Doing the right thing isn’t hard! Knowing what the right thing is...that’s the hard part. Once you know what the right thing to do is, doing it comes relatively easily.
What a pearl of wisdom so succinctly put!
I found it in a quite engaging movie entitled, The Confession.
It is a remarkable film which I recommend for its story line and plot. Alec Baldwin plays the role of an attorney representing a Chief Financial Officer who kills the doctors and nursing staff who allowed his son to die because of their callous indifference. The role of the Chief Financial Officer is played by Ben Kingsley who wants to confess and take responsibility for his crime but who is thwarted by his boss who wants Baldwin to have Kingsley found incompetent to stand trial in order to protect some shady business practices.
Funny how a movie, an art form, can be the source of such inspiration and truth.
This came to my mind as I read of the most recent comments of the former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese. who is proving how hostile to the Catholic Church she truly is and has been for such a long time in her life.
In a recent interview, McAleese spoke of her completed doctoral thesis, yet to be defended before a team of academics, in which she criticizes the Catholic practice of infant Baptism as enforced membership of the Church which is in breach of fundamental human rights.
Chief among those rights, according to McAleese, is the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion and freedom to change religion. The Catholic Church yet has to fully embrace that thinking,” she said.
According to the former head of state, on the role of conscience, she stated: “I think it’s very simple. My human right to inform my own conscience, my human right to express my conscience even if it is the case that it contradicts the magisterium, that right to conscience is supreme.”
Another problem the church has yet to deal with was “that tension between a fully informed conscience that disagrees with the magisterium”.
And once again, we are treated to yet another dose of pseudo-appeals to conscience which stress that the dictates of conscience are always either morally obligatory or at least can never be morally wrong.
Such appeals are both fundamentally flawed and equally untenable. They result in an indefensible moral relativism. They should be called out for what they are: untruths which should be abandoned.
The universal imperative of human conscience is very simple: do good and avoid evil. The human conscience does not determine what is right or wrong, but once that determination has been made, the conscience impels the will to act in favor of what is right and good.
For the faculty of human conscience to work properly (in fact, to work at all) it must be informed. That is, the choices presented to it must have already been determined in their rightness or wrongness.
Conscience is not the determining faculty in that judgment.
Rather, judgments about what is good and compelling and what is evil to be avoided are made based upon sound moral principles which come to a person outside his subjective viewpoint and are informed by the Divine Mind and Will of the Creator Himself.
It is precisely the role of the Church to communicate the moral truths revealed to humanity by God through the ministry of the Word and the magisterial teachings of the Church.
McAleese knows this but her deeply-held animosity and bias against the Church will not allow her to assert that which she knows to be honest and true.
To assert the supremacy of conscience alone without reference of objective moral truths is to undermine society itself.
Law would have no meaning. Justice annihilated. Murder, warfare, sexual assault, in essence, every sort of depraved and errant behavior would be permissable and protected under the banner of the freedom of conscience.
The sadness is that the Bishops in Ireland (and the Church in general) do not take the pseudo-moralists like McAleese to immediate task for the dishonesty of their public remarks, leaving the impression that their statements are equivalent to traditional principles of morality.
McAleese is misguided at best or dishonest at worst.
She is wrong nonetheless and should be called out publicly for her error.
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