The King is Dead! Long Live the King!
Conscience is King!. Yep! If my conscience tells me to do it, I must. Yep. If my conscience tells me that saving three bunnies in a shampoo factory lab (by the way, a horrible travesty of research) is worth the annihilation of property and the slaughter of a few measly human beings, so what? I must follow conscience. In a PoMo world, conscience is sometimes not the best of guides. When consciences are formed with relativism and metheism at the base, the ultimate product could make Jeffrey Dahmer look like a humanitarian.
This note (link found on Jeff Miller's blog) helps to sort out some of the confusion.
In other words, if not checked by truth, the individual conscience tends toward error. How can we avoid following a flawed conscience? The Church affirms there's one sure way: to correctly form one's conscience. To form a good conscience, the Church proposes a few practical means. The first is the acceptance and practice of Catholic moral teaching as taught by the magisterium of the Church. Every Catholic has a serious obligation to know the Church's moral teaching in order to form good conscience. Next we need to strengthen our knowledge of the moral truth with prayer and mediation. Prayer enlightens the dictates of our conscience and directs us toward God, the source of all truth. To form a conscience that conforms with God's will, we need to examine our conscience frequently in light of Christian morality. This is the best way to prepare for the fruitful reception of sacramental confession.
I am often appalled at having to vote the way I do. I cannot countenance the vast majority of what politicians do. I do my best to remain overtly apolitical and to espouse in non-political terms what I desire from my representatives--a preferential option for the poor, proper stewardship of Earthly resources, justice for the disenfranchised (particularly the most disenfranchised at all) and so on. The only way that our politicians will hear us is if we stop talking politics and start talking the truth--straight from the shoulder in complete candor and honesty. And these truths should not be couched in the minispeak of PoMo advocates, but in the eternal verities that come from faith in Jesus Christ. These truths are relative to nothing--they are absolutes, and we should not be ashamed to espouse them because they are written on the heart and in the minds of all believing Christians. The Holy Spirit burns them into us with His annealing flame.
