Conscience
What is conscience?
Conscience is our morality-detector.
“Deep within his cosncience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which
he must obey... calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil” (GS 16).
Conscience is the inner voice in a man that moves him to do good under any circumstances and
to avoid evil by all means. At the same time it is the ability to distinguish the one from the other.
In the conscience God speaks to man. (CCC, 1776-1779)
Conscience is compared with an inner voice in which God manifest himself in a man. God is the
one who becomes apparent in the conscience. When we say, i cannot reconcile that with my
conscience, this means for Christian, I cannot do that in the sight of my Creator. Many people
have gone to jail or been executed because they were true to their conscience.
“Anything that done against conscience is a sin”. St. Thomas Aquinas
“To do violence to people’s conscience means to harm them seriously, to deal extremely painful
blow to their dignity. In a certain sense it is worse than killing them”. John XXIII, the one who
convoke the 2nd Vatican Council.
Conscience gives us three things: Functions
a. An awareness of good and evil
b. A desire of good and evil
c. A feeling of joy and peace and rightness at having done good and of unease and guilt at
having done evil.
These three functions of conscience correspond to the three parts of the soul,
(a) the mind, or intellect, or reason,
(b) the will, and
(c) the emotions or feelings.
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 (CCC, 1778).
Moral conscience... enjoins him at the appropriate moment to do good and to avoid evil. (CCC,
1777).
Conscience is also an intuitive feeling approving those that are good and denouncing those that
are evil. (CCC, 1777).
Can someone be compelled to do something that is against his conscience?
No one may be compelled to act against his conscience, provided he acts within the limits of the
common good (CCC, 1780-1782).
Anyone who overlooks the conscience of a person ignores it and uses coercion, violates that
person’s dignity. Practically nothing else makes man more human than the gift of being able
personally to distinguish good from evil and to choose between them. This is so even if the
decision, seen in an objective light, is wrong. Unless man’s conscience has been incorrrectly
formed, the inner voice speaks in agreement with what is generally reasonable, just, and good in
God’s sight.
Types of conscience.
1. Certain
2. Doubtful
3. Righteous
4. Erroneous
Is someone who in good conscience acts wrongly guilty in God’s sight?
No. If a person has thoroughly examined himself and arrived at a certain judgment, he must in
any case follow his inner voice, even at the risk of doing something wrong.(CCC, 1790-1794,
1801-1802)
God does not blame us for the objective harm that results from a wrong judgment of conscience,
provided that we ourselves are not responsible for having a badly formed conscience. While it is
quite true that ultimately one must follow ones conscience, it must likewise be kept in mind that
people have swindled, murdered, tortured, and betrayed others on the basis of what they wrongly
suppose to be their conscience.
Certain errors about conscience.
1. Conscience is not just a feeling.
2. Conscience is not infallible.
3. Conscience is not passive.
Moral Principles guiding conscience
(1) Only the true and certain conscience is the right proximate rule of morality.
(2) Man has the obligation, therefore, to make sure his conscience is “true”, i.e. sufficiently
formed and informed.
(3) Man has the obligation to follow not only his true conscience, but also his erroneous
conscience if it is invincibly erroneous.
(4) It is not right to follow a culpably erroneous conscience or a doubtful conscience.
(5) Doubts can be resolved by means of sincerity, upright intention, the desire to seek the
will of God in everything, and a sense of responsibility in consulting the right person.
Can a person form his conscience?
Yes, in fact he must do that. The conscience, which is innate to every person endowed
with reason, can be misled and deadened. That is why it must be formed into an
increasingly fine-tuned instrument for acting rightly. (CCC, 1783-1788, 1799-1800)
The first school of conscience is self-criticism. We have the tendency to judge things to
our own advantage. The second school of conscience is orientation to the good actions of
others. The correct formation of conscience leads man into the freedom to do what has
been correctly identified as good. With the help of the Holy Spirit and Scripture, the
Church over her long history has accumulated a vast knowledge about right action; it is
part of her mission to instruct people and also to give them directions.
Conscience must be informed and moral judgment enlightened. A well-formed
conscience is upright and truthful. It formulates its judgment according to reason, in
conformity to the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator.
The formation of the conscience is life-long task.
In the formation of conscience, the word of God is the light of our path.
