Can We Trust Our Conscience?
Archbishop Charles Chaput writes in the Catholic Exchange on the value of our personal conscience in making decisions. This article specifically addresses the issue of our conscience helping us to choose between contraception and Natural Family Planning.
His Grace goes on to develop the need to ensure that our conscience is developed correctly. Herein lies my contention with this issue. How will we ever know if our conscience is faithful to God’s truth and not some mutation of the teachings of the Catholic Church? This becomes a risky adventure especially when we become more educated and attempt to rationalize everything to fit our convenience. I’m just afraid that we become relativists eventually if we don’t use a constant point to guide us.
All journeys need a good set of tools. Let’s say our journey to Heaven is analogous to our attempt to reach the North Pole. We have at our disposal now a set of tools from past ages in the form of the magnetic compass and from recent advances the GPS (global positioning system). Experience and scientific data suggest that the magnetic North pole wanders quite substantially and using a magnetic compass will not get us to the North Pole but somewhere else that the compass deceives us into thinking is the North Pole. However using a GPS will definitely get us to the true North Pole.
This for me is the situation if we use our conscience (the compass) rather than the immutable teachings of the Church (the GPS). There is absolutely no way we can go wrong when we undertake our earthly journey, with the Church only as our moral GPS.
