Catholics, just because of all their efforts to secure Catholic education and a Catholic atmosphere for their children, must admit that conscience can be changed, trained, developed. We protest that it is possible for the consciences of children brought up under non-Catholic principles and with non-Catholic ways of regarding life and its obligations, to become distorted and even destroyed. All the promptings that are right and normal and that should be almost instinctive may become hopelessly obscured, and their fine delicacy so blunted as no longer to produce that feeling of shame and moral reprehension that should at least follow an evil deed. No doubt there are certain principles that are so fundamental and elementary that it is very difficult to imagine them wholly inoperative such, for example, would be the rudimentary idea that a man should do to others only what he would wish them to do to him. In varying forms this idea seems to be of universal acceptance; but other sub sidiary notions can certainly become obliterated by custom or ignorance. Saint Paul uses a most expressive word to describe the effect made by sin upon the conscience, for he speaks of sinners as having their consciences "seared"; that is, the delicacy and re sponsiveness to evil suggestion have been lost through a hardening of the perceptive faculty of the soul, comparable only to the loss of all feeling produced by a burn, which hardens the skin and deadens its perceptive power. Thus by everything that we proclaim, we show that we Catholics regard the conscience as something not definite or stationary, but easily affected and capable of education and refinement.
Conscience, therefore, is subject to influence; hence it cannot be a mere collection of principles. Sometimes in our conversation we speak of a man of conscience as "a man of principle" as though the two things were necessarily the same, whereas they are quite distinct. Principles are unchanging, whereas conscience is alive. Conscience is more accurately what the poets have always described it to be a voice, not in the sense that it is a voice external to us, but that it is the inarticulate expression of our whole being. Perhaps we have had the notion that conscience was the voice of God whispering in our ears, a voice that tells us of things of which we are ignorant, an instructive suggestion, much as revelation is. But conscience is nothing of the kind. It is the voice simply of ourselves, though based upon certain rudimentary principles such as we have already described. It is, if you like, a faculty, like the musical faculty, which must first of all be inherent before it can be cultivated, but which assuredly requires cultivation. Left to itself, it might go off into all sorts of wrong paths. It needs to be taken in hand by someone who has both judgement and taste, by whom it may be fashioned to its best purpose. Conscience is always changing, always fluid, so that we do things today that our conscience is silent about, whereas tomorrow it may furiously upbraid us for even thinking of them. I have, then, obviously to train my conscience, for of itself, except in the very simplest things, it will not necessarily act aright. There are souls, indeed, that are naturally Christian, but how few, and these not on every point!
Now to train my conscience I have need of some definite principles by means of which I can be certain that I am on the right path. What are these? Perhaps I may notice that there are three such sources: (a) The principles of the natural law, such as justice, truthfulness, etc., dictate; (b) the principles of the supernatural law, laid down in faith and morals by the Church as representing the teaching power that Christ left to continue His work; (c) the actual life of our Lord, which takes in concrete form the abstract principles that the others profess. In the first two we see simply how life should be lived; in the last we can see it actually lived. These separate sources, if properly studied, will give us the main ways of achieving a properly regulated conscience; for the real trouble of conscience is that we are responsible for conscience itself. It is not enough for me to say that my conscience lets me do this or that, since the further point can quite properly be put: Has my conscience any right to do it? Certainly it is possible to have a false conscience, and it is possible also that this falseness of conscience may be my own fault entirely. The question, then, is not so simple as it sounds, for conscience is not the external voice of God whispering to me, but is really just the voice of my whole being; it is not separate from me, but only myself. To see, therefore, whether or not my own conscience is correct, I must make frequent meditation on the faith and on the Gospels, and on that code of moral life which I find accepted even by those who make no pretence to be following the teaching of Christ. Only when I have done this shall I really know whether my conscience is healthy or scrupulous, whether lax or too personal, or whether it follows the lines laid down by our Blessed Lord and continued after His design by the Church. Conscience is above all, but that is only because it has been formed after the fashion of Christ.
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.