(See also: http://www.thetablet.co.uk/page/renderinguntocaesar.
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/page/renderinguntocaesar2.)
Aidan O’Neill, QC, has written a brilliant, well-documented, highly readable, and in some ways terrifying essay in Common Knowledge on ‘Roman Catholicism and the Temptation of Shari’a.’ He warns that Benedict XVI may be about to engineer an abandonment of the Aristotelian-Thomist Natural Law tradition that has underpinned the Church’s relationship with society in recent centuries, in order to replace it with a more ‘Augustinian’ understanding that will bring the Church into closer proximity with the ideology underlying Islamic Shari’a law. The full essay is available on Project Muse. I would like to share here some of the passages that struck me.
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O’Neill quotes remarks made by Cardinal Ratzinger a year before the papal election :
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[Consequent upon the Reformation], “it was necessary to elaborate a law, or at least a legal minimum, antecedent to dogma: the sources of this law then had to lie no longer in faith, but in nature and in human reason. Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf and others developed the idea of natural law, which transcends the confessional boundaries of faith by establishing reason as the instrument whereby law can be posited in common. Natural law has remained (especially in the Catholic Church) the key issue in dialogues with secular society and with other communities of faith in order to appeal to the reason we share in common and to seek the basis for a consensus about the ethical principles of law in a secular, pluralistic society. Unfortunately, this instrument has become blunt. Accordingly I do not intend to appeal to it for support in this conversation. The idea of natural law presupposed a concept of “nature” in which nature and reason overlap, since nature itself is rational. With the victory of the theory of evolution this view of nature has capsized: nowadays we think that nature as such is not rational. . . . One final element of the natural law that claimed (at least in the modern period) that it was ultimately a rational law has remained, namely human rights. These are incomprehensible without the presupposition that man qua man, thanks simply to his membership in the species man, is the subject of rights and that his being bears within itself values and norms that must be discovered – but not invented. Today, we ought perhaps to amplify the doctrine of human rights with a doctrine of human obligations and human limitations. This could help us to grasp anew the relevance of the question as to whether there might exist a rationality of nature and hence a rational law for man and for his existence in the world.” [Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “That which Holds the World Together: The Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free State,” a talk given at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria in January 2004, reprinted in his Europe Today and Tomorrow: Addressing the Fundamental Issues (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2000), 75 – 76.]
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O’Neill recalls that a position of positive dialogue with and participation in society was taken by Vatican II. The alternative is “fortress church” that rallies to itself a “faithful remnant” while railing against relativism, and corrupted reason outside. The new policies of US Bishops, which contributed to John Kerry’s defeat in 2004, are one practical result of this ideological shift: ‘The role of Catholics in public life came to special prominence in the United States in 2004 as the result of pronouncements made by a number of American bishops. In January of that year, Raymond Burke — then bishop of La Crosse, Wisconsin — published a formal “canonical notification” in the diocesan newspaper, in which he stated that Catholic politicians, who in their work as legislators were deemed by the bishop to have shown “support” for abortion or the legalization of euthanasia, would not be admitted to communion within his diocese. Bishop Burke was subsequently installed as archbishop of St. Louis, Missouri, and in June 2008 he was appointed prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s supreme court of canon law. Archbishop Burke specified that the Democratic Party’s nominee for president of the United States, Senator John Kerry, a practicing Catholic, would be refused communion and, moreover, that Catholics who voted for him should also be excluded until such time as they had confessed and repented their “sin” in voting for “a pro-choice politician.” Thus, a Catholic prelate effectively campaigned against a Catholic candidate for high public office, favoring instead a born-again Methodist-Evangelical, George W. Bush. In a pastoral letter of May 2004, Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs likewise stated without reserve or nuance: “There must be no confusion on these matters. Any Catholic politicians who advocate for abortion, for illicit stem cell research or for any form of euthanasia ipso facto place themselves outside full communion with the Church and so jeopardize their salvation. Any Catholics who vote for candidates who stand for abortion, illicit stem cell research or euthanasia suffer the same fateful consequences… As in the matter of abortion any Catholic politician who would promote so-called “same-sex marriage” and any Catholic who would vote for that political candidate place themselves outside the full communion of the Church and may not receive Holy Communion until they have recanted their positions and been reconciled by the Sacrament of Penance.” It is worthy of at least passing notice that these same bishops appeared willing to allow communion to Catholic politicians and judges who supported the continued use of the death penalty in the United States, who were in favor of the preemptive military strike on Iraq, and who supported the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction by Western interests, despite opposition to all these by the Catholic hierarchy. In response to these individual bishops’ pronouncements, the U.S. Catholic Episcopal Conference issued in June 2004 a public statement, “Catholics in Political Life,” in which they appeared to uphold an individual bishops’ right to proclaim such diocese-specific “excommunications,” though allowing also that “bishops can legitimately make different judgments on the most prudent course of pastoral action.” The approach of then-Cardinal Ratzinger to the issue was more nuanced than that of bishops such as Burke and Sheridan. In a memorandum to the president of the U.S. Catholic Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Ratzinger stated that a Catholic politician who consistently campaigned and voted for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws – and any individual Catholic who deliberately voted for a politician “precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia” – would be guilty of “formal cooperation in evil” and therefore would be deemed “unworthy” to present him- or herself for communion. Cardinal Ratzinger did leave open the possibility that an individual voter might have “proportionate reasons” for voting for such a candidate despite his or her stand on abortion and/or euthanasia… Archbishop Burke returned to the fray with the publication, in October 2004, of a new pastoral letter, “On Our Civic Responsibility for the Common Good,” in which he added that individuals had a moral duty both to vote and to use that vote against any candidate supporting, inter alia, same-sex marriage, no matter that candidate’s position on any other issues. Archbishop Burke also unequivocally indicated his dissent from the position taken by his fellow bishops that they might “legitimately make different judgments on the most prudent course of pastoral action.” The archbishop insisted that “The statement of the United States’ Bishops, Catholics in Political Life… failed to take account of the clear requirement to exclude from Holy Communion those who, after appropriate admonition, obstinately persist in supporting public legislation which is contrary to natural moral Law… No matter how often a bishop or priest repeats the teaching of the Church regarding procured abortion, if he stands by and does nothing to discipline a Catholic who publicly supports legislation permitting the gravest of injustices and, at the same time, presents himself to receive holy communion, then his teaching rings hollow. To remain silent is to permit serious confusion regarding a fundamental truth of moral law. Confusion is, of course, one of the most insidious fruits of scandalous behavior.”’
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‘Cardinal Levada, formerly archbishop of San Francisco and now Joseph Ratzinger’s successor as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has asserted: “Over the years since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, the frustration of many Catholics, bishops among them, about Catholic politicians who not only ignore church teaching on abortion but actively espouse a contrary position has continued to grow… Supreme Court decisions are not infrequently changed or reversed over time. The Dred Scott decision on slavery is perhaps the most cited case in point. The Supreme Court’s judgment about the application of the Constitution should also be guided by principles of the moral law.” For an American, Cardinal Levada displays a worrying lack of understanding of the constitutional history of the United States in supposing that the Dred Scott decision was overturned by judicial fiat. He suffers as well from a form of historical amnesia in his failure to acknowledge that slaves were held and owned by Catholic institutions based in the South right up to the Civil War (on the basis that slavery was not at that time considered by the church to be intrinsically evil). Instead, of course, Dred Scott was overturned not by the court but by the terms of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments to the constitution, passed in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War. But if, on Cardinal Levada’s understanding, the votes of Supreme Court justices are to be determined not (only) by the terms of law or the intention of the framers of the constitution but (also) by external considerations such as the requirements of the religion of the particular judge (as explained by their bishops), is there not a problem about separation of powers and about the separation of church and state?’
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‘The bishops protest that they are simply reiterating the church’s constant social teaching on respect for life and on matters of sexual ethics. They are just doing their job. But of course they are not just teaching; they are giving instructions and issuing threats. Theirs is a model of society in which people can be told how to vote and be punished, eternally, if they fail to do so in the required manner. If the bishops’ threatened use of church disciplinary measures were successful, a Catholic bloc would emerge whose votes could be delivered on call. The bishops would become political players, of similar influence and importance to the trade-union barons of old Labour (in a British context) or to the lords of Tammany Hall (in New York). In this way, the institutional church might increase its power within civil society — even where Catholics form a minority of the electorate – and politicians would once again fear the wrath and condemnation of turbulent priests. The legislature (and courts) could be expected to push through a quite radical social program. Given the tone of some of the recent pronouncements emanating from the Vatican, the “Catholic agenda” might include policies such as these:
• accepting, within domestic jurisdictions, the binding and enforceable nature of international (humanitarian) law and, more specifically, affirming the jurisdiction of the international criminal court over the state’s nationals;
• recriminalizing abortion, as well as banning the manufacture and sale of IUDs and the “morning-after pill”;
• outlawing human embryonic stem cell research and the therapeutic or reproductive cloning of human embryos; creating animal/human-hybrid or admixed embryos by cloning, or using human biological material obtained from aborted embryos in scientific research or for the production of vaccines or other products;
• halting the in vitro production of human embryos even for the purposes of overcoming a (married) couple’s infertility, as well as prohibiting surrogacy and donor arrangements in relation to assisted pregnancy;
• strengthening the laws against euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide;
• improving prison conditions and abolishing (except, perhaps, in the most extreme circumstances) the death penalty;
• limiting the availability of contraceptives and promoting a sex-education curriculum directed against the present day’s “contraceptive mentality”;
• withdrawing legal recognition from unmarried de facto family relationships;
• making divorce more difficult and also, conceivably, prohibiting remarriage after divorce;
• supporting measures enabling women to participate equally and without suffering discrimination in the workplace;
• promoting the integration of people with disabilities into society and, in particular, ensuring that they are not discriminated against in the workplace;
• withdrawing the protection of antidiscrimination laws that cover sexual orientation and vetoing every legal recognition of same-sex unions;
• licensing and encouraging biotechnological innovations (including genetic modification) in the area of plant and (nonhuman) animal life.
These laws encouraged by the Vatican are held to derive their binding force and legitimacy not from consent of the people but from their harmony with the world as God intended it. The model assumes that God created humanity – and each other component of the universe – with a fundamentally fixed nature or essence. It further assumes that, by careful observation, it is possible to discern various natural laws that govern the appropriate exercise of that nature. These laws are in principle immutable since human nature is (said to be) an unchanging given. All and any acts undertaken contrary to these natural laws will be, in all circumstances, objectively immoral because they are contrary to nature and to God’s purpose. Further, the model assumes that civil law should reflect and enforce the moral norms of natural law… By contrast, however, St. Thomas Aquinas held that it is not the business of human law either to restrain all moral vices or to require the execution of all virtuous acts. Immorality does not map directly onto illegality. The apparent collapse, in recent Vatican pronouncements, of the careful distinctions made by Aquinas does make it seem that the temptation of shari’a has been irresistible to the church. A profound lack of sympathy on the part of the Vatican with specific legal developments in the Western democracies – particularly in the areas of sexuality, family, and the right to life – has perhaps led the church away from the Thomist recognition of the dignity and integrity of the system of positive civil law… What, then, is the difference between this agenda of the Church and the determination of radical Islamists to make shari’a the civil law in all Muslim countries? Why, for example, should Catholic prelates not call for the recriminalization of adultery, as has been proposed in Turkey? Adultery, after all, is forbidden in the Ten Commandments and considered by the church to be an objectively immoral act that undermines the very basis of civil society – the family. The legal agenda of the church could well be more radical in scope than even the Islamists’ program, because the church contends that the moral standards it seeks to guarantee through legislation are products of rational reflection on the human condition. They are therefore standards that everyone, regardless of religious belief or culture, can properly be expected to recognize and affirm.’
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‘While awaiting the establishment of the godly state, church authorities in the post-Nuremberg context have relied less on the assertion of theocratic power than on the right, guaranteed to them in democratic societies, to freedom of religion and freedom of expression. These democratic rights have become the basis for the bishops’ claim of entitlement to intervene in issues of public policy that touch upon questions of morality. Moreover, the bishops’ criticism of laws to which they object has tended to be framed in the language of fundamental human rights… The problem with many recent documents emanating from the Vatican, and from some of the more politically activist bishops, is the lack of adequate awareness of what use of the language of human rights, in the context of democratic society, commits them to as a matter of process. Likewise, there seems to be inadequate awareness of the complexities involved in the processes by which the rule of law is carried out. And perhaps of most far-reaching significance, the bishops show inadequate awareness that fidelity to the values of legality and constitutionality is itself a moral requirement for participation in democratic public life… Though church documents sharply critical of civil society have increasingly been framed in the language of human rights, the Vatican itself – as a sovereign European state – has not subscribed to the European Convention on Human Rights. But if the church is willing to use human rights language to criticize civil society, then it has also to be open to the possibility that the church itself may be criticized and judged with reference to these same standards. The Vatican’s Compendium of Social Doctrine acknowledges that “the Church profoundly experiences the need to respect justice and human rights within her own ranks.” The difficulty is that the church uses the language of human rights as if it were simply another way of talking about natural law. The popes, the curia, and the bishops appear to assume that, when participating in human rights discourse, they do no more than translate the church’s constant teaching into intelligible contemporary terms. This assumption on the part of church authorities is mistaken: it is a basic category or framework error. In Catholic teaching, “natural law” is a specifically Christian theological account of what makes actions by human beings into moral actions and of what gives human (positive) laws their prescriptive or binding force. But talk about fundamental rights, post-Nuremberg, is not talk about theology, nor is it talk about virtue (which surely is the proper focus of any Christian morality). “Fundamental rights talk” is best understood as the articulation of a specifically political attitude toward the power of the state; namely, that its power is not unlimited. A concrete expression of the limitation on power is that the state and its agents can be held to account, as a matter of law, for conduct held to be incompatible with respect for a set of basic values. Talk of fundamental rights in this mode arose from the historical experience (particularly in Nazi Germany) of how very far state power, when constitutionally unlimited, can go in abusing individuals. Our contemporary talk of human rights seeks to protect individuals from the state and its agents. The focus of human rights legislation is individualistic, its methods are thus by definition legalistic; and its end is the preservation of self-interests. Given its source and historical context, human rights talk does not directly address the duties owed by individuals to others. Nor does it address the interests of the community over and against those of the individual. In other words, the church has so far failed to take account adequately of the political (and specifically, the democratic) context in which the idea of human rights is now embedded. In decontextualizing, de-democratizing, and dehistoricizing human rights, the church is bound to continue misrepresenting them. As for the specific processes by which democracies embody the rule of law, the Roman Catholic Church – in stark contrast, say, to the Church of Scotland – is not a democracy (the laity have no vote in its governance), nor has the sovereign State of the Vatican City participated in constructing the sets of legally enforceable rights affirmed since World War II.’
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‘Western democratic states are not, as some in the church hierarchy would claim, morally neutral or morally bankrupt. The post-Nuremberg democracies share a moral vision that is implicit in the following propositions:
1. that all individuals have inestimable and intrinsic worth;
2. that respect for this intrinsic worth can be translated into statements of fundamental rights;
3. that respect for these rights entails each individual’s correlative obligation to respect the rights of others as equal to his or her own, and entails as well each individual’s respect for the interests of the community as a whole;
4. that the interests of the community as a whole are to be determined by an electoral process under which the majority’s will prevails – subject always to the duty of the majority to give due respect to the fundamental rights of minorities and of each individual;
5. that the creation and maintenance of a balance of respect for the rights of individuals and the interests of the community require that institutions for open discussion flourish (hence the importance accorded to freedom of speech, open and honest debate within legislatures, and the flow of information and commentary through the press, broadcasting, and the Internet);
6. that the prevention of tyranny and abuse of power by (or in the name of) the majority, as well as the protection of the fundamental rights of minorities and individuals, entail that there should be independent and impartial courts, whose judgments are to be respected and accepted by all parties before them and especially by those entrusted with political power;
7. that an attitude of humility, including the acceptance that one’s own views are contingent on passing circumstances – an acceptance that one might be wrong and a consequent openness to persuasion of the rightness of other views – is essential in maintaining social order and civic peace;
8. that all those who participate in civil society – and particularly those holding public office – must do so in good faith and must share those values of respect for the individual, toleration of difference, equality of treatment, and willingness to listen, upon which all the civil institutions of the society must also be based;
9. that laws duly enacted under the democratic deliberative process, unless found – under the same process – to be unconstitutional and to violate fundamental rights of individuals, must be respected and obeyed by all parties within society, subject always to the right to continue pressing, under the same deliberative process, for change in such laws;
10. that, given the experience of World War II and relevant findings of the Nuremberg trial judges, an individual, in rare and extreme cases, may break a duly enacted law, but only where
(a) the individual is seeking to prevent an action that is itself illegal under either domestic or applicable international (humanitarian) law;
(b) the individual’s action is necessary in the sense that there is no reasonable legal alternative available to the actor (for example, because the authorities have refrained from enforcing relevant laws);
(c) that the individual actor can reasonably and properly expect that the actions he or she takes will be effective in impeding the illegal act; and
(d) that the individual’s actions are marked by a fidelity to legal values, which is to say that they are proportionate, that they involve no possibility of harm or violence to individuals, and that no attempt is made to avoid detection in performing the act.
It should be said immediately that most of these propositions have their parallels in official Roman Catholic documents, including the Catechism. Civil democratic society does not differ radically from the church regarding the importance of individual rights, though the emphases of course differ. Both the church and civil society recognize the urgency of protecting minorities against the potential tyranny of the majority. The difference between civil democratic society and the church can be formulated in either negative or positive terms. Defined negatively, civil democratic society, in comparison with the church, shows a lack of certainty or finality in the judgments made on how its substantive values are to be realized and on the requirements of the common good. Defined positively, civil democratic society differs from the church in its openness to the possibility of views alternative to those that currently hold sway and in the openness of decision making. The assumption of fallibility does not mean, as is sometimes charged, that a democratic society is therefore committed to “ethical relativism.” Relativism is an assertion that there exists no right answer, while the structures of a democratic civil society exist precisely to allow for the continued search for right answers.’
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‘It is only the rules of due process and the requirements of pluralism and liberalism that render guarantees of human rights enforceable – render them more than an empty promise. In its use of the language of human rights, the church has not yet committed itself to this very particular moral and political vision. Any church teaching on the proper relationship between the civil law and the moral law needs to take into account that, from the perspective of the former, the legitimacy of any law comes not from the end it achieves but from its having passed through the democratic process and having been found, by the institutions of the state charged with this task, in accord with all fundamental rights that the state guarantees. Moreover, laws in the democratic state are not fixed and final, and its governments are not eternal. It is a democratic ideal that the law be responsive to and reflective of the community; thus there is provision for lawful change. Lawful change is brought about by using mechanisms provided: campaigns may be mounted, petitions gathered, discussions initiated in the press and the broadcasting media, legislative hearings called, members of the executive and the legislature lobbied. All of these are activities in which the church may properly and legitimately participate. Given the existence and vigor of the democratic deliberative process, it is improper and illegitimate for the church to claim that it can mandate immediate disobedience of laws that it considers in contravention of natural law. To do so threatens the integrity of a legal system that emerged in response to post-Nuremberg needs for liberalism, pluralism, majoritarianism, and procedural transparency.
Church authorities sometimes respond to this logic by implicitly comparing the institutions and principles of the post-Nuremberg democracies with those that permitted the Nazi Party to take power and then exercise it through the German legal system. But, as we have seen, the German legal system from 1933 to 1945 was systematically corrupted and subordinated to tyranny, such that all who participated in it (or in public life at any level) were tainted. It was a system of, and only of, state oppression; and the only moral response was for the just to withdraw from any participation in it and, indeed, to seek to overthrow the regime – by “unlawful” or “revolutionary” means if need be – that sustained it. Nothing at all resembling this situation can reasonably be said to hold currently in the legal systems of Western democracies. But if that is indeed the church’s assessment of systems that permit abortion and euthanasia, then the only option is for the church to instruct its members to withdraw wholly from participation in the public life of these societies. John Paul II, however, in most of his remarks, seemed to take the more balanced view that, while most laws in Western democracies were aimed at the common good, others (notably those respecting human life) failed to achieve that standard. If the church in this way accepts the overall legitimacy of Western democracies, then it cannot call for revolt against the system as a whole. Its one reasonable and consistent option is, then, to promote change in specific laws by engaging in public debate…
The main problem with the political ideas of rigorists like Archbishop Burke is that, while they would accept that individuals have an extensive list of fundamental rights that must be respected, the rigorists’ basic orientation is theocratic or, in their terminology, theonomic. Despite arguments made by John Paul II in favor of an “authentically free political order,” we are often reminded by the hierarchy that, since the church is not a democracy, it is not essential that civil society should be so. Because the truth is known to, and will be taught by, the church – and because the spreading of erroneous views is likely to cause harm – there is no reason, on this theocratic vision, for structural importance to be ascribed to the freedom of speech. Free speech can serve, indeed, as a medium of temptation: citizens are tempted (in the words of the Catechism) “to prefer their own judgment and reject authoritative teachings.” In a theocracy of the kind envisioned, laws draw their legitimacy not from consent of the people but from conformity with natural law. Thus, no respect is due intrinsically to electoral, legislative, and judicial procedures. Thus are Catholic voters told that voting for a particular candidate would be sinful and incompatible with their continued full participation in the life of the church. Thus are Catholic members of democratic legislatures instructed to disregard the views of the people who elected them to office and to use their office instead to promote church-approved legislation. Thus are Catholic members of the judiciary expected to use their offices not to protect and uphold the values of the constitution and laws of the state, but rather to decide cases in accordance with the dictates of natural law, as explained by bishops. And thus are Catholic heads of government told they are not answerable to their people but rather to God and his church. The idea that civic magistrates and leaders of the people hold office contingent on their adherence to the requirements of the godly is a model of church-state relations known outside of Catholic Christendom. It was developed as well in the Reformed tradition by Calvin and his followers in sixteenth-century Geneva and seventeenth-century Scotland. It is also the model of radical Islamists today…
The bishops, unlike post-Nuremberg democrats, implicitly understand laws as commands. A law tells you what to do or not do, and the failure to obey entails punishment. Law is directed by a superior to a subordinate, and backed by threats. We may call this the “big stick theory” of legal obligation. In claiming that their prescriptions as to what we ought to do must outweigh the individual’s obligations under civil law, the bishops appear to be offering a “bigger stick theory”: obey your bishop’s prescriptions or else place yourself “outside full communion with the Church and so jeopardize your Eternal salvation.” These last words are those of Bishop Michael Sheridan, whose model for governance is dualist, indeed almost Manichean. On the one hand, you have the command of the state; on the other hand, you have the commands of God (as mediated through his church), which trump human laws…
The late pope, at least, seems to have recognized that reliance, in a democratic context, on canonical authority to issue instructions and threaten sanctions had been turning abortion and euthanasia into sectarian issues peculiar to the church discipline of Catholicism. Whereas Catholic moral tradition has it that these are questions to which all persons of goodwill, guided by the light of reason (rather than revelation), will come to see the objectively right answers.’
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‘The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its communication of 2003 against proposals for the legal recognition of same-sex unions, acknowledged the primary importance of individual conscience by suggesting the existence of a right (or indeed, in some circumstances, a duty) of “conscientious objection” to civil laws. Of necessity, that same right of informed conscientious objection must be conceded within the institutional church if the baptized are to remain moral agents. As then-Father Joseph Ratzinger commented on article 16 of Gaudium et Spes: “For Newman, conscience represents the inner complement and limit of Church principle. Over the Pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there still stands one’s own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirements of ecclesiastical authority. This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one in which the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even of the official Church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism… Conscience is made the principle of objectivity, in the conviction that careful attention to its claim discloses the fundamental common values of human existence… Above all, however, conscience is presented as the meeting point and common ground of Christians and non-Christians and consequently as the real hinge on which dialogue turns. Fidelity to conscience unites Christians and non-Christians and permits them to work together to solve the moral tasks of mankind, just as it compels them both to humble and open inquiry into the truth.”
One of the great problems with the way in which church authorities talk about natural law is its deductive certainty, its apriorism, its nonverifiability and nonfalsifiability, its antiempiricism. For example, the much-repeated assertion that it is “not possible” for homosexuals to find fulfilment, complementarity, or happiness within a same-sex partnership goes unnuanced despite testimony from individuals who live the life. Such testimony is dismissed as false consciousness. “The experience was only a dream, as that which should not be can not be so” (Morgenstern), as Joseph Ratzinger might reason. But if the bishops are going to take seriously both the traditional Catholic teaching on the primacy of individual conscience and that on the universal discernibility of natural law, then they are going to have to
1. allow that individuals may, in conscience, differ as to what moral action demands of them in any particular circumstance;
2. allow that questions regarding how best to legislate in or regulate areas of moral dispute or controversy – where people of goodwill reach contrary positions – are questions for the prudential judgment of elected legislators rather than for ex cathedra pronouncements of the church;
3. be willing to listen and to engage in dialogue, in both the context of civil society and the context of the church, without resorting to ecclesiastical sanctions or the threat of sanctions;
4. seek to persuade by the authority of their reasoning rather than to command obedience by reason of their authority; and
5. be willing to accept that they may themselves get it wrong.’