QUOTATION: Conscience

Before conversion, conscience seemed to be a restraining, coercive power; God was a hostile and exacting judge; the commandments were prohibitions; and the Church was an inhibition. Responsibilities were identified with obligations; duty was seen as opposed to desire; the morally right was identified with the physically unpleasant; and love was opposed to morality. But after conversion the conscience no longer accuses; it never seems to command, or order, or inhibit, because there are no longer two wills in opposition. The will of the convert is the will of God. There is no need for a conscience to tell him what ought to be done.” Conscience is swallowed up in love and there is no duty or “must” between lovers.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul, 1949

QUOTATION: Conscience

Before conversion, conscience seemed to be a restraining, coercive power; God was a hostile and exacting judge; the commandments were prohibitions: and the Church was an inhibition. Responsibilities were identified with obligation; duty was seen as opposed to desire; the morally right was identified with the physically unpleasant; and love was opposed to morality. But after conversion the conscience no longer accuses; it never seems to command, or order, or inhibit, because there are no longer two wills in opposition. The will of the convert is the will of God. There is no need for a conscience to tell him what “ought to be done.” Conscience is swallowed up in love, and there is no duty or “must” between lovers.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul, 1949

QUOTATION: Conscience

It is strange that some theologians have difficulty accepting the precise and limited doctrine of papal infallibility, but see no problem in granting de facto infallibility to everyone who has a conscience.

--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), “Bishops, Theologians and Morality”, 1984

QUOTATION: No Compromise on Freedom

Better to be a beggar in freedom than to be forced into compromises against my conscience.

--Dietrich von Hildebrand

QUOTATION: Tribulation

The greatest of all tribulations is a guilty conscience.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: False Conscience

The devil, our cruel enemy, takes pleasure in aiding us to form false conscience and in troubling our peace of soul; he sometimes succeeds in making us believe that there is sin in everything, in order that, thus deluded, we may deprive ourselves of the happiness of participating in the Eucharistic Banquet, and so lose the precious graces which Our Lord distributes to souls that receive Him worthily. Take care not to become the sport of the spirit of darkness.

--St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, Conferences and Instructions

QUOTATION: Conscience

It is well known that our conscience not only decides whether our actions are good or bad but also approves or disapproves of us.  When it disapproves it chastises and torments us with pangs of remorse.  And this is the fundamental temporal punishment within the purifying function willed by God.  Our pangs of conscience are a form of suffering that purifies.  They are more far-reaching in their inward effect than any temporal chastisement; for not only does a man really experience within himself the malice of sin, crime, injustice, injury, but he is also able to set himself free from it again --  an inner liberation but nonetheless a real one.

--Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, (Pope St. John Paul II), Sign of Contradiction, 1977

QUOTATION: Conscience

Conscience has rights because it has duties; but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations. It becomes license to take up any or no religion, to take up this or that and let it go again, to go to church, to go to chapel, to boast of being above all religions, and to be impartial critic of each of them.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, The Difficulties of Anglicans

QUOTATION: Erring in Ignorance

When men err in ignorance, following closely their own notions of right and wrong, though these notions are mistaken,—great as is their sin, if they might have possessed themselves of truer notions (and very great as was St. Paul's sin, because he certainly might have learned from the Old Testament far clearer and diviner doctrine than the tradition of the Pharisees),—yet such men are not left by the God of all grace. God leads them on to the light in spite of their errors in faith, if they continue strictly to obey what they believe to be His will.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, "St. Paul's Conversion Viewed in reference to His Office", Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 2

QUOTATION: Conscience

Saul was ever faithful, according to his notion of "the way of the Lord." Doubtless he sinned deeply and grievously in persecuting the followers of Christ. Had he known the Holy Scriptures, he never would have done so; he would have recognised Jesus to be the promised Saviour, as Simeon and Anna had, from the first. But he was bred up in a human school, and paid more attention to the writings of men than to the Word of God. Still, observe, he differed from other enemies of Christ in this, that he kept a clear conscience, and habitually obeyed God according to his knowledge. God speaks to us in two ways, in our hearts and in His Word. The latter and clearer of these informants St. Paul knew little of; the former he could not but know in his measure (for it was within him), and he obeyed it. That inward voice was but feeble, mixed up and obscured with human feelings and human traditions; so that what his conscience told him to do, was but partially true, and in part was wrong. Yet still, believing it to speak God's will, he deferred to it, acting as he did afterwards when he "was not disobedient to the heavenly vision," which informed him Jesus was the Christ [Acts xxvi. 19.].

--Blessed John Henry Newman, "St. Paul's Conversion Viewed in reference to His Office", Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 2

QUOTATION: Justification

The self-contented conscience does not content God; and that man alone is just before Him, who knows that all justice and grace proceed from the divine mercy.

--St. John of Avila, Letters, XXIII

QUOTATION: Modern Religion

Now conscience is a stern, gloomy principle; it tells us of guilt and of prospective punishment. Accordingly, when its terrors disappear, then disappear also, in the creed of the day, those fearful images of Divine wrath with which the Scriptures abound. They are explained away. Every thing is bright and cheerful. Religion is pleasant and easy; benevolence is the chief virtue; intolerance, bigotry, excess of zeal, are the first of sins.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, "The Religion of the Day", Parochial and Plain Sermons

QUOTATION: Political Conscience

I think that when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.

--St. Thomas More

QUOTATION: Prayer before the Examination of Conscience

Mother of my God, who art so charitable to sinners that desire to repent, assist me by thy intercession. My guardian angel, who hast been a spectator of all my crimes, help me to discover the sins which I have committed against my God. All ye saints of heaven, pray for me, that I may bring forth fruits of penance. Amen.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Holy Eucharist

QUOTATION: Religious Insincerity

Here is the test between earnestness and insincerity. You say you wish to be a different man; Christ takes you at your word, so to speak; He offers to make you different. He says, "I will take away from you the heart of stone, the love of this world and its pleasures, if you will submit to My discipline." Here a man draws back. No; he cannot bear to lose the love of the world, to part with his present desires and tastes; he cannot consent to be changed. After all he is well satisfied at the bottom of his heart to remain as he is, only he wants his conscience taken out of the way. Did Christ offer to do this for him, if He would but make bitter sweet and sweet bitter, darkness light and light darkness, then he would hail the glad tidings of peace;—till then he needs Him not.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 1, “Knowledge of God's Will without Obedience”

QUOTATION: Conscience

In support of the claim that Newman's concept of conscience matched the modern subjective understanding, people often quote a letter in which he said — should he have to propose a toast — that he would drink first to conscience and then to the Pope. But in this statement, "conscience" does not signify the ultimately binding quality of subjective intuition. It is an expression of the accessibility and the binding force of truth: on this its primacy is based. The second toast can be addressed to the Pope because it is his task to demand obedience to the truth.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Being Good without Christ

For, make no mistake: if you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will not have enough left over to live on. The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you. And your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier. In the end, you will either give up trying to be good, or else become one of those people who, as they say, "live for others" but always in a discontented, grumbling way--always wondering why the others do not notice it more and always making a martyr of yourself. And once you have become that you will be a far greater pest to anyone who has to live with you than you would have been if you had remained frankly selfish.

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

QUOTATION: Conscience

Like all things human, the conscience can fail and encounter illusions and errors. It is a delicate voice that can be overpowered by a noisy, distracted way of life, or almost suffocated by a long-lasting and serious habit of sin.

Conscience needs to be nurtured and educated, and the preferred way to form it—at least for those who have the grace of faith—is to relate it to the biblical revelation and the moral law, authoritatively interpreted with the help of the Church and the Holy Spirit.

--Pope John Paul II

QUOTATION: Conscience and the Sense of Sin

When the conscience is weakened the sense of God is also obscured, and as a result, with the loss of this decisive inner point of reference, the sense of sin is lost.

--Pope John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia

QUOTATION: Freedom

When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.

--Pope John Paul II