The Bishop of Limerick, Dr Donal Murray, yesterday launched a 31-page document on "conscience", on behalf of the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference. The conference concludes its three-day summer meeting in Maynooth today.
Dr Murray, who is secretary of the Conference Doctrinal Commission, said much contemporary discussion on moral issues, such as nuclear weapons, integrity in public life, euthanasia etc., "generated more heat than light", with people operating from different parameters.
It was hoped the document would establish common parameters and clarify for people how one arrives at a moral decision/judgement. Conscience, described in the document as "the still, small voice of God" (1 Kings 19:22), "is how we arrive at truth", Dr Murray said.
The document points out that the sincerity with which convictions are held was no indication of the truth of those convictions. "There is a difference between being sincere and being correct," Dr Murray said.
Nor was it wrong to judge sincerely-held views as mistaken. But it was "a distortion of the truth" to see "the Catholic vision of morality as if it were concerned with condemning and denouncing people". It was not a matter of condemning people "but of clarifying the issues involved in particular kinds of decisions".
Conscientious judgment is also "not just about how I feel", the document says, or "whether the action causes more happiness than pain". The first question it seeks to answer "is whether what this action says is true". Then "does what it says about me express the truth about my own dignity?", and "does what it says about others express the truth about their dignity?"
In arriving at such a judgment people had "an inescapable responsibility to inform" their conscience. We do not make up our minds as isolated individuals, but are helped by knowing how others in our world see the matter. That meant learning from tradition, "seeing how people saw the issue down the centuries," as Dr Murray put it. For Catholics that involved taking on board the church's view. "Nowadays people tend to think of tradition as something which is hidebound and restricting," the document says. However ". . . this context which we have inherited is an ally of freedom. Excessive individualism is not."
Similarly, it says that "when it comes to the church there is a tendency to see its moral vision and ideals not as helpful advice but as restrictive regulations".
But "down through the centuries, Christians who wanted to love God and their neighbour with all their hearts faced many different situations" from which "they concluded that, `in this sort of situation you should do this; in that sort of dilemma you should do that.' "It is not that popes and bishops sat in their offices trying to think of things that would make life difficult. It was that the followers of Jesus searched for the right answers to the question of how a Christian should live."
In a section of the document titled "Why should I listen to the Church?" it is pointed out that "the Catholic Church has been given a mandate (by Christ) to teach authoritatively. The Pope or the bishops cannot compel anyone to agree with them. Authority is not dictatorship; it appeals to the consciences of people to accept that what it says is true."
It was also the case today that "one of the great crimes in a world which likes to think that everybody's opinion can be regarded as equally valid is, apparently, to be `absolutist'.
"The idea that there is no moral truth, that one person's opinion is as true as anyone else's, seems initially attractive . . . But the statement that abortion is a violation of the right to life of a human being must either be true or false. It cannot be true for some people but not for others."
Sometimes there are no exceptions, it says. "The direct taking of innocent life is always wrong," but "the right to life is not the right to live for ever; it is the right not to be deliberately killed."
To say that something is absolutely wrong means that if anyone chooses to do it he or she has acted immorally."
Returning to the word `absolutist', the document says that in some circumstances "it can be another word for `hero' ", and instances the martyrs of history who were prepared to die because they believed that their moral obligations were absolute.
"Absolute moral obligations, the call to love of God and neighbour with our whole heart and soul and might, may seem unreasonable demands to make on us human beings with all our limitations and all the varied calls upon our attention," it continues.
