Slide 2:
What the church means by that teaching is that we must always do what we truly believe is right and good.
It is also important that we make every effort to correctly form our conscience by following the Church’s moral, ethical, and doctrinal teachings.
Both correct and incorrect judgments of conscience bind us, but in quite different ways.
When you go against your conscience by ignoring the little voice within you that says you should or should not do or say something then you sin.
Slide 3:
The judgment of a correct conscience binds us absolutely.
An incorrect conscience on the other hand binds us to decisions incidentally.
“On Conscience” written by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger now Pope Benedict XVI, he says that an incorrect conscience places guilt differently.
“The guilt lies then in a different place, much deeper -- not in the present act, not in the present judgment of conscience, but in the neglect of my being that made me deaf to the internal promptings of truth.”
In other words we have a responsibility to seek truth, and where we find truth, we find God, and at the same time we correctly form our conscience.
Slide 4:
Think of it this way, a patient lies in a hospital bed and looks up at the nurse and asks, “Am I going to die soon?”
She knows the patient is terminally ill and based upon her professional knowledge she is aware the patient can die at any moment.
She feels sorry for the patient and believes she can make him feel better so she says, “No, you have a long time to go.”
She sinned by purposely telling a lie.
Slide 5:
Given the same situation let’s say our nurse isn’t skilled in the terminally ill patient’s condition.
Ignoring her conscience’s warnings about her inability to give an accurate and truthful answer she tells the patient, “No, you have a long time to go.”
She also sinned but not in the act of telling the patient what she believed they wanted to hear, but sinned because she became deaf to the internal promptings of conscience and her own lack of knowledge and experience that would have allowed her to deliver a truthful and accurate answer.
Slide 6:
Every day in every part of the world people stand before judges and say, “I didn’t know it was wrong,”
And the judge says, “Lack of knowledge is no excuse.” That statement can be applied to our conscience.
What seemed okay when we were six-years old isn’t okay when we are twenty-six. Why?
Because our conscience, like our minds and bodies grow over time.
Over time we are held to an increasingly higher standard.
Slide 7:
As Christians we are held to an even higher standard based upon the knowledge we should have developed in areas of church teachings and the workings of the world.
It is our individual responsibility to develop a correct conscience by always seeking the truth our conscience can correctly and consistently give us accurate advice. Can our conscience be wrong?
Yes, but only if we allow it to do so by not taking on the responsibility to grow in wisdom and faith.