CHAPTER SEVEN

Conscience
ELIZABETH SWEENY BLOCK

Theologians and ethicists have been writing about conscience for many centuries, yet a univocal
definition remains elusive. Richard Gula once wrote, “Trying to explain conscience is like trying
to nail jello to the wall; just when you think you have it pinned down, part of it begins to slip
away.”1 This is so because conceptions of conscience have developed and evolved over many
centuries, but also because conscience holds together, or even holds in tension, opposite poles of
the moral life. For instance, scholars often describe conscience as deeply private and personal,
even as it is profoundly relational, formed and exercised in community. Conscience also
mediates the tension between subjectivity and objectivity, between the self and the world.
Additionally, conscience names a process that involves the interior life of a person and not
simply her actions, and this is much more difficult to define with precision. Furthermore,
conscience cannot be easily separated from other ambiguous concepts, including freedom, truth,
authority, and church, which means conscience is necessarily representative of many theological
debates. Statements about the nature of conscience always imply larger determinations about
what the moral life entails and requires; therefore, much is at stake when theologians take up the
topic of conscience today.
Perhaps more important than defining conscience is identifying what having a conscience or
living as persons of conscience implies. James Bretzke, SJ, uses the phrase “conscience-based
moral living,” which rightly turns conscience into more of an action than an object. Conscience
is not a thing that we possess, but a way of life.2 This chapter provides a brief history of
conscience, including traditional terminology and distinctions associated with conscience. I offer
a brief section on Protestant and Orthodox conceptions of conscience, but the primary focus of
this chapter is on conscience in Roman Catholic moral theology since the Second Vatican
Council, after which scholarship on conscience exploded as theologians worked to situate
conscience in the new personalist paradigm of morality. I focus on three features of the
contemporary conscience: the holistic nature of conscience, shorthand for the moral self; the
primacy of conscience, although its work involves integrating numerous moral sources; and the
relationality and reciprocity of conscience. I conclude, all too briefly, with attention to two
ongoing challenges to conscience: the constant tension between conscience as discernment
versus obedience, which is a particular challenge for Catholics given the role of the magisterium
in moral matters, and the more pressing, non-denominational matter of the impact of cultures of
racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia on conscience. This short chapter cannot do
justice to conscience, but my hope is that it at least provides a helpful introduction and indicates
where there remains work to be done.

HISTORY AND TERMINOLOGY

The first use of the Greek word for conscience, syneidesis, is attributed to Democritus of Abdera
in the fifth century BCE, who used it to mean a faculty of self-reflection. This term is absent from
later Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle, but they used terms that are recognized as precursors
to conscience and that reflect this moral self-awareness, including “wisdom” and “prudence.”
Linda Hogan observes that conscience in Greek, Latin, and Jewish texts can be used to mean
awareness in a nonethical sense, and these instances can give a false impression of the frequency
of the use of conscience in a moral sense. Additionally, she notes that the idea of conscience as
self-reflection and as a guide were conveyed by other terminology, such as wisdom and heart,
and this is important to include in the history of conscience, even if explicit references to
syneidesis (Greek) or conscientia (Latin) are lacking.3
Conscience is virtually absent from the Hebrew Bible, save for two or three references, but
here too scholars have identified references to the interior life, the need to interiorize the law, and
to the “heart” as precursors to conscience. St. Paul in the New Testament is the first person to
reference a guiding or future-oriented dimension of conscience, as opposed to conscience as only
a judgment on past actions. These two dimensions of conscience—reflection on past actions and
guidance on future actions—are referred to as the consequent and antecedent conscience or the
judicial and legislative conscience. Conscience is said to look back at our actions, perhaps
feeling remorse but possibly also affirming what one has done, and to legislate future actions.
In addition to the distinction between the judicial and legislative conscience, there is also a
distinction made between the habitual and actual conscience, a distinction that is the result of an
error of transcription that shaped all future discussions of conscience. Alongside the Greek word
for conscience, syneidesis, we have another word to contend with: synderesis. It is believed that
St. Jerome (c. 340–420) invented the word synderesis by scribal error in his Commentary on
Ezekiel (“perhaps the monk had too much wine with dinner,” jokes moral theologian Charles
Curran4), yet it has become a mainstay in understandings of conscience. Synderesis is the “spark
of conscience,” the desire to discern and do good. Medieval theologians accepted both terms and
sought to explain their coexistence. Thomas Aquinas understood synderesis to be the innate
knowledge that human beings have to seek good and avoid evil. Synderesis has come to be
known as the habitual conscience, knowledge that inclines us to act well, distinct from the actual
conscience, which applies that knowledge. For Aquinas, conscientia or conscience is the act of
applying knowledge to a particular situation, that is, acting on the knowledge of the habitual
conscience. Contemporary moral theologian Hogan insists that although it would be easy to
dismiss these distinctions as obsolete and insignificant, the presence of both the habitual and
actual conscience
allows us to make a distinction between the basic goodness of a person and the occasional lapses into bad judgment,
of which we are all capable. In an important sense, it prefigures a very modern recognition that although individuals
may make wrong decisions or act against what they know to be right, this does not mean that their basic or
fundamental orientation is flawed.5

One signifies moral orientation, the other action.6

This leads to the third important distinction that has less to do with conscience itself and more
to do with errors of conscience. Granting that one may have the knowledge and inclination to
seek good and yet still err in action, we are now in the territory of the erroneous conscience. St.
Paul famously admitted that he knew the good and yet did not necessarily do it.7 The erroneous
conscience is one that errs, but it may do so either vincibly or invincibly. Vincible ignorance
indicates that the person should have known better and is therefore culpable for her erroneous
action. Invincible ignorance recognizes that a person may have a certain conscience, meaning
that she believes sincerely that her understanding and action are right and true, but still err. This
distinction between vincible and invincible ignorance is, therefore, a distinction that determines
culpability.
Invincible ignorance hinges on a well-formed and informed conscience. Different theologians
have interpreted the erroneous conscience differently. Bernard of Clairvaux believed actions
done through invincible ignorance are bad and not excused. Peter Abelard claimed that intention
alone can make an action good. Aquinas stated that an erroneous act is objectively wrong but the
person is not responsible for this wrong act. Alphonsus Ligouri went beyond Aquinas and
claimed that invincibly wrong actions are not just excused but are good.8 Aquinas’s position is
generally accepted today: if a person believes that something is a commandment of God, then to
disobey one’s conscience on this matter is to disobey God. This sentiment is echoed in Vatican
II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, which states, “Conscience
frequently errs from invincible ignorance without losing its dignity. The same cannot be said for
a man who cares but little for truth and goodness, or for a conscience which by degrees grows
practically sightless as a result of habitual sin.”9 That an invincibly erroneous conscience retains
its dignity further solidifies the sacredness of conscience, although the categories of vincible and
invincible ignorance may no longer be adequate in the face of unconscious biases and implicit
forms of discrimination pervasive in our culture, including racism, sexism, homophobia, and
xenophobia. I return to this problem in the final section of this chapter.

PROTESTANT AND ORTHODOX CONCEPTIONS OF CONSCIENCE

It is perhaps not all that surprising that the author of an essay on Protestant conscience argues
that “conscience, or at least consciousness of conscience, has been given a far more elevated role
in Christian moral thinking than it actually deserves.”10 Dave Leal has a number of concerns
about conscience, including its focus on conscious reasoning when moral agents are often not
aware of willing most of the time and its misplaced confidence in humans as the source of their
own good actions, neglecting the will of the divine. He asserts that “conscience is not ultimate,
and we may hope beyond the experience of it to a fulfillment in the one who is Truth himself.”11
Still other Protestant theologians are more appreciative of conscience. In an essay on what he
calls the “transmoral conscience,” Paul Tillich sympathizes with theologians who argue that
conscience’s confusing and contradictory connotations warrant the elimination of the term from
the study of ethics, yet he believes conscience is “a definite reality which … can and must be
described adequately.”12 For Tillich, the conscience should be “transmoral,” that is, “it judges
not in obedience to a moral law, but according to its participation in a reality that transcends the
sphere of moral commands.”13 The transmoral conscience accepts our moral imperfection and
the guilt that accompanies every decision we make and every act we perform; it rises above the
moral realm, where we attain a joyful conscience as the result of justification by God’s grace. In
other words, the transmoral conscience transcends the realm of law by the acceptance of divine
grace; it conquers “the bad, moral conscience” that dwells in absolute despair. This is one answer
to Leal’s concern that conscience is too human-centered. H. Richard Niebuhr also suggests that
conscience is not individual and that moral agents cannot both be accused by and accuse
themselves, meaning that the judgments of conscience must come from another if conscience “is
to avoid self-contradiction.”14
For this reason, Niebuhr is critical of the Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler and German
philosopher Immanuel Kant, both of whom he reads as recognizing conscience as merely an
inward judge of oneself and one’s own actions. However, Jeffrey Morgan argues that it is a
misunderstanding of Kant’s conscience to believe that he “gives the modern moral subject a
license to view herself as accountable not to a tradition, a community, a particular history, or to
an objective moral order but to herself as her own lawgiver.”15 Rather, “Kant’s theory of
conscience stands in a line with figures like Augustine and Chrysostom and these depictions in
the New Testament of the individual standing before God in conscience.”16 According to
William Schweiker, “Conscience is a term for human transcendence in which the claims of the
‘integrity’ of life, one’s own and that of others, is constitutive of the self. In the religions, this
means that ‘conscience’ is a communication among and between worlds, including the divine
world, without collapsing those worlds into one.”17 For Schweiker, conscience is ethical
awareness of the claim of the integrity of life on human existence before God.18
In the Orthodox tradition, “conscience is part of a conceptual system to describe ascesis, the
spiritual struggle necessary for fellowship with God; it does not have … the sense of a secular
autonomous faculty by which justice may be discerned.”19 Conscience is inseparable from “the
invitation to human beings to intimate communion with the Divine Trinity.”20 Conscience draws
one into a living relationship with God and is part of the whole ascetical life, concerned with
awareness and discernment. There is much to be learned from the humility of the Orthodox
conscience. “There is no luminous, self-evident awareness of what is right and wrong in the
spiritual life. The human being is, from the start, a mystery to him or herself.”21 Orthodox prayer
books include prayers for forgiveness of sins that one may not even know he has committed.
There is explicit recognition of the reality that conscience can be wrong because human beings
are fallible.

CONSCIENCE SINCE VATICAN II

The earlier-cited excerpt from Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern
World is the conclusion of a longer passage that is the quintessential statement on conscience in
the Roman Catholic Church:
In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to
obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to
his heart: do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of man;
according to it he will be judged. Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with
God, Whose voice echoes in his depths. In a wonderful manner conscience reveals that law which is fulfilled by
love of God and neighbor. In fidelity to conscience, Christians are joined with the rest of men in the search for truth,
and for the genuine solution to the numerous problems which arise in the life of individuals from social
relationships. Hence the more right conscience holds sway, the more persons and groups turn aside from blind
choice and strive to be guided by the objective norms of morality.22

This statement on conscience is only the beginning of a flurry of activity around the term.
Conscience entered a new phase post-Vatican II, wherein it became less of a mechanism for
discrete decisions and more of a representation of a person’s moral self, which includes but
certainly is not limited to actions and concrete decisions. Widespread interest in conscience in
the decades following the Council is the result of the working out of a new paradigm in morality,
one that is person-centered or “personalist” as opposed to act-centered. That is, the Second
Vatican Council marked a shift in moral theology from a focus on specific actions as right or
wrong to a focus on the character and orientation of the person, although this shift was in the
making prior to the Council and has continued to evolve since then. Conscience, understood
traditionally as the faculty of moral decision making that determines how we act, was naturally
implicated in this paradigm shift. If morality is not determined solely by actions, but is in fact
also constituted by a person’s character and relationship with God, then understandings of
conscience must account for this change. Many scholars who have written about conscience in
the past fifty years have done so in order to situate conscience in this personalist paradigm. What
has been said about conscience has been in the service of accentuating the character, narrative,
and history of a person and not only her actions. In what follows, I will highlight three
significant features of conscience today: its holistic nature, its primacy, and its relationality.

THE HOLISTIC CONSCIENCE

Bernard Häring describes the experience of conscience as God’s calling the whole person.23
Richard Gula notes, “Whereas in the past we tried to restrict conscience to a function of the will
or of the intellect, today we understand conscience as an expression of the whole person. Simply
put, conscience is ‘me coming to a decision.’ ”24 Since the Second Vatican Council, many
scholars have emphasized the holistic nature of conscience, but a concrete definition of
conscience remains elusive, in part because conscience is not merely a “thing” to which we can
point. Scholarship on conscience has retained the association of conscience with an inner sense
of right and wrong but has also emphasized the roles of reason, grace, emotions, and intuition in
conscience and situated conscience within the many dimensions of the person’s experience,
including cultural and religious background, education, emotions, past history, and future
plans.25 For Hogan, conscience is a term that indicates moral self-governance and highlights that
moral activity is freely chosen.26 Anne Patrick identifies conscience as an aspect of the self, a
kind of personal moral awareness.27 These contemporary examples equate conscience with the
moral self and moral agency.
Gula describes conscience as a capacity, process, and judgment. This tripartite structure
illustrates the fluid nature of conscience and indicates that conscience is not merely a faculty or a
part of the body or the brain. As a capacity, conscience is “the fundamental characteristic of
being human”28 and “our general sense of value and … responsibility which makes it possible
for us to engage in moral discussions.”29 This capacity is often equated with synderesis,
sometimes referred to as “the spark of conscience.” As a process, conscience “searches for what
is right through accurate perception”30 and includes analysis and reflection. This is important
because it implies that conscience is in constant motion, always searching, on an endless journey
toward the truth. We are never finished; our story is always incomplete. Finally, Gula retains the
more common understanding of conscience as a “concrete judgment of what I must do in a
situation based on my personal perception and grasp of values.”31 This is a discrete act of
conscience, in a particular moment, introduced above as syneidesis or conscientia: the act of
applying moral knowledge to a particular situation.
Bretzke builds on this holistic picture of conscience by identifying conscience as a “modality
of being human,” that is, a way of being human in the world and which gives us insight into the
true nature of human morality.32 Bretzke focuses on what he calls “the spiral of conscience-
based moral living,” which further implies that conscience is not merely a faculty or judgment
but a way of life, our moral self always in progress.33 “A spiral suggests both a certain circularity
in the process of conscience development as well as an ongoing and upward progression as we
grow in moral wisdom and skill in putting this wisdom into practice.”34 Bretzke’s spiral begins
with and returns to the formation of conscience, which requires paying attention to a multitude of
sources of moral wisdom, especially to voices other than the ones we commonly, or want to,
hear; we must escape our comfort zone and hear the voices of those from whom we differ. In
between the forming and informing of our conscience comes reconsideration, reflection,
discernment, decision, and action, finally returning to formation. Even as scholars such as
Bretzke argue that conscience is not merely about decision making, often in our efforts to capture
the meaning of conscience we end up right back at conscience as judgment. Bretzke himself
notes the weakness of his spiral model: “It is still very intellectual and rationalistic and seems to
suggest that conscience is mostly about coming to the right answer.”35 However, Bretzke is
much more interested in identifying conscience as the process of “moral striving to seek out and
do good and avoid or minimize evil.” Here again it is evident that conscience names a process,
the ongoing work of moral selves on a journey.36

THE PRIMACY OF CONSCIENCE AND INTEGRATING SOURCES OF

MORAL WISDOM
The Second Vatican Council emphasized the primacy of conscience. The above excerpt from
The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World indicates that conscience is a
sanctuary, a sacred space where we meet God but also a space that cannot be intruded upon by
outside authorities. Earlier in the chapter, I noted that a conscience that errs invincibly retains its
dignity, another indication of the sacredness of conscience. As a sacred space where we
encounter God’s voice, however, conscience is not radically autonomous. Following one’s
conscience is not the same as doing whatever strikes one as good and right, independent of any
outside sources of moral wisdom. Rather, as Hogan has described it, conscience “is the
individual’s personal and self-conscious integration of collective moral wisdom with her/his own
learned insight.”37 Not only do we again get the sense that conscience is a process or ongoing
work, but we also see here that it requires attention to multiple sources of moral wisdom. “Since
conscience is the source of free and responsible decision making, it is rightly regarded as the
supreme authority in ethics. However, Christianity operates with a community-based model of
ethics not with an individualistic one.”38 Conscience-based moral living must integrate sacred
texts, the collective wisdom of Christians past and present, persons entrusted with preaching the
Christian message, one’s own experiences of the living God, and the knowledge we gain from
other disciplines, including science, sociology, psychology, and history. The church plays a
central role in formation of conscience, but the authority of the church vis-à-vis individual
consciences remains a source of tension and debate to which I will turn below.

THE RELATIONALITY AND RECIPROCITY OF CONSCIENCES

Perhaps one of the most important developments with respect to conscience since the Second
Vatican Council has been recognition of how profoundly communal and social it is. Bernard
Häring used the phrase “the reciprocity of consciences” and argued that conscience is “the
person’s moral faculty, the inner core and sanctuary where one knows oneself in confrontation
with God and with fellowmen.” He claimed that we “can confront ourselves only to the extent
that we genuinely encounter the Other and the others.”39 This is a critical reminder that if we
think of conscience as profoundly individual and autonomous, we misunderstand not only
conscience but also the meaning and purpose of the moral life.
Conscience is a social phenomenon. We are always and ought to be influenced by our social
relationships. Moral reasoning takes place not in a vacuum but in context. The church can
provide a community in which faithful moral reasoning can take place. Hogan continues this
contextual, communal theme, observing that all moral truths are understood and lived out in
particular situations and contexts. Recently theologians have emphasized the importance of
respect not only for one’s own conscience, but for the consciences and conscientious judgments
of others. Hogan urges us to think about conscience not as a “conversation stopper,” which it
often can be when someone evokes the phrase “I followed my conscience” or “My conscience is
clear.” Rather, conscience is relational in that living as a person of conscience requires deliberate
self-reflection and self-awareness as the foundation for dialogue.
In justifying our ethical positions to one another we must explain why we believe we are correct in holding the view
we do, for example, on the equality of men and women, or the goodness of same-sex relationships, but we should do
so in a manner that conveys something about the moral framework out of which we are speaking and acting, and
which we hope will be intelligible and convincing to the other.40

Legal scholar Robert Vischer similarly urges us to break conscience out of its “black box,”
wherein conscience is a law unto itself, accessible and accountable to no one. Conscience is “not
some self-contained black box but comprises convictions about right and wrong in the world of
actions and is as likely to serve as path of dialogue as path of isolation.”41 Although the moral
authority of conscience may be highly personal, the authority of conscience is made possible by
claims that originate outside the person. Conscience is not merely the means for justifying
whatever I believe to be right. Conscience exists and functions in relation to things outside itself,
including objective moral norms and the needs and well-being of the surrounding community.
Invoking conscience should not stop the conversation but open us to dialogue.

CHALLENGES OF CONSCIENCE
In 1874, John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote, “Conscience is the voice of God, whereas it is
fashionable on all hands now to consider it in one way or another a creation of man.”42 The same
could be said today. Because conscience is at least in part personal and private, there exists
always this danger that conscience will be purely self-referential, nothing more than a source of
self-justification for whatever we want to do, “a creation of man” with no connection to objective
moral truths. If I declare that my conscience dictates that I act this way, or if I contend that “my
conscience is clear,” does that simply make it so? The short answer is “no,” but this is tricky
territory.
Scholars generally agree that conscience is the medium between subjectivity and objectivity,
between the self and the world, including moral objectivity. As Curran puts it,
 The subject pole concerns the human person and involves one’s basic orientation and the virtues or attitudes that
characterize each one. The object pole considers the world, the communities, and the relationships in which people
live and the values and principles that direct them in these areas. The church itself constitutes an important part of
the object pole, but the primary importance of the church for Christian morality requires that the church be
considered first in Catholic moral theology.43

The subject pole of the moral life encapsulates “who the person is as subject,” while the object
pole is constituted by “what the person does as agent.”44 The object pole of morality reminds us
that morality is not solely about individual humans and our feelings, desires, wishes, and hopes.
That there is an object pole of morality indicates not only that there is something true,
irrespective of whether you or I recognize or concur with this truth, but also that we as subjects
interact with objects, people, communities, and a world that are outside of us. The push and pull,
give and take, between these poles is conscience at work. This is again why the formation of
conscience with attention to a multitude of sources is critical; without this, conscience is in
danger of being purely self-referential.
This is a perennial problem surrounding conscience: how to navigate the personal and sacred
nature of conscience while also hearing, respecting, and living the truths of one’s faith. Ideally,
these components of the moral life are in harmony, but this is not always the case. In these
situations, is the work of conscience obedience or discernment? Bretzke has called this the next
great quaestio disputata in the Catholic Church.45 There are still those who identify a rightly
formed conscience as one that is fully aligned with Church teaching, while others argue for
respecting decisions made in conscience, even if those decisions appear to be “in objective non-
compliance” with Church teaching. Unlike Pope John Paul II, who worried about the separation
of freedom from truth and subsequently equated conscience with obedience in his 1993
encyclical Veritatis splendor, Pope Francis errs on the side of discernment. In Amoris laetitia,
Francis writes of the difficulty that Church leaders have in “mak[ing] room for the consciences
of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel amid their limitations, and
are capable of carrying out their own discernment in complex situations. We have been called to
form consciences, not to replace them.”46 This is a bold statement about the primacy of
conscience in relation to the magisterium.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to conscience today is not how to balance discernment and
obedience but how to form and inform our consciences in a world mired by structural sin, or
what Bryan Massingale calls “culturally legitimated social evil.”47 Racism, sexism, homophobia,
and xenophobia are daily realities, not only in explicit acts but also built into our systems,
structures, and cultures, such that we are implicated in injustice simply by virtue of our
participation in everyday life. Attending to conscience is a reminder to be deliberately self-
reflective, aware of who we are, what we are doing, and how what we do impacts who we are.
But we must also strive for a deep and honest awareness of our own context and culture, which
define us and form our ways of life. We must remove the blinders that conceal our own
involvement in sinful injustice. This problem reveals the inadequacy of invincible ignorance,
which too easily renders people blameless and fails to account for implicit cultural evils.
At a gathering of Catholic theologians, Massingale spoke these words: “Our moral theology
[is] becom[ing] conceptually complicit in structural injustice.”48 If we fail to understand
conscience as the moral self, relational, navigating the tension between discernment and
authority, accountable to the consciences of others, and wounded by unconscious biases and
cultural evils, then conscience becomes an inadequate term at best, an instrument of injustice at
worst. Conscience ought to unify, not divide.
 SUGGESTED READINGS
Bretzke, James, SJ. “Conscience and the Synod: An Evolving Quaestio Disputata.” Journal of
Moral Theology 5, no. 2 (2016): 167–72.
Cox, Kathryn Lilla. Water Shaping Stone: Faith, Relationships, and Conscience Formation.
Collegeville: Liturgical, 2015.
DeCosse, David E., and Kristin E. Heyer, eds. Conscience and Catholicism: Rights,
Responsibilities, and Institutional Responses. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2015.
DeCosse, David E., and Thomas A. Nairn, OFM, eds. Conscience and Catholic Health Care:
From Clinical Contexts to Governmental Mandates. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2017.
Hogan, Linda. Confronting the Truth: Conscience in the Catholic Tradition. Mahwah: Paulist,
2000.
Keenan, James, SJ. “Redeeming Conscience.” Theological Studies 76, no. 1 (2015): 129–47.

1 Richard Gula, SS, Reason Informed by Faith: Foundations of Catholic Morality (Mahwah: Paulist, 1989), 123.
2 James T. Bretzke, SJ, A Morally Complex World: Engaging Contemporary Moral Theology (Collegeville: Liturgical,
2004), 138.
3 Linda Hogan, Confronting the Truth: Conscience in the Catholic Tradition (Mahwah: Paulist, 2000), 37–8.
4 Charles Curran, The Catholic Moral Tradition Today: A Synthesis (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press,
1999), 175.
5 Hogan, Confronting the Truth, 67.
6 This is a distinction and synthesis that moral theologians still grapple with today. What is the relationship between the
person and her actions? In the twentieth century, the fundamental option theory placed greater emphasis on a person’s
orientation and less weight on actions, although a person’s orientation is expressed in and through her actions. See
Darlene Weaver, The Acting Person and Christian Moral Life (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011).
7 Rom. 7:19.
8 This summary of different positions on error is the work of Curran, Catholic Moral Tradition Today, 88.
9 Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1965), § 16.
10 Dave Leal, “Against Conscience: A Protestant View,” in Conscience in World Religions, ed. Jayne Hoose (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 21.
11 Ibid., 56.
12 Paul Tillich, Morality and Beyond, Library of Theological Ethics, foreword by William Schweiker (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, [1963] 1995), 65.
13 Ibid., 77.
14 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1963),
74.
15 Jeffrey Morgan, “Self-Knowledge and the Approximation of Divine Judgment: Conscience in the Practical Philosophy
and Moral Theology of Immanuel Kant,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 36, no. 1 (2016): 111.
16 Ibid., 119.
17 William Schweiker, “The Ethical Limits of Power: On the Perichoresis of Power,” Studies in Christian Ethics 29, no. 1
(2015): 12.
18 William Schweiker, “Responsibility and the Attunement of Conscience,” Journal of Religion 93, no. 4 (2013): 471.
19 Stephen Thomas, “Conscience in Orthodox Thought,” in Conscience in World Religions, ed. Jayne Hoose (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 104.
20 Ibid., 105.
21 Ibid., 106.
22 Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes, § 16.
23 Bernard Häring, Free and Faithful in Christ: Moral Theology for Clergy and Laity, Vol. 1 (New York: Crossroad,
1978), 227.
24 Gula, Reason Informed by Faith, 131.
25 For these descriptions of conscience, I am indebted to Charles Curran and Linda Hogan. See Curran, Catholic Moral
Tradition Today, 172, 186; and Hogan, Confronting the Truth, 9, 13.
26 Hogan, Confronting the Truth.
27 Anne E. Patrick, Liberating Conscience: Feminist Explorations in Catholic Moral Theology (New York: Continuum,
1996).
28 Gula, Reason Informed by Faith, 10, 244.
29 Ibid., 132.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Bretzke, A Morally Complex World, 130–1.
33 Ibid., 138–44.
34 Ibid., 138.
35 Ibid., 142.
36 It has been argued that conscience has become a means of being consistent with oneself rather than the means of
judging ourselves as God judges us. The worry is that conscience loses touch with the transcendent and universally
binding moral law against which we should judge ourselves. See Jeffrey Morgan, “A Loss of Judgment: The Dismissal
of Judicial Conscience in Recent Christian Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 45, no. 3 (2017): 539–61.
37 Hogan, Confronting the Truth, 15.
38 Ibid., 14.
39 Häring, Free and Faithful in Christ, 224.
40 Linda Hogan, “Marriage Equality, Conscience, and the Catholic Tradition,” in Conscience and Catholicism: Rights,
Responsibilities, and Institutional Responses, ed. David E. DeCosse and Kristin E. Heyer (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2015), 91.
41 Robert Vischer, Conscience and the Common Good: Reclaiming the Space between Person and State (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 22.
42 John Henry Cardinal Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, 247.
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/index.html#titlepage.
43 Curran, Catholic Moral Tradition Today, 83.
44 Ibid., 95.
45 James Bretzke, SJ, “Conscience and the Synod: An Evolving Quaestio Disputata,” Journal of Moral Theology 5, no. 2
(2016): 167–72.
46 Pope Francis, Amoris laetitia (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2016), § 37.
47 Bryan Massingale, “Social Sin versus Cultural Evil: Insights from African American Socio-Political Analysis,” paper
delivered at the 73rd Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Indianapolis, June 8, 2018.
See also, Bryan Massingale, “Conscience Formation and the Challenge of Unconscious Racial Bias,” in Conscience
and Catholicism: Rights, Responsibilities, and Institutional Responses, ed. David E. DeCosse and Kristin E. Heyer
(Maryknoll: Orbis, 2015), 53–68.
48 Ibid.