Fr Flader, Cardinal John Henry Newman says that in some matters one’s conscience may prevail even over a decision of the pope. Can you please explain how this can be?
Newman does say that. It is in section 5, on conscience, in his long Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, written in 1875. Consisting of some 150 pages, the letter was a response to Protestant-Catholic polemics that emerged just after the First Vatican Council. Newman comments throughout on the injustice of Prime Minister Gladstone’s claim that Catholics have “no mental freedom.” He says that Catholics “do not deserve his injurious reproach that we are captives and slaves of the pope.” In that context, he shows how conscience is related to the pope’s teachings.
In this column I will comment on some of Newman’s reflections on the nature and role of conscience in general, and in the next I will give some examples of how he applies this teaching in practice. Conscience, as we know from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognises the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed … It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognises the prescriptions of the divine law” (CCC 1778).
In this regard, Newman writes, quoting Cardinal Gousset: “The Divine Law is the supreme rule of actions; our thoughts, desires, words, acts, all that man is, is subject to the domain of the law of God; and this law is the rule of our conduct by means of our conscience. Hence it is never lawful to go against our conscience.”
Since what we are apprehending is the very law of God, we can never go against our conscience when it commands or forbids an action because, in so doing, we would be going against God himself and his law. Newman explains: “I am using the word ‘conscience’ in the high sense in which I have already explained it—not as a fancy or an opinion, but as a dutiful obedience to what claims to be a divine voice, speaking within us.”
In a passage which has been quoted in part in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 1778), Newman says that conscience “is a messenger from him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway.” That is, it is God himself speaking to us through our conscience, making conscience the very vicar of Christ.
In a strong passage, Newman describes how conscience is viewed in the mind of many people in his day. What he says could apply aptly to many in our own day: “When men advocate the rights of conscience, they in no sense mean the rights of the Creator, nor the duty to him, in thought and deed, of the creature; but the right of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting, according to their judgment or their humour, without any thought of God at all.
“They do not even pretend to go by any moral rule, but they demand, what they think is an Englishman’s prerogative, for each to be his own master in all things, and to profess what he pleases, asking no one’s leave, and accounting priest or preacher, speaker or writer, unutterably impertinent, who dares to say a word against his going to perdition, if he like it, in his own way.”
Newman goes on to say why we need the church to help us know what God’s law is and so form our conscience. He says that sciences other than the science of religion have certainty in themselves, since they derive necessary conclusions from undeniable premises. “But the sense of right and wrong, which is the first element in religion, is so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so subtle in its argumentative methods, so impressible by education, so biased by pride and passion, so unsteady in its course, that, in the struggle for existence amid the various exercises and triumphs of the human intellect, this sense is at once the highest of all teachers, yet the least luminous; and the church, the pope, the hierarchy are, in the Divine purpose, the supply of an urgent demand.”