David D. Kagan, the Bishop of Bismarck and thus my bishop, had a letter on conscience and citizenship read at masses throughout North Dakota last weekend. Well-written, informed, and informative, it was supposed to be under embargo until then, but, being delivered to parishes ahead of time, it was leaked to a North Dakota state senator who perceived in it subtle politicking. The senator broke the embargo and published the leaked letter on the Internet in the context of his own vigorous response as a pre-emptive strike.
For my part, I think the senator’s response to Bishop Kagan’s letter misinformed on conscience and Catholic citizenship. I do not wish to delve deeply into either letter, however. Readers may find links to them below, as well as my own general reflections on conscience in response, and make their own judgments. But I do wish to take the opportunity of this most unfortunate incident (for the state senator in question is by all accounts actually a faithful Catholic with a stellar voting record) to reflect on the Christian conscience and its concern for the common good.
Catholics (and many other Christians) believe that conscience is malleable and must be formed by the objective norms of reason and nature. It ought to conform to truth, but it can be well formed or poorly formed and direct the human will in right and wrong directions. Problems arise, however, because the modern mindset considers conscience a matter of subjectivity, and in practical terms that means it functions on the level of feelings as a warrant for one’s desires. Here the conscience is seen as the particular, unquestionable property of an autonomous individual, and any external claims upon it are perceived as a threat.
But the Christian conscience is considerably more robust. In its concern for the common good, the Christian conscience concerns itself with the objective and public categories of reason and nature. Simply put, truth. Here postmoderns may protest, positing that claims regarding nature are actually cultural exercises in the will to power. Through sleight of hand, culture masquerades as nature, crushing those on the margins. Indeed, some truth claims about the ultimate nature of things have had deleterious consequences, and certainly competing (meta)narratives abound, but here the principle of abusus non tollit usum is useful. Without a constant striving for truth, we wind up like the impetuous and brash William Roper in A Man for All Seasons, willing on utilitarian grounds for the sake of expediency to tear down laws for the sake of some greater good, but like him we will have nothing shielding us from the devil when he turns on us. Better to strive for truth and fail than to have nothing to appeal to in the face of injustice.
Now Christian conscience is concerned for the common good because of its insights into the categories of reason and nature by which it is ideally shaped. Reason and nature teach the well-formed conscience that it should be concerned for the common good and what is ultimately good. Further, reason and nature are categories accessible to all, not just Christians; they are public categories. Certain strains of thought in late medieval theology and philosophy culminated in the Enlightenment conviction that faith and reason were separate things, and thus religion has become regarded as a matter of private preference to be pushed out of the public square. For this reason, whenever people of faith put forward arguments in the public square, our secularist opponents cry foul, because they assume that religious people are contending for contentious positions on religious grounds, not rational grounds.
Admittedly, much Christian activism furthers this perception to the degree that activists themselves have failed to understand the classical Christian conception of the relationship of faith and reason and often employ warrants drawn directly from revelation, not reason; put simply, they quote Bible verses and present the issue as a matter of the Christian God’s will. I recently attended a pro-life event, a wonderful evening of conversation and conviviality capped by a captivating speaker. I live in a very Christian region of the country, kind of like Kierkegaard’s Denmark, where even the cows are Christian, so the repeated mention of Jesus did not surprise me, nor did our speaker’s express passion for him. But I do wonder if our religious passion for our causes undercuts our endeavors, effectively relegating us to the margins in the eyes of our opponents precisely because we’re not making arguments expressly rooted in reason. If we are to withstand and repel the juggernaut launched by the sexual revolution and preserve the human person and the human family, we will need to develop a broad-based consensus on these issues shared not only by the religious right within the Republican party but shared by persons of all faiths and no faith, by both Democrats and Republicans as well as Independents.
Such a consensus is indeed possible, even though at the present moment it seems elusive, if we can recover and promote a sufficient appreciation for reason and nature. And here we might find Christian conscience converging with Enlightenment concerns, if the Enlightenment would follow through on its stated convictions regarding the individual. As Bishop Kagan put it in his letter:
At the heart of all Catholic moral and social teaching is a single fact: the respect given to an individual human person must always be first and must govern every law and action so that the person’s life and dignity is always and everywhere protected and defended. In other words, from the first moment of human conception to the last moment of life on earth, the person must be respected without exception.
This, I think, is what reason and nature ultimately teach us, confirmed also for Christians by their faith, and on this natural, rational basis all positive law and policy should rest.
Leroy Huizenga is Director of the Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota. His personal website is LeroyHuizenga.com. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.
RESOURCES
David D. Kagan, Bishop of Bismarck, Letter of October 19 on Catholic Conscience and Citizenship
Leroy Huizenga, Church, State, and Conscience
State Senator Tim Mathern, Media Advisory Urging Bishop Kagan to Withdraw Election-Related Letter
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Comments:
Or, Catholics who are uncomfortable with the apparent politicking of the bishops believe that consciences are to be formed in light of objective, natural law moral principles and realize that Catholics will necessarily differ in prudential judgment about which candidates and parties best make it possible to realize those principles in practice in a political context where neither party fully accepts Catholic social teaching and different issues possess different moral weight. The bishops are infallible only collectively and then with respect to first order principles of faith and morals. They are guaranteed no special insight in the area of prudential judgment. The tendency to blur the distinction between these two things and to address prudential disagreements as if they were heresy on first order principles damages the social witness of the Church by making it appear to be nothing more than an organ of partisan politics.
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Two errors:
Using infallability as the only metric for obedience and claiming voting for a pro abortion politician is simply prudential.
“1) The Bishop’s position is inconsistent with the principle of Primacy of Conscience, a long accepted position of Roman Catholic moral theology. The Bishop’s letter states:
‘A properly formed Catholic conscience will never contradict the Church’s teachings in matters of faith and morals.’
As exemplified in the sentence above, Bishop Kagan short circuits conscience formation by insisting that properly formed conscience must follow his direction. He speaks as if the Church and he himself are infallible on matters of personal conscience. In a misstep of power, he colludes the complicated doctrine of papal infallibility with the positions of the Church. A Catholic owes a duty to listen thoughtfully to the Bishop, but if in ‘good conscience’ he or she cannot give assent, the Catholic must be free to follow his or her own conscience, which is the true moral responsibility.On his blog, Franciscan author Richard Rohr writes about the primacy of conscience: ‘Although the first principle of Catholic morality is that ‘You must follow your conscience,’ we usually immediately override it with the second principle, which is that ‘You must form your conscience ‘through Scripture, tradition, and prayer, which I surely agree with. It balances individualism with community. But let’s never forget the first principle is still first!.’ In placing the second principle before the first, Bishop Kagan’s letter impedes the needed discussion of what we all can do to promote the value of life and solve difficult public policy issues.”
I conclude that the senator is either an ignoramus or a heretical dissenter from Catholic Truth. He sets one author or dubious orthodoxy (and one who undubiously writes in a manner full of weasel words), Richard Rohr, in opposition to his bishop; and he nowhere discusses the binding force of the Church’s teaching on this matter. Even if the Church’s teaching on abortion (or on the duties of Catholics to be, if I may so put it, Catholics first and Americans second, if and when there is a conflict between the two) has not been infallibly promulgated by the Church’s magisterium, it has been taught authoritatively by those who have been set in authority in the Church, and therefore faithful Catholics owe it that “obsequium religiosum” (religious assent) spoken of in Lumen Gentium 25a:
“Bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and Catholic truth. In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent ...”
Senator Mathern seems to think that the Church’s authority to command the assent of the faithful in moral matters ceases at the verge of matters political, but the Church itself has always thought and acted otherwise, and there is no place for any sort of “American exceptionalism” in this area.
