For fifty years, heretics have been promoting the primacy of conscience. Taking a single line from St. Thomas Aquinas out of context, these clowns teach that if your conscience tells you to do one thing and the Bible tells you to do another thing, you should follow your conscience. Furthermore, they also say that an action classically-defined by the Magisterium as sinful is not a sin as long as you can prove to yourself that you either had ignorance in your actions or no-malice in your heart.
You might think I am exaggerating here, but I saw this error creeping into moral theology so intensely twenty years ago that I wrote a 70-page thesis on it here as I finished seminary.
But you don’t have to read my 70-page thesis. This short article will suffice. The first reason the “primacy of conscience” is wrong is because Sacred Scripture is clear that God has written His law on every man’s heart in an objective manner, not a subjective manner:
For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.—Romans 1:20-21.
In the above quote, St. Paul is even referring to pagans who have never heard the Gospel. How much more responsible are baptized Christians for the law of God!
Even the new CCC admits that you can’t claim ignorance of the moral law if you could have, should have, would have known the truth of the moral law, but were too lazy to investigate the truth. In other words, invincible ignorance might reduce your culpability before God at the end of your life, but vincible ignorance will certainly not reduce culpability:
A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself. Yet it can happen that moral conscience remains in ignorance and makes erroneous judgments about acts to be performed or already committed. This ignorance can often be imputed to personal responsibility. This is the case when a man “takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin.” In such cases, the person is culpable for the evil he commits. Ignorance of Christ and his Gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one’s passions, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the Church’s authority and her teaching, lack of conversion and of charity: these can be at the source of errors of judgment in moral conduct. If – on the contrary – the ignorance is invincible, or the moral subject is not responsible for his erroneous judgment, the evil committed by the person cannot be imputed to him. It remains no less an evil, a privation, a disorder. One must therefore work to correct the errors of moral conscience.—CCC 1790-1793.
Another reason we place Divine Revelation ahead of the so-called “primacy of conscience” is because the heretics who hijack St. Thomas Aquinas to support their erroneous conclusion actually ignore the full teaching of St. Thomas on this.
One of the questions that St. Thomas asks (quite apropos for our current Church crisis!) is this: Did the people who killed Christ in the first century out of “obedience to the Pharisees” get a pass before God because they were listening to the religious leaders of the day? St. Thomas Aquinas answers with an emphatic: No.
St. Thomas (much more reliable than the new CCC) teaches in the First part of the Second Part of the Summa, Q 19 A 6 that the Jews who killed Christ (even thinking they were being obedient to the current corrupt hierarchy) were still guilty before God: On the contrary, The will of those who slew the apostles was evil. And yet it was in accord with the erring reason, according to Jn. 16:2: “The hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you, will think that he doth a service to God.” Therefore the will can be evil, when it abides by erring reason.
St. Thomas Aquinas continues in his respondeo to that same Q19 A6:
If then reason or conscience err with an error that is involuntary, either directly, or through negligence, so that one errs about what one ought to know; then such an error of reason or conscience does not excuse the will, that abides by that erring reason or conscience, from being evil. But if the error arise from ignorance of some circumstance, and without any negligence, so that it cause the act to be involuntary, then that error of reason or conscience excuses the will, that abides by that erring reason, from being evil. For instance, if erring reason tell a man that he should go to another man’s wife, the will that abides by that erring reason is evil; since this error arises from ignorance of the Divine Law, which he is bound to know.
In other words, you can trick yourself into thinking conscience trumps the Natural Law and Divine Revelation, but you won’t trick God. St. John the Baptist (whose feast day was two days ago) would not allow a Pharisee or even a Roman soldier in the first century to play such games of conscience. The Baptist would have insisted: God will judge you for what you knew and for what you could have known. This includes when you chose to ignore God’s law (or common sense) out of fear, willful-blindness or complacency in sinning (and perhaps in ecclesiastical matters, too.)
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