Madam, - In a rather ill-tempered letter to your newspaper, Fr Sean Fagan SM (December 29th) takes issue with a statement of mine (in an article on informed conscience published in the January issue of The Word, as reported by Patsy McGarry on December 27th). This was to the effect that it would be a sin for a Catholic to act against the clear teaching of the Church (in the moral sphere).
Fr Fagan asks me to explain "whether or not millions of Catholics are now in hell who for centuries were told by the Church that for couples to have intercourse during menstruation was a mortal sin or were told for 18 centuries that slavery was no sin at all, until it was condemned as an abomination by the Second Vatican Council". In neither of these two questions, however, is authoritative Church teaching involved.
Basing their teaching on the (false medical) assumption that intercourse during the menses might endanger the well-being of the child, individual theologians in the Middle Ages considered such intercourse sinful, though how gravely sinful remained among them a disputed question; others later came to allow it, if menstruation was abnormally prolonged.
With regard to slavery, the early Church tolerated an institution that, like the pagan state itself, was part of the world it entered, while at the same time undermining it by the Gospel message of equality before God (cf. Gal 3:28). The Church did not officially teach that slavery was "no sin at all".
Some theologians, such as Augustine, saw slavery as one of the effects of original sin. But more significant is the fact that, beginning with St Paul, the Church "strove to imbue both masters and slaves with a new Christian spirit of charity which was finally to abolish the institution itself" (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1997, p.1507).
With the discovery of America, a new and more cruel form of slavery was introduced, this time among Christians, and was condemned by successive popes, e.g. Paul III in 1537, Pius V in 1567, and Urban VIII in 1639 (ibid.), long before the Second Vatican Council!
Furthermore, Fr Fagan's attempt to quote my former professor, now Pope Benedict XVI, against me may be rhetorically effective, but again it is based on error. He quotes from Ratzinger's commentary on Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World, but fails to inform us that there Ratzinger was paraphrasing Newman's teaching on conscience, which according to Ratzinger influenced the council text. Fr Fagan also fails to inform us of Ratzinger's critical assessment of the way the council used Newman.
More significantly, he fails to point out that Ratzinger in the same context is at pains to stress what the conciliar text does imply, namely "that obedience to conscience means an end to subjectivism, a turning aside from blind arbitrariness, and produces conformity with objective norms of moral action". It is these objective norms that are taught by the Church's magisterium, as Ratzinger points out in his other writings. In the same commentary, Ratzinger also notes the council's inadequate treatment of the so-called doctrine of an erroneous conscience, which, as he makes clear in his most developed writing on the topic (On Conscience, San Francisco, 2007), has had a negative effect on 20th-century moral theology.
Under the influence of this so-called doctrine of erroneous conscience, many modern theologians have embraced a subjectivist notion of conscience and falsely quote Newman in their support. This is what makes Fr Fagan's quotation so rhetorically effective. But it is not ad rem.
What Fr Fagan quoted (out of context) was written in 1969. In the meantime, Ratzinger has developed further his understanding of the primacy of conscience in both politics and within the Church, as well as clarifying the true meaning of conscience against the background of the various misunderstandings of the concept found among moral theologians today. All of this I discuss in my recent publication, Pope Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age. A Theological Portrait (San Francisco, 2007). - Yours, etc,
D. VINCENT TWOMEY SVD, Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology, Maynooth, Co Kildare.