The Love Both campaign launch in Dublin. As referendum day approaches, Catholics will be told by all and sundry that they should vote according to their consciences. In a Western democratic society like Ireland, which values individual freedom and personal autonomy above all else, there is little difficulty in accepting the central role of ‘conscience’. Hardly anyone disagrees with that, because ultimately moral decision-making must be allowed to rest where it belongs – with the individual.
The Church must always teach publicly that abortion is gravely wrong. But that doesn’t mean bishops can simply instruct Catholics to vote ‘no’ or relieve them of the responsibility of considering the issues for themselves. Moral authoritarianism is long past and rightly so. That said, the word ‘conscience’ can often be bandied about very loosely in popular and political circles, and can mean different things to different people.
What conscience means
It is important therefore for Catholics to know what the concept really means. Conscience is the name given to that in us which responds to the moral. It is an aspect of our consciousness, the one which is aware of the distinction between good and evil and which urges us to do good and avoid evil. It is not a merely subjective “gut feeling”, nor on the other hand is it simply a mental exercise.
It does draw on both the intellectual and the intuitive dimensions of the person in judging what is the right thing to do in a given situation. Ultimately, conscience involves weighing up a particular act in the context of what one already knows to be morally correct values. It is certainly not the simple freedom to do just what a person likes or wants.
Conscience and truth
Most importantly, there is an essential link between conscience and moral truth. Conscience engages the person in an honest search to find the right and true answer.
The person tries to ensure that the decision arrived at is, as far as possible, in accord with the objective truth, that is, what is true in and of itself regardless of whether we like it or not. As Vatican II says, “the more a correct conscience holds sway, the more persons and groups turn aside from blind choices and strive to be guided by objective norms of morality” (Gaudium et Spes 16). Hence, conscience is not just “doing what I feel is right”. It always requires informing oneself about what is morally true.
Alone with God
The Catholic understanding of conscience also sees it as humanity’s most secret core and sanctuary – where the person is alone with God. Vatican II observed that in the depths of her/his conscience a person detects a law which the individual does not impose on herself or himself, but which nonetheless holds the person to obedience. This voice of conscience summons the person to love good and to avoid evil, because in the heart of humanity there is a law written by God. This thinking reflects the teaching of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans (2:14-15).
Our conscientious choices are not simply judgments to do or not to do certain things. Through our actions we are also deciding what kind of people we wish to be – just or unjust, faithful or unfaithful, truthful or untruthful, committed or uncommitted. We are deciding to accept or reject God’s love and God’s claims on us. In short, we are responding, positively or negatively, to God.
Frailty of conscience
Experience teaches us that conscience can be frail and fallible. All sorts of factors can lead to a mistaken conscience: a deficient moral sense, false ideas, prejudices, social pressures, sin, and negligence. That’s why the Catholic tradition speaks of conscience as being correct when it accords with the objective truth; otherwise it is called erroneous. In other words, even if I follow my conscience I could still be doing something that is wrong.
One must be true to one’s deepest thought-out convictions. This principle means that one must follow decisions made in conscience, even when, through no fault of one’s own, it is in error. Hence Aquinas taught that even an erroneous conscience must be followed, that is, a conscience that is telling me to do something that is actually wrong, provided such a conscience is certain of itself. This is because not following a genuinely informed conscience would entail my not being faithful to what I believe to be the truth.
However, while one is always bound to follow one’s conscience, that is to act in accordance with one’s moral convictions, one may have committed a wrong in the process of arriving at one’s conscientious decision in the first place. How? For instance, by not taking the time or trouble to find out what is good and true. Or by having neglected or blanked out the memory of innate truths placed deep in our being by God our Creator. In such a case a person may not be without fault.
Cultural influences
Catholic Christians in the Western world do not live in a religious bubble but are deeply influenced by the secularised culture around them.
In that culture, there has slowly developed over the last 50 years a great societal blind spot about the brutal reality of legal abortion, just as in the past there was a blind spot about slavery.
In regard to abortion, the West has gradually become morally blind from being accustomed to this evil. Abortion, previously regarded with horror or at least moral repugnance, is now even spoken of as a human right and bizarrely its wide availability is considered a sign of a tolerant caring modern society.
The destruction of a vulnerable little human being is glossed over in the media with soothing euphemisms which speak of tolerance and compassion. But the nice words hide the fact that a life is being ended.
This false thinking has subtly and gradually desensitised many Catholics, often unwittingly. The innate truth of the humanity of the unborn child has been blanked out in their consciences, or at least it has become quite blurred.
Their hearts may have become hardened over a period of time to the promptings of truth deep within themselves, sometimes because of the surrounding culture’s overpowering but deficient moral sense.
Avoiding the truth
Yet, as the billboard says, the unborn child is ‘one of us’ – human as much as we are. Groups like Catholics for Choice who assert that Catholics should vote ‘yes’ with a good conscience always avoid this basic fact. Here we see the word ‘conscience’ misused as an alibi for a defiant inability to allow oneself to be corrected.
The word is also being used to cover up an obstinate unwillingness to listen to what the Catholic tradition says about the sanctity of all human life in the eyes of God, as expressed explicitly in Vatican II’s condemnation of abortion.
So Catholics thinking of voting ‘yes’ need to reflect on whether their thinking is being subtly shaped by the prevailing Western cultural bias that unborn life isn’t somehow fully human and so not worth protecting. Not to sincerely consider this possibility could count as a culpable failure to inform one’s conscience.
Our own cultural biases and flaws can be as deep seated as those we sometimes find so repugnant in the less developed world.
Imposing morality?
Some Catholics, while convinced of the humanity of the unborn and the moral wrongness of abortion, doubt whether abortion should remain illegal. They fear ‘imposing’ their conscientious viewpoint on others and thus legally restricting their moral choices. Abortion is often compared to gay marriage in this regard.
However, there is a fundamental difference. Unlike the issue of gay marriage, this abortion referendum relates to that most basic of human rights, the right to life itself. Voting ‘yes’ means giving to other people the legal power to destroy innocent life and also giving the Oireachtas the authority to decide on who lives and dies right up to birth.
That is very different morally to other referenda like those on divorce and gay marriage. Deleting the Eighth Amendment will mean that the right to choose will completely trump the right to life itself. That indeed will be ‘the last frontier’ for Irish society.
So to vote ‘yes’ would be completely at odds with the principle that innocent human life should always be protected by law insofar as possible, a principle a good conscience will recognise and abide by.
Voting with a clear conscience
What has all of this to say to Catholics as they cast their vote? There is now no doubt that deleting the Eighth Amendment will be a vote to allow abortion, and not even a vote for a limited abortion regime.
The Supreme Court has decided that unborn life has no constitutional rights besides the Eighth Amendment. Voting ‘yes’ will go further than a simple deletion because it is also a vote to insert into the Constitution an effective right to destroy human life, and give the Oireachtas the authority to regulate that right up to birth.
It will be a vote that the humanity of the unborn will no longer be recognised at all in our most basic law and will be subject to passing political whims and party alliances.
We find it difficult to accept that a committed Catholic can vote with a clear conscience for such a direct, drastic and radical attack on innocent human life. And for a person who still has doubts after conscientiously studying the issues, surely the prudent and safer option is to vote ‘no’.