A brouhaha is brewing in the Great State of my beloved North Dakota at the moment. Bishop David Kagan, my ordinary here in Bismarck, and also apostolic administrator of the vacant Diocese of Fargo, has composed a letter concerning conscience and citizenship as Catholics in North Dakota prepare to participate in the election two weeks’ hence. The letter was delivered to parishes and is to be read this Sunday in Mass. Although under embargo until then, the letter has been leaked, and one of our state senators, Tim Mathern of Fargo, a practicing Catholic and a Democrat, has published Bishop Kagan’s letter on the web with his own scathing reply accusing the Bishop of engaging in partisan politics and threatening the non-profit status of the Catholic Church thereby. The long and the short of it, I think, is that Senator Mathern feels Bishop Kagan is implicitly telling Catholics to vote for GOP candidates, while the North Dakota Catholic Conference has called Mathern’s claims “irresponsible.”
The situation is sad. By all accounts, Senator Mathern is a sincere Catholic believer, truly dedicated to Christ and the Church, and informed Catholics faithful to the Church’s teaching regard his voting record as nearly flawless. Senator Mathern is not in my opinion a candidate for Canon 915, and one hopes that after the sound and fury of the election die down he will have occasion for more sustained reflection on Church, State, and conscience.
As Bishop Kagan’s letter is still under embargo, I won’t link to copies of it at this point; neither will I link to Senator Mathern’s reply, which presents Bishop Kagan’s letter in full. (I may address these matters in detail after the public reading of Bishop Kagan’s letter on Sunday.) But I will address the issue of conscience in general, as Bishop Kagan’s letter concerns the proper formation of the Catholic conscience and as Senator Mathern accuses Bishop Kagan of “damag[ing] the bounds of personal conscience.”
Moderns believe every one’s conscience belongs to one’s self, that conscience is a matter of subjectivity, that an individual is subject only to his conscience and his conscience to him. Thus, “conscience” becomes a warrant for one’s own wishes and desires, and any external authority is perceived as a threat.
But in Catholicism, the human conscience is not an autonomous repository of feeling. Rather, it is a human faculty that must be formed to conform to Truth. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
Conscience must be informed and moral judgment enlightened. A well-formed conscience is upright and truthful. It formulates its judgments according to reason, in conformity with the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator. The education of conscience is indispensable for human beings who are subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer their own judgment and to reject authoritative teachings. (§ 1783; cf. §§ 1776-1802)
I can do no better than Pope Benedict, who, as Cardinal Ratzinger, delivered a masterful talk on conscience in 1991, much of which is dedicated to John Henry Cardinal Newman’s concept of conscience. Ratzinger says:
When the subject of Newman and conscience is raised, the famous sentence from his letter to the Duke of Norfolk immediately comes to mind: “Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing), I shall drink–to the Pope, if you please,–still to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards.” In contrast to the statements of Gladstone, Newman sought to make a clear avowal of the papacy. And in contrast to mistaken forms of ultra-Montanism, Newman embraced an interpretation of the papacy which is only then correctly conceived when it is viewed together with the primacy of conscience, a papacy not put in opposition to the primacy of conscience but based on it and guaranteeing it.
Ratzinger’s point is that both authority (here, the Papacy) and conscience are subject to Truth, and when they subject themselves to Truth, they are in harmony. But Ratzinger observes that modernity opposes subjectivity (and thus conscience) to authority:
Modern man, who presupposes the opposition of authority to subjectivity, has difficulty understanding this. For him, conscience stands on the side of subjectivity and is the expression of the freedom of the subject. Authority, on the other hand, appears to him as the constraint on, threat to and even the negation of, freedom. So then we must go deeper to recover a vision in which this kind of opposition does not obtain.
Ratzinger sees Newman, living fully in modernity, presenting Truth as the key:
For Newman, the middle term which establishes the connection between authority and subjectivity is truth. I do not hesitate to say that truth is the central thought of Newman’s intellectual grappling. Conscience is central for him because truth stands in the middle. To put it differently, the centrality of the concept of conscience for Newman is linked to the prior centrality of the concept of truth, and can only be understood from this vantage point.
It’s not only the Pope and Catholics who have (or should have) this view of conscience. Here I present to you Martin Luther. Many see Luther as the first modern man of conscience, who followed his own conscience at the Diet of Worms instead of submitting to the imperial and ecclesiastical authorities who demanded he recant the teachings contained in his many works. Having thought and prayed through the night, Luther addressed the Imperial Diet thus:
Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. God help me. Amen.
Luther, Newman, and Ratzinger stand in formal agreement, though many moderns miss this. Luther’s words are often adduced to support the modern, subjective conception of the autonomous conscience. But observe what Luther says: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” Materially, the Luther of Worms has in his conception of sola Scriptura a different source of Truth than the Catholic Church. But formally, he too here agrees that the conscience is not autonomous but must be formed subject to Truth.
Many in Luther’s Reformation times on all sides of confessional divides were men and women of conscience, giving their lives to and for what they saw as the truth. Ratzinger finds in Luther’s contemporary Sir Thomas More an example of the man of conscience:
A man of conscience is one who never acquires tolerance, well-being, success, public standing, and approval on the part of prevailing opinion at the expense of truth. In this regard, Newman is related to Britain’s other great witness of conscience, Thomas More, for whom conscience was not at all an expression of subjective stubbornness or obstinate heroism. He numbered himself, in fact, among those fainthearted martyrs who only after faltering and much questioning succeed in mustering up obedience to conscience, mustering up obedience to the truth which must stand higher than any human tribunal or any type of personal taste.
Or any — and I mean any — political party. The playwright Robert Bolt also saw Sir Thomas More as a paradigm of the man of conscience and presented him as such in his acclaimed play and film A Man for All Seasons. Therein the character of Sir Thomas More asks the man whose testimony sent him to his martyrdom, the conniving, treacherous, and ambitious Richard Rich: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?” Mutatis mutandis we could ask the same of Senator Mathern.
October 24th, 2012 | 2:02 am
The long and the short of it, I think, is that Senator Mathern feels Bishop Kagan is implicitly telling Catholics to vote for GOP candidates . . .
Bishop Kagan actually is telling Catholics to vote for GOP candidates. In one case, he identifies (though not by name) a candidate and says not to vote for her. Since you are not quoting from, or linking to, the document, I won’t either. But Bishop Kagan crosses a line I have never seen a bishop cross before.
October 24th, 2012 | 3:53 am
You have your stories backwards it seems. Senator Tim Mathern represents Luther and Moore today. You are obviously Richard Rich.
One of Senator Mathern’s points was that the Church should not promote the Republican party, or the Democratic-NPL. Why? Because faithful Catholics can be found in both and because human weakness and failings are also found in both.
October 24th, 2012 | 7:18 am
I know a number of priests who have preached on the subject of “primacy of conscience” whose clear message was rather “primacy of ego”.
October 24th, 2012 | 7:29 am
It seems to me the issue in this case is not proper formation of conscience. It is a poorly argued case not just by Bishop Kagan but by many other Catholics who, in effect, say, “You must vote Republican” (or at least, “You must not vote Democratic”).
A properly formed conscience will tell you that you must never commit an intrinsically evil act. Let’s accept for the sake of argument that a properly formed Catholic conscience must accept as intrinsically evil everything the Church teaches to be intrinsically evil. Let’s even accept that Democrats, in general, support the intrinsic evils of abortion, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem cell research. This does not translate into a Catholic duty to vote for Republican candidates or against Democrats. Voting is much more a matter of exercising prudential judgment than of obeying a properly formed conscience.
Some years ago, then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a letter to bishops on worthiness to receive communion which contained this statement:
Accepting everything the Church teaches, it is still the decision of the voter, even a voter with a flawlessly formed Catholic conscience, to decide whether a vote for a candidate who may hold unacceptable views on “Catholic non-negotiables” is still the better candidate. It’s not up to the voter’s bishop to say which candidates or which political party to vote for.
October 24th, 2012 | 8:01 am
I wish you would at least have the courage to publish the whole of what I made public yesterday. You screen my thoughts through your thoughts without giving the reader the opportunity to make their independent thoughts regarding my release.
It is the same experience people will have next Sunday, one way direction of words, no communication. A society supportive of life needs all to participate.
Senator Tim Mathern
October 24th, 2012 | 8:42 am
Catholics do have a Pope and a canon and so forth. It’s pretty legitimate to say, “Catholics believe…” ‘Moderns’, on the other hand, have no popes or hierarchy or agreed-upon creed.
If I said “Christians believe that Benedict XVI is part of a direct line of apostolic succession from St. Peter”, rather a large number of Protestants (not to mention Eastern Orthodox churchgoers) might reasonably object, no?
So either the term “Moderns” is overbroad, or the point being made is entirely too narrow and a whole lot of people are neither Moderns, nor Catholics, nor Christians (nor even theists).
October 24th, 2012 | 10:09 am
Considering the “pulpit talk”, of many S. Chicago churches, & churches in the South, this item is hardly new.
October 24th, 2012 | 10:52 am
[...] Church, State, and Conscience – Leroy Huizenga, First Thoughts [...]
October 24th, 2012 | 11:01 am
There seems to be some confusion as to the impact on tax exempt status for priests or bishops to recommend a candidate. It wasn’t that long ago that a priest, Robert Drinan, held office as a Representative to Congress here in Massachusetts. Nobody lost tax exempt status though I am sure Fr Drinan campaigned for himself. He stepped down because Pope John Paul II told him to. The requirement not to endorse candidates comes from the Catholic Church itself.
October 24th, 2012 | 11:29 am
M. Cathleen Kaveny wrote a very informative article in America Magazine just prior to the 2008 election that is very relevant here. It is titled Intrinsic Evil and Political Responsibility. Is the concept of intrinsic evil helpful to the Catholic voter? (Unfortunately, the site seems to be down at the moment, but hopefully it will be available soon.)
Briefly (and this is not intended as a summary of Professor Kaveny’s article), labeling something intrinsically evil does not tell you anything about the gravity of the evil. Lies, for example, are intrinsically evil, and they can range from extremely minor to extremely serious. Masturbation is intrinsically evil, and yet no one would insist Catholics were obliged to vote for a candidate who campaigned on criminalizing masturbation.
This of course is not to say that because a bishop identifies something such as abortion as intrinsic evil, that identification means it is not gravely evil. It does mean, however, that invoking the concept of intrinsic evil when judging the morality of voting doesn’t make any more compelling a case than simply calling evil evil. There is no moral justification for claiming a person is compelled to vote one way when intrinsic evils are involved but vote another way when non-intrinsic evils are involved.
October 24th, 2012 | 11:32 am
(1) Nickol: It is a stretch to think that the letter identifies a candidate.
(2) Mathern: If the the discussion is in one direction, it is because you started the discussion before the letter was released.
October 24th, 2012 | 11:58 am
Dear Senator Mathern,
I am between a rock and a hard place in that I’m respecting the office of the bishop and thus the embargo which you decided to break. But neither of us is naive: Your letter, and thus +Kagan’s letter, is all over the internet, and people can find it readily enough. You yourself could also provide a link to it here easily.
As far as “courage,” well, I wouldn’t consider calling out a powerful state senator publicly cowardice. As far as a building a “society supportive of life,” perhaps we’d have something approaching that if Catholics clergy and lay — including politicians, of both parties — would have operated in accord with Catholic social teaching over the last fifty years. I do thank you for your own record in this regard.
What I am trying to do in this post is discuss the Catholic concept of conscience broadly without fisking your entire letter, especially since I suspect — I don’t know, as I haven’t been in contact with the bishop’s office — the chancery will respond officially after Sunday.
I meant what I said about the sincerity of your faith, and I do respect your office and your service to our State, my native North Dakota, which I love. That said, your letter presents errors about the nature and function of conscience and so your public actions in this matter, while sincere, have provided an occasion for confusion. In charity towards you, our fellow Catholics, and the general public, I was therefore compelled to offer this small primer on conscience.
If you have time, I would like to invite you to lunch next time you are in Bismarck so we can talk in private as well. My email is lahuizenga[at]gmail[dot]com.
Best,
Dr. Leroy Huizenga
October 24th, 2012 | 12:17 pm
Nickol: It is a stretch to think that the letter identifies a candidate.
charles,
From what I have read, it makes a thinly veiled reference to a particular candidate, or was inadvertently (and clumsily) written so that it seems to. Perhaps the bishop should fix this in the draft before it is read officially.
October 24th, 2012 | 1:40 pm
I followed Mr. Huzenga’s suggestion and easily found both letters on the internet. The bishop’s letter seems entirely correct to me. I can agree with Senator Matern only in one particular: if “likeable” identifies a particular candidate locally, he should not have included that sentence.
Other than that, he identifies certain actions as intrinsic evils which can never be supported. The other issues which Senator Matern mentions are all matters of prudential judgement. For instance, he includes “Paul Ryan’s budget,” meaning, I suppose that that budget is supposed to harm the poor. But one may prudentially decide that the collapse of the economy due to an overload of debt will soon hurt the poor more than a small reduction of benefits. These issues can never be proportionate reasons to vote for someone who supports, for instance, abortion, and who might be in a position to influence how abortion is treated in law, for instance, by the passage of legislation about abortion or the confirmation of Supreme Court Justices who may rule on abortion legislation.
Catholics like Senator Matern, whose judgment leads them to support Democratic positions about these issues of prudential judgment, should be doing all they can to bring the Democratic party back to positions on life and marriage issues which they can in good conscience also support.
Susan Peterson
October 24th, 2012 | 2:41 pm
The concept of a well formed conscience, it seems to me, is a tricky one, and if taken to the extreme is simply a call for mindless obedience. The Catechism is quoted above, but one has to balance the quote given against this one:
A decision of conscience is a very personal one. No one can delegate his or her decisions of conscience to another, and no one may take it upon himself or herself to dictate another person’s decisions of conscience.
I think Bishop David Kagan, in his letter, goes beyond attempting to aid those in his diocese in developing a well formed conscience into usurping their obligation to make decisions of conscience for them. The Church teaches abortion is an intrinsic evil. The Church is said to teach that abortion must be illegal. But the Church does not have any teaching about voting for any particular candidate, even if that candidate is pro-choice. To paraphrase what I quoted above from Cardinal Ratzinger, a Catholic may not vote for a candidate because that candidate is pro-choice. But a Catholic may indeed vote for a candidate in spite of the fact that the candidate is pro-choice “in the presence of proportionate reasons.” It seems to me what Bishop Kagan is doing is either omitting the matter of proportionate reasons from his letter altogether, or taking it upon himself to decided the matter of proportionate reasons on behalf of Catholic voters—something he has no right to do.
Here’s a frequently quoted comment by Pope Benedict:
However, in voting, a Catholic may be in perfect agreement with Church teaching that abortion is intrinsically wrong and never permitted, but he or she still may come to a different conclusion than the pope or a bishop on how to vote when abortion is only one of many issues involved.
The most a bishop can do is to make clear what Catholic teaching is on matters like abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and so on. He can explain principles like material cooperation with evil. But he can’t make the voters’ decisions for them. He can’t tell them the Church requires them to vote Republican, or to vote against a particular pro-choice politician. He can’t usurp the right of Catholic voters to make their own prudential decisions.
October 24th, 2012 | 3:56 pm
Look, some comments here assume that Bishops couldn’t take a public political position, and that’s just pure hogwash. What, they weren’t supposed to comment on the political issues involving slavery?
If the Bishop had said “vote Republican because xyz” he would be perfectly within his rights. It would have been tacky, but nothing more.
The Democratic party has, sadly, endorsed evil _in its party platform_. It has also essentially declared open hostility on the Catholic (and by extension all) Church. This is sad and I honestly feel for those who continue as good Democrats in the face of the perversion of their party. Heck, I proudly know some.
But lets not play this game that moral positions don’t sometimes lead directly to political decisions. That’s post-modern garbage.
October 24th, 2012 | 4:39 pm
If the Bishop had said “vote Republican because xyz” he would be perfectly within his rights. It would have been tacky, but nothing more.
Nick Jost,
Are you saying—and I hope you are not—that if Bishop David Kagan had said Catholics in his diocese should vote Republican, his instructions would be binding, and that anyone who disagreed would not have a well formed conscience?
October 24th, 2012 | 4:46 pm
Today , we can say some parts of the Church didn’t speak up against slavery or against Nazism. After, say, 2050,when the populations dives, and when ND has even less children and our economy resembles Greece (no young people to pay into the social security or health care), people will ask, why didn’t the Church say something? How did so many get killed? No civilization–Carthage, Rome, Aztecs, Mayans–can persist that kills its own. Rural ND , like rural everywhere, is closing schools, losing funds for schools, losing future workers in their towns and these towns are the canary for the rest of the country. This is postponed in ND for a decade perhaps by the fracking work.
How’s this for proportionality: vote for Hitler because the Autobahn is great and the Volkswagen is a great invention that produces jobs and less families will starve if they work on the autobahn. Vote for Jefferson Davis because the southern economy will crumble without the cheap labor in the cotton fields.
As for the senator: “a society supportive of life needs all to participate”. You can’t participate when you are killed before birth. To see the ugliness of abortion culture, I would suggest Catholic democrats read Life News headlines for about one month.
October 25th, 2012 | 10:55 am
Spot on TXW.
David Nichol, there is no reason to assume that the letter reads as a command to vote one way. And yes, even if it did, I would not object. I may not follow the command as my conscious dictates but I do understand that whole cities, states, and people’s can fall under condemnation. I also believe that a bishop could notice such a state and rightfully warn his people of it. Further it would be his DUTY to do so. We should all pray that such things never happen, but in our world it most assuredly can.
October 25th, 2012 | 11:12 am
If you go here, you’ll find a video of Bishop David Kagan discussing Catholic politicians who say they are “personally opposed” (his examples are abortion and euthanasia) but don’t want to impose their beliefs on others. He says this is “absolutely a false statement.” He goes on to say:
While a very strong argument can be made that this is correct in the case of abortion, is is an overly broad statement about the relationship between a Catholic (Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, etc.) politician’s religious beliefs and his or her public duties. Where does one draw the line here? If a Catholic politician’s religious beliefs about same-sex marriage demand political and legal opposition to same-sex marriage, what about divorce and remarriage? If a Catholic politician’s religious beliefs about abortion demand political and legal opposition to abortion, what about contraception? How does this apply to judges? Scalia says his jurisprudence is not at all influenced by his Catholicism. Why is this acceptable for a judge but not a senator?
The problem with Bishop Kagan is not that he is completely wrong, but rather his statements are devoid of nuance, and he does not know where to draw the line, or perhaps doesn’t believe in drawing lines at all.
October 25th, 2012 | 1:20 pm
And yes, even if it did, I would not object. I may not follow the command as my conscious dictates . . . .
Nick Jost,
But the issue here is when your conscience dictates and when your conscience can be dictated to.
October 26th, 2012 | 10:27 am
The Roman Catholic faith teaches that the soul enters the embryo at conception. Thus, the embryo is worthy of life. This is a hard argument to make to those who do not share this faith and believe that the soul enters the embryo at conception.
Moreover, even if one posits that the embryo is an ensouled person worthy of life, it does not mean that the embryo has the right to live within another person’s body. Or will Personhood Amendments now give the embryo the right to live within another person’s uterus? Where else in law do we force a person to house another within their body?
Plan B and other implantation blockers will be the wave of the future in abortion research, and will survive any bans on the abortion procedures because many people do not believe they can be forced to house another being within their bodies. And the compromise will be that these medications do not directly destroy the embryo/fetus, but they protect bodily integrity of the woman by preventing an illegal taking of their uterine lining.
October 27th, 2012 | 12:27 pm
jfm,
Pretty standard. Ensoulment is not a necessary argument to refute abortion, and is used as a red herring most of the time, since appeals to the measurable, scientific existence of something is usually used by prolifers. Often, the “Apple” argument is used. That is, the unborn homo sapiens is a person and this is self evident, as much as an Apple is self evident, even though some philosophers tell us we are wrong, an Apple is really called a “WNXBDKALDIW”. The violinist-hooked-up-to a machine argument is old hat from the 1970′s, and doesn’t work anymore except in abortionist circles. IIRC, the philosopher who wrote it later said it was faulty.
You have it backwards (the embyo already is living), and it is that a human “person” is worthy of life, and an embryo is a person, as much as Dred Scott or Anne Frank or Maximillian Kolbe. The size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency do not matter. Or if they matter for an embryo, they matter for the next burdensome person.
Plan B will not be the wave of the future. It has failed to reduced the unintended pregnancy rate and failed to reduce surgical abortion rates. Hopefully the wave of the future is not forced abortions like in China, but no matter how many hormones you throw at women, they will still get pregnant. The average age of an unborn girl who gets aborted is about 8-11 weeks in the US, and this girl has a fully formed organ system, including a uterine lining herself, so her uterine lining is being destroyed in the abortion as well, as a result of her death. Plan B and similar (IUD’s, mifepristone) only work at early weeks; after that a surgery is needed, and optimally when the arms and legs can be counted to know that the whole “mass of cells” is evacuated. I suggest you volunteer in your local Arm and Leg Counter Association to get a better grasp of what goes on in the local abortion clinic, ensoulment aside.
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