So village scold and Catholic writer, Anthony Esolen, has a new piece, Close at the Ear of Eve, up at Crisis Magazine. This one is mostly about conscience. Needless to say, Esolen believes conscience should be shelved in favor of absolute obedience to the teachings of the Catholic Church. He maintains that conscience is little more than thinly-veiled solipsistic casuistry that deludes people into finding appealing but immoral behavior acceptable. He does not refer to any act of conscience, such as those that inspired Thomas More or Martin Luther King Jr., that was not self-serving and in fact led to suffering or loss.
I've been thinking lately, in the context of why people join the military, about why people abandon their will to authority. A friend once suggested that following orders is comforting for some people because they find it stressful to make decisions. I guess some people like to be told when to go to bed, when to get up, what to wear, when and what to eat, what they need to be doing at any time, and even, to some extent, what to think or not think. These appear to be the people that Bob Altemeyer, in his free, online book, The Authoritarians, calls "authoritarian followers" or "RWA's". They apparently tend to score highly on tests that measure self-righteousness and fear of a dangerous world. According to Altemeyer, they can be quite aggressive, often in a dark and cowardly way, when they feel established authority approves of their aggression, when they feel frightened, and when they feel self-righteous. They are putty in the hands of Altemeyer's authoritarian leaders, whome he refers to as "social dominators" and who tend to be amoral, lacking in empathy, and deceitful. They can easily manipulate RWA's, who tend to sacrifice conscience for compliance. This probably explains some of the appeal of Donald Trump, who throws the occasional bone to the religious right, thus assuring them they are on the side of "good", while allowing them to believe he is an all-powerful authority figure.
Interestingly, the Catholic Church, teaches that conscience is inviolable and that "a human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience," even when it is wrong. Vatican II and, more recently, Pope Francis have both affirmed "the primacy of conscience." Not all Catholics approve of such individualistic thinking. The Cathechism states that conscience must be "correctly formed", from which some infer that a "correctly formed" conscience is entirely congruent with church teachings. According to the Catechism, the only excuse for doing wrong in good conscience is "invincible ignorance" of Church teaching. There's a good book, Confronting the Truth: Conscience in the Catholic Tradition by Linda Hogan, on the subject. Hogan traces the sometimes incoherent and contradictory teachings on doctrine throughout the history of the Catholic Church and concludes that Catholic teaching and human authenticity require that conscience trumps the rule book. One can be a Catholic in good standing and still disagree with much of what the Church teaches.
Esolen, a hegemonic masculinist, can't resist fitting into his essay a little dig at "rape culture" (he uses quotation marks) on college campuses. He defines this as young people involving themselves in sexual behavior that they later regret because "they did not fully consent" to it. Um, if someone doesn't fully consent, then they were assaulted. He compares rape accusations to buyer's remorse after signing off on a business deal. This is a hideous and illogical analogy. I don't think he even knows what rape culture really means. He apparently sees it as a series of rape claims, when the definition is far broader. Rape culture is a culture that degrades, marginalizes and sexualizes women through attitudes, speech, and behavior that contribute to a threatening and even dangerous environment. Esolen holds demeaning views of women that contribute to rape culture.
Usually when people minimize the importance of conscience and insist instead on total compliance to "the Church", what they really mean is that they want total compliance to every aspect of their own interpretations of doctrine. As Andrew Greeley says in his wonderful essay, Why I'm Still a Catholic, "You ask such folks [people he calls "right wing kooks" earlier in the essay] whether they believe slavery is moral, that coeducation is against the natural law, that the sun revolves around the earth, that those who are not Catholics cannot be saved, that the theory of religious freedom is wrong -- all doctrines that Popes have taught, most of them in the present century. They avoid the question because they define papal infallibility far more broadly than the Church does, because they are ignorant of history, and because their personalities require an absolute certainty which the human condition cannot provide."
If I ever go back to the Catholic Church, I will continue to be open about my beliefs that women should be ordained, that the LGBTQ population should be normalized, accepted, and supported, that contraception is a good thing, that "safe sex" means responsible premarital sex is acceptable, and even that abortion is a necessary evil. Catholic teachings on conscience say that you can believe these things and still be a good Catholic.
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