. Inevitably such benefactors, “feel good about themselves,”  “this is my work,” and indeed, the work deserves praise.

St. Therese of Lisieux, one of the lights of the 19th century, did not do anything spectacular. Shortly before her death, a sister was concerned about what could possibly be praised when she died: she had done nothing special. Indeed, that was true, but she did what she ought to do with such a love that in Gods eyes, it gained eternal value.

It is tempting to accuse me of having no understanding for the greatness and nobility of “social work.”  It is the glory of the Catholic Church that from the very beginning she has founded hospitals, schools, and tried in every possible way to ease the burdens of suffering humanity. But this admirable mission was in fact based on a clear awareness of the hierarchy of our moral obligations. “Seek you first the Kingdom of God and His justice, and all the rest will be added unto.” To adore and love God is our primary duty, and it is also man’s glory. From this it follows that we should obey His commandments, a primary one of which; Thou shalt not murder. Early in Genesis, this abominable crime was condemned.

Those who do not perceive this luminous truth suffer from a grave disease: moral blindness. Whereas blind people know that they are blind, the tragic fate of morally blind people is that they do not realize that they are gravely “ill.”

It is my wish and hope that when going to the polls in November, all men of good will will say a short prayer echoing the one of the blind man in Jericho. Christ said to him: what do you want. “Lord, that I may see.” His request was granted.

Moreover,  it is fashionable to claim that in acting, our key concern should be focused on the consequences of our act. Will it benefit society? Once again, the ambiguity is obvious: benefit in what sense? Morally? Humanly? Financially?  Should we be concerned about “immediate’ benefits, or those in the long run? If our key moral concern should be  the consequences of our action, it would be impossible for man ever to make any valid decision because he can never foretell what  “fruits” his action will bring.

Let us imagine the following scenario; a hundred years ago, a man saved a teenager who has fallen in a river, and was close to drowning. Had he known (an impossibility) that the youngster was Adolf Hitler, should he have refused his help? The “call” of the hour was to save a human life. The future is in God’s hands.

Ethics is the most “existential” branch of philosophy. It plays a key role in our daily life. There is one thing that all men can and should share: the “natural” law (not confusing it with the laws of nature such as gravity, which applies to all creatures). I am referring to a law inscribed in every human heart the validity of which is independent of time, place, and circumstances. Moral evil injects poison in the society in which we live, because our acts have direct or indirect consequences on others. To take the life of an innocent defenseless person , is a crime that cries to heaven. Anyone who denies this luminous ethical truth suffers from a terrible sickness: moral blindness. Whereas a blind man knows he is blind, many are those who are morally blind – a much graver “disease” – and are totally unaware of it. They do not even question the validity of their moral vision.

Moral evil is the cancer of any society and history teaches us that all great nations that have disappeared from the face of the earth, were morally decadent. Money never has and never will save a nation.

My husband gave hundred of talks in seventeen countries in four languages. A couple of years before his death, he delivered his very last talk in Orange, California. It was after Roe and Wade (which made him exclaim that “The 'defeated' Hitler won the war” for the Nazi poison (ruthless disrespect for the dignity of human life) had penetrated into the soul of the “conqueror.” This justifies the words of Plato: “… many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the victor …” (Laws, 19)

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s very last words uttered with a trembling voice were, “A country that legalizes murder is doomed.” That should give us food for thought. To vote for a President who fully endorses abortion, is to vote for death.

Man’s second duty is to do as much good as possible. Modern man is psychologically tempted to give priority to "good and noble causes" over our strict duty to abstain from moral evil. The reason is obvious: by not committing murder, we are just doing our "duty" (see Luke 17:10). We do not deserve praise. How ludicrous it would be if a man “bragged” that he has not murdered his parents. How grotesque would it be to give an award to someone because he has never raped a woman or a child. Who deserves praise for doing what he ought to do? Whereas our concern about the wide range of "social issues"  strikes us as noble and generous deeds that deserve to be commended and honored.  It makes us “feel good” about ourselves.

Indeed, it is our strict moral duty to care about our neighbor's needs, but this concern can never justify our breaking a moral law with an absolute veto. There is no conceivable moral justification for endorsing Obama’s position.

Let me repeat: there is a hierarchy of truths, and there is a hierarchy of moral obligations. All those who intend to vote for a president who clearly justifies not only abortion, but homosexuality, same sex marriages and self assisted suicide in the name of “social concerns” are gravely “sinning” against this hierarchy established by God Himself.  We should be “socially concerned,” but such concerns are legitimate only to the extend that they respect the natural law.  Moreover, they should never “allow” us to violate a  moral law with an absolute veto. I am not allowed to kill one person in order to save another person’s life.

Man is a creature: his primary duty is to obey. The great confusion prevalent today is that many confused people justify an intrinsically evil act, because they “calculate” (consequentialism) that "in the long run," it will bring a decrease of  evil  and therefore a greater good.

This reasoning is the Devil’s logic, and he can play the clever logician when convenient.

On the other hand, one could also claim that if abortion were not “free” (a gift from the State paid by others’ taxes whether they want to or not), many of them would not be performed. If it had to be paid for, one would be surprised how many women would hesitate to have one. Money matters in our society.  If  walkers were not paid for, it might be that some persons would courageously train themselves to walk with a cane. The great danger of “great government” is that everyone is “promised a free wheel chair,” without paying for it, and thereby are discouraged from going to therapy and “re-conquer” their mobility. I heard about an acrobat who after a terrible accident lost his leg, and re-learned to do tight rope walking with an artificial leg. He wanted to. Moreover “big government” means a monstrous bureaucracy, and inevitably opens the door far and wide to fraud. A friend of mine who worked for the government his whole life long, told me that in government offices, there is nothing which is not stolen unless it is “solidly nailed down.” Some of us might hesitate to rob a neighbor. Who cares to satisfy one’s needs at the expense of an impersonal monster: the state. Tax payers will fill the deficit.

After original sin,  men were condemned to earn their bread with the sweat of their brow.  Most of them  have no objection to working, but they do not like the “sweat”, that is the pain, the effort. How tempting to vote for a President who  provides for one’s needs without having to “sweat” to enjoy them. This is the danger menacing us today. People should not be encouraged, nay “tempted” to depend on the impersonal state, a Leviathan which imprisons his victims into his treacherous net and will inevitably rob them of their freedom.

There are, of course, cases in which it is fully legitimate to ask and to get help and support.  But we should not forget that the most generous “charities” are in the hands of individuals animated by love of neighbor. It is well known that from the beginning of Christianity, innumerable religious orders have been founded to take care of the poor, the sick, the afflicted.  I am far from denying that the State has no social responsibility, but there is an abyss between personal care or “bureaucratic“ care. Alas, in our society, social help has now becomes a “right” and who is grateful for what we have a right to possess?

A French proverb says, “He who wants to kill his dog, will accuse him of having the plague.” It is easy enough to view an innocent baby as an intruder, an unwanted guest, threatening one’s career or promotion,  and  thereby justify extinguishing the life of a human person made to God’s image and likeness. No doubt, this approach to pregnancy leads to innumerable abortions.

Let us recall the grief of Jewish women like Rachel, like Hannah, like Elizabeth because  of their infertility. How they suffered; how they prayed and their prayers were heard. Today a baby is  viewed as a “tumor,” a “sickness,” that calls for urgent medical intervention.

How deeply regrettable to witness that Catholic education since Vatican II has been so deplorable that many “good” Catholics are plainly ignorant not only of their faith, but also of the basic tenets of the natural law that they share with all men.

Social work, admirable and praise-worthy as it is (let us think of what a Mother Teresa of Calcutta has accomplished – she was not a State Employee, thank God) will never solve the tragic problem of poverty: “You shall always have poor among you.” She devoted every moment of her religious life to relieve the poor. Has poverty disappeared? But her deeds of love are jewels now resplendent on her crown. This does not mean that we shouldn’t do everything possible to help those in need,  but not to commit moral evil has priority. Murder is irreversible: a corpse cannot be brought back to life.

Catholics  blessed by the Magisterium are doubly culpable for not listening to the voice of our pastors who defend both God’s commandments and the “natural” law.

I repeat: to place a strict moral commandment which suffers no exception, on the same level with a vague unwarranted claim that in the long run the abominable moral evil of abortion coupled with “social concerns” will have positive consequences, is a tragic confusion which, alas, has caught many “good” Catholics into its devilish net. Indeed, the Devil is the Master of confusion.

Before going to the polls, may I urge all men of good will to say a short prayer echoing  the one of the blind man of Jericho: “Lord, that I may see.”

Practice soccer day....

Burke Vs Hobbes.....

source link: here

CAMPAIGN 2012: Burke vs. Hobbes?
 
September 5, 2012 - You likely think, gentle reader, that the 2012 presidential race is a contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. That, of course, is true, insofar as the names on our Nov. 6 ballots go. But the 2012 race for the White House is something more, something more profound—something with deeper historical roots in modernity’s wrestling with political power and how that power contributes to the common good.
 
This is a contest, to take symbolic reference points, between Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Edmund Burke (1729-1797).
 
Both were British subjects. Both had a profound impact on modern political theory. Both knew that religion and politics—Church and state—had been thickly interwoven into the history of the West, although here the deep differences between these two paradigmatic figures begin to sharpen: Hobbes tried to drive religious conviction out of the modern public square, while Burke fashioned a vision of political modernity that drew in part on the rich social pluralism of the Catholic Middle Ages.
 
In a Hobbesian world, the only actors of consequence are the state and the individual. In a Burkean world, the institutions of civil society—family, religious congregation, voluntary association, business, trade union and so forth—“mediate” between the individual and the state, and the just state takes care to provide an appropriate legal framework in which those civil-society institutions can flourish.
 
In a Hobbesian world, the state—“Leviathan,” in the title of Hobbes’s most famous and influential work—monopolizes power for the sake of protecting individuals from the vicissitudes of a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In a Burkean world, civil society provides a thick layer of mediation—protection, if you will—that cushions the interactions between individuals and life’s challenges.
 
A Hobbesian world is a world of contracts and legal relationships, period. A Burkean world is a world in which there are both contracts—the rule of law—and covenants: those more subtly textured human associations (beginning with marriage) by which men and women form bonds of affection, allegiance and mutual responsibility.
 
Catholic political theorists have always had major difficulties with Hobbes, and not simply for his promotion of what we would call, today, the “naked public square”: a public space shorn of religious conviction. Hobbes’s vision of the state is far too cold for the social sensibilities of Catholics, who habitually think of society as organic, not artificial or contrived.
 
By contrast, Burke’s defense of society’s “small platoons” has numerous affinities with Catholic social doctrine, from Leo XIII through Benedict XVI. John Paul II, for example, was particularly forceful in his defense of the mediating institutions of civil society, describing them in the 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus as schools of freedom: those natural human associations, beginning with the family, where beautiful, willful little tyrants (which is a precise description of every 2-year-old ever born) are transformed into the kind of civil, tolerant adult citizens who can participate in public life through their minds, not just their muscles.
 
No American presidential candidate is going to run on an explicitly Hobbesian platform. And the complexities of life in a post-modern world are such that a purely Burkean republic is unlikely anytime soon. The issue here is one of tendencies, orientations, visions of possibility. And at that level, 2012 really is shaping up as a contest between “Hobbes” and “Burke.”
 
For as the candidates have presented themselves to the country over the past months, and most recently at their conventions, it has become ever more clear that America will choose in 2012 between two paths into the future. Along one path, there is, finally, room for only the individual and the state. Along the other path, the flourishing institutions of civil society empower individuals and contribute to real problem-solving. In the former, the state defines responsibilities and awards benefits (and penalties). In the latter, individuals and free, voluntary associations assume responsibility and thereby thus make their contribution to the common good.
 
Hobbes vs. Burke. It’s an old argument. It’s also the argument we shall have between now and Nov. 6.

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on the tragedy of gay adoption, gay marriage, and IVF/egg sperm donors....

The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. According to this moral maxim, because I would never not want to know and be raised by both my biological parents I can not approve of other people being denied their right to a mommy and a daddy. 
Why has the Left seemingly abandoned this principle? Isn't it universal? Afterall 100% of all people have had one mommy and one daddy. Yes, including 100% of all gay men and women in the world.
PS About gay adoption: Well why if you could choose between 2 sets of equally capable parents one two men and one one man and one women why would you rather choose two men? It doesn't make sense to me from a fairness perspective. Adoption agencies try to match kids' background to their adoptive parents so a native american child will go to a native american couple first. So because every child is the result of a man and women coming together wouldn't you want to place them as close to their background as possible? ie mom and dad? Also because 98% of kids grow up to be straight and those raised by gay parents are like maybe 90-95% likely to be straight wouldn't you want for fairness and for basic justice to put them with a couple to whom they will be most likely to relate? and on whom they can most easily model their behaviour? This has nothing to do with any religious convictions just basic reasoning, or am I missing something?
Anyway great article and yes, look at even what Elton John said last week, that his adoptive boy will be crushed to find out he doesn't have a mum. Of course the truth is that he does, but she's just decided to have nothing to do with him, short of giving him half his genes via an egg, but look if I found out that I actually had a mum but was denied her by her and my dad and my so-called adoptive other dad I think I'd have a mental breakdown. I would be crushed and emotionally I think I'd be devastated. Maybe that's just be but I suspect it isn't.
Maybe our society is going too far to make a group of people feel welcome that I suspect will never feel welcome enough.

and another awesome one

"Most people approve of gay couples adopting. I am one of these people. ,,, Being raised by one’s biological parents is not only ideal according to social science research, but according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is a human right. My biggest fear is that the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples will strip children of the right to be raised by their natural parents, because law and culture will demand that we celebrate all the means by which same-sex couples become parents."
If "being raised by one's biological parents is not only ideal" but is also "a human right," then being raised by a mother and a father is also "ideal" and "a human right." If Alana Newman's biggest fear is that "children will be stripped of their "right to be raised by their natural parents," how is it that she approves of gay couples adopting, which not only leaves the child without either a mother or a father, but also forces the child into the unnatural home environment created by two adults of the same sex sleeping together. It is not like children don't figure out what that means.
We won't really know until a generation of children have been raised that way what the most common psychological impact an unnatural home environment has on children. It is hard to imagine how that most common psychological impact will be anything but negative. Our willingness to use them like millions of guinea pigs in a huge social experiment is indicative of the loss of respect for children that is so rampant in our culture.
Acceptance of same-sex adoption and the disrespect for children inherent in it should not surprise us. After all, another blatant indication of our dramatic loss of respect for children is late abortions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in the United States, 1.5% of abortions are at 21 weeks or after. There have been well over 50 million abortions in the U.S. since Roe. That is at least 750,000 late 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions where children clearly recognizable as just that were murdered. Taking innocent human life at any stage of its development is gravely wrong, but you can show even a small child a picture of an unborn child at 21 weeks or later and they will know it is a baby. So should we. Or maybe we know that all too well and the problem is that we just don't respect children anymore.