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"The Creator, your Father, did not birth you in ignorance"
The Church defines as a dogma that even sinful man has a truly free will. The will, as St. Thomas Aquinas remarks, remains ever free to give or refuse consent.[1] The position taken by the Church is that “normal human beings—normal being understood as signifying not ideally normal, or perfectly healthy persons, but the common run of men—under ordinary circumstance (including circumstances of temptation, stress, and pressure) possess sufficient freedom to be capable of sin and indeed, of mortal sin.”[2]
Everyone has a conscience, a God-given gift that helps us to recognize the truth, so as to do good and avoid evil. Cardinal Newman refers to conscience as “the main guide of the soul, given to the whole race of Adam outside the true fold of Christ as well as within it, given from the first dawn of reason, given to it in spite of that grievous penalty of ignorance….”[3] Pope Leo XII wrote: “First among all [laws] is the natural law, which is written and engraved in the mind of every human being for it is the human reason itself, commanding to do right and forbidding sin.”[4] The Catechism of the Catholic Church likewise states, "...no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are written in the conscience of every man"[5] My Catholic Faith catechism explains, “As St. Paul, speaking of the non-Jews who did not know the Jewish law, said: ‘The Gentiles, who have no law, do by nature what the Law prescribes, they show the work of the law written in their hearts. Their conscience bears witness to them’ (Romans 2:14-15).”[6]
As the Bayside message
tells us, “You have all been given a God-born conscience. The Creator, your
Father, did not birth you in ignorance.” (Jesus, November 24, 1973)
Conscience and guilt
The Bible says, “Wash me yet more from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my iniquity, and my sin is always before me” (Psalm 50: 4-5, Douay-Rheims version). The pain of conscience will normally be felt by all, if the voice of conscience has not been deadened by habitual sin. Cardinal Ratzinger states, "This feeling of guilt disturbs the false calm of conscience and could be called conscience's complaint against my self-satisfied existence. It is as necessary for man as the physical pain which signifies disturbances of normal bodily functioning."[7] We know from the Bible that “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But if we do not humble ourselves in our sinfulness, God will deprive us of His peace: “He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength: who hath resisted Him, and hath had peace?” (Job 9:4) and “God hath given to a man that is good in his sight, wisdom, and knowledge, and joy: but to the sinner he hath given vexation, and superfluous care…” (Ecclesiastes 2:26).
To acknowledge that we are sinners, to listen to the voice of conscience, is an essential first step in returning to God. Pope John Paul II tells us: “To acknowledge one’s sin, indeed--penetrating still more deeply into the consideration of one’s own personhood--to recognize oneself as being a sinner, capable of sin and inclined to commit sin, is the essential first step in returning to God.”[8] Often this conversion of heart comes after many years, with many regrets. There is a powerful scene from the play-made-movie, Cyrano de Bergerac, where the immoral count tells Roxanne, “When one has lived too long and done all, one is pained by a thousand vague regrets… I envy your Cyrano.” These “thousand vague regrets” are the voice of conscience.
Bishop Keating emphasizes that the person who is numb to guilt is spiritually ill:
“The feeling of guilt,
the capacity to recognize guilt, belongs essentially to our spiritual make-up
and to the process of conversion from sin. The person who is numb to guilt, who
is without remorse, is spiritually ill. This sad condition is often the result
of sinful habits. In a way, sin does to one's soul what AIDS does to one's body:
It attacks the built-in recovery system itself. Conscience and guilt are
debilitated or suppressed: ‘Sin creates a proclivity
to sin; it engenders vice by repetition of the same acts. This results in
perverse inclinations which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgment
of good and evil. Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself, but
it cannot destroy the moral sense at its root.’"[9]
The lax conscience
King David wrote in the Psalms, “Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth: and a door round about my lips. Incline not my heart to evil words: to make excuses in sins” (Psalm 140:3-4). Neglect, not resisting evil as strongly as we should, and not loving God purely and wholeheartedly inclines us to offer excuses, in order to evade personal responsibility. Bishop Sheen states:
“What is it that drags a soul down to hell but the neglect to lift itself up to heaven? Let a man be solely at ease with himself, satisfied with what he is, consenting to the customs of the world, drawing in the unwholesome breath of refined evil and letting his moral inclinations run their natural course without check or stay, and he will most surely tide onward, with an easy and gentle motion, down the broad current of eternal death, for in the language of Paul, ‘How shall we escape, if we neglect?’”[10]
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Being a practical thing, conscience depends in large measure for its correctness upon the good use of it and on proper care taken to heed its deliverances, cultivate its powers, and frustrate its enemies.”[11] Intellectual torpidity, ignorance, indifference, and complaisance, writes Fr. Felix Sarda y Sylvany, are ways of opening the doors to the enemies of our conscience and our soul.[12] Knowing more about the sports page that the Catholic Faith and morality is not properly informing one’s conscience.
Conscience always remains within the individual; it can never be entirely destroyed. In the words of Cardinal Newman:
“I do not say that is particular injunctions are always clear, or that they are always consistent with each other, but what I am insisting on here is this, that it commands—that is praises, it blames, it promises, it threatens, it implies a future, and it witnesses the unseen. It is more than a man’s own self. The man himself has not power over it, or only with extreme difficulty: he did not make it, he cannot destroy it. He may silence it in particular cases or directions, he may distort its enunciations but he cannot, or it is quite the exception if he can, he cannot emancipate himself from it. He can disobey it, he may refuse to us it; but it remains.”[13]
According to Fr. Prummer, O.P., “The causes of a lax conscience are numerous: (1) bad education and evil company—all too evident from daily experiences; (2) violent disorderly passions which usually cloud the intellect and prevent it from making a correct judgment; (3) a life of vice which causes spiritual blindness or at least shortsightedness.”[14]
Pope John Paul II states:
“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. This explains why my Predecessor Pius XII one day declared, in words that have almost become proverbial, that ‘the sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin.’”[15]
A person who has fallen into repeated lapses quickly loses the keen perception of conscience:
“Repeated lapses into the same kind of sin may easily dishabituate us from a keen perception of the antithesis to value it embodies: we tend to consider the offense in question no longer as ‘so very bad,’ and allow certain channels to form in our mental world through which we may all the more glibly slip into that sin.”[16]
The
seared conscience
The
conscience, if disobeyed, can become defiled (1 Cor. 8:7; 10:25). If conscience
is persistently disobeyed, it becomes hardened or seared. St. Paul writes to
Timothy, speaking of those “having their conscience seared” (1 Timothy 4:2).
“Conscience may err on the side of laxity,” writes Fr. Edward Hayes, “whereby a
person can sometimes be persuaded that great sins are permissible. Such people
often begin by rationalizing minor faults until their conscience becomes numb
and incapable of proper direction.”[17]
St. Thomas Aquinas explains that “the natural law can be blotted out from the
human heart either by evil persuasions …or by vicious customs and corrupt
habits, as among some men theft and even unnatural vices, as the Apostle states,
were not esteemed sinful."[18]
St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “And this is why I lost You, because You will not be possessed together with a lie.”[19] Pope John Paul II calls man’s grave disobedience towards God a “suicidal act”.[20] Those who habitually ignore or silence the voice of conscience fall further and further into self-deception, with horrible consequences. Father Peeters explains the fall towards a hardened conscience:
“The principles and rules gradually become either clear or obscure in perfect proportion to the growth or decline of fervor. Objections rise up at will against every restraint placed upon the freedom that is longed for. The man who transgresses what he knows is his duty soon learns to think up sophisms and pretexts to justify himself. Just how far this dupery can go and just how the conscience can grow so hard is a mystery.”[21]
The lovers of evil are
not merely those who are lazy or lax in following their conscience, but those
who have constructed in their mind a world to their own liking. Isaias the
prophet wrote, “Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness
for light, and light for darkness” (Isaias 5:20). Jesus warns about the danger
of blind conscience: "If your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of
light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness"
(Mt 6:22-23).
The evil and the blame-game
The evil do not have a love for the truth (1 Thess. 2:10), nor are they open to the truth: “The perverse are hard to be corrected” (Ecclesiastes 1:15). Cardinal Ratzinger explains:
"No longer seeing one's guilt, the falling silent of conscience in so many areas, is an even more dangerous sickness of the soul than the guilt which one still recognizes as such. He who no longer notices that killing is a sin has fallen farther than the one who still recognizes the shamefulness of his actions, because the former is further removed from the truth and conversion. Not without reason does the self-righteous man in the encounter with Jesus appear as the one who is really lost.”[22]
Scott Peck explains that for the evil, their perverse will must win out over their conscience:
“… to a greater or lesser degree, all mentally healthy individuals submit themselves to the demands of their own conscience. Not so the evil, however. In the conflict between their guilt and their will, it is the guilt that must go and the will that must win.”[23]
The evil have become a law unto themselves and have chosen self-idolatry. Otto Barb tells us:
“Idolatry is well understood in the Bible as differing from the pure worship of Israel’s God in the fact of its personification and objectification of the human will in contrast with the superhuman transcendence of the true God. When an idol is worshipped, man is worshipping himself, his desires, his purposes and his will…. As a consequence of this type of idolatry man was outrageously guilty of giving himself the status of God and of exalting his own will as of supreme worth.”[24]
Our Lady of the Roses has said many times, “sin is insanity.” The evil are insane with sin. They employ a wide variety of defense mechanisms and psychological weapons to evade personal responsibility and get their own way. “Generally, those who do wrong,” says Dr. Laura Schlessinger, “use all sorts of behaviors and psychological tricks to avoid truths that make them feel uncomfortable.”[25] Dr. Scott Peck points out “the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders”.[26] These sinful behaviors are indicative of attempts to silence the voice of conscience.
A common defense mechanism of those with a seared conscience is scapegoating, or projection. Dr. Peck writes:
“Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world’s fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.”[27]
This scapegoating behavior is used by those who are unwilling to face their own sinfulness. Dr. Peck explains that the evil do this “Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection.”[28] He also writes, “Although we need research to know much more about evil, we already know a few things beyond doubt. One is the tendency of evil to project their evil onto others. Unable or unwilling to face their own sinfulness, they must explain it away by accusing others of defects.”[29]
In summary, Charles Sykes gives a vivid explanation of America’s growing fear of personal responsibility:
“Something extraordinary is happening in American society. Criss-crossed by invisible trip wires of emotional, racial, sexual, and psychological grievance, American life is increasingly characterized by the plaintive insistence, I am a victim. The victimization of America is remarkably egalitarian. From the addicts of the South Bronx to the self-styled emotional road-kill of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the mantra is the same: I am not responsible; it’s not my fault. Paradoxically, this don’t-blame-me permissiveness is applied only to the self, not to others; it is compatible with an ideological puritanism that is noticeable for its shrill demands of psychological, political, and linguistic correctness. The ethos of victimization has an endless capacity not only for exculpating one’s self from blame, washing away responsibility in a torrent of explanation—racism, sexism, rotten parents, addiction, and illness—but also for projecting guilt onto others.”[30]
"It is only because many have given themselves to the love of the flesh and the material things of your world. In this manner have they become blinded to the truth. It is sad, My child, that many have even sold their souls to get to the head." - Our Lady, December 31, 1974
References:
[1] St. Thomas
Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 3, a. 2.
[2]
Catholic Encyclopedia, “Responsibility,” 1967 edition.
[3]
quoted by Dietrich von Hildebrand, True Morality, pp. 138-139.
[4]
Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical letter Libertas
Praestantissimum.
[5]
Catechism of the Catholic Church, #1860.
[6]
Bishop Louis Morrow, My Catholic Faith, p. 171.
[7]
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” 1991.
[8]
Pope John Paul II, apostolic exhortation On Reconciliation and
Penance in the Mission of the Church Today, #13.
[9]
Bishop John Keating, “A
Pastoral Letter on Morality and Conscience,” September 17, 1994.
Our Lady of the Roses Bayside messages:
These messages came from Jesus, Mary, and the saints to Veronica Lueken at Bayside, NY, from 1968 to 1995.
NECESSARY TO
REPEAT?
“My child, is it necessary for Me to repeat My words? Have I
not reached the world with an essence of the truth? The truth lies in every
man's heart, for every man has been given an inbuilt conscience from the
Father. However, of your own will can you shut off your contact with your
Father, for you give yourself to the world.” - Our Lady, February 1, 1974
EMOTION
SUPERB
“My poor children, hopeless of heart, know now that the future
after the cleansing will be glorious, far more glorious than your human mind
could ever conceive. Beauty of beauties! Emotion superb! The fulfillment of
every desire that man could conceive on earth will be yours in the Kingdom.
Is this, My children, what you will discard for the few short earthly years
given to you, as you run about aimlessly seeking the pleasures of your world
and the riches, willing to close your hearts and your ears to the truth?
Many have chosen this path, for they find to shut out the truth will take
the conscience, God-given to them, away. How mistaken they are! They cannot
run from the Spirit.” - Our Lady, March 18, 1973
NOT ONE
PERSON
“You will always remember, My child and My children, that when
the struggle to remain on the narrow path has 'taken all out of you,' as you
say, you must remember that eventually you will all be held accountable for
your soul. There is not one person who can follow you at the same time over
the veil and stand up for you when you are being judged. For every man,
woman, and child of conscionable age will be their own master towards their
soul. In other words, My children, you must have your God-given conscience
forward and placed before you always.” - Jesus, March 18, 1983
TARNISHED
“You must realize, My children, that he who does not recognize My Son as
his Savior shall not be given the keys to the Kingdom. My Son has given you
all in the Father an inborn conscience and guide. You will not be misled by
satan or his agents or by his enticements if you do not throw away the
graces that have been given to you. Your souls will only become tarnished if
you fall from this grace or cast it willfully away. Then you will become
blind, My children. All of you can become blind where you will no longer
recognize truth.” - Our Lady, March 25, 1972
NO OTHER
RECOURSE
“There is no other recourse, My children. You have all been
given an inborn conscience. You must reject the plan of satan and not
succumb to his lures. The world about you has become the playground of satan
and his agents. Your world is in darkness; Our Church is in darkness. But We
still carry the light. And all who follow Me, My children, will be led out
of this darkness.” - Our Lady, April 1, 1972
SIN AGAINST
THE HOLY SPIRIT
“The greatest sin that man has on his weakening
conscience is a sin against the Holy Spirit. And this is being committed not
only in lay life but in the ranks of My clergy.” - Jesus, May 13, 1978
THE PLAN
“You cannot in your human nature understand the plan of your God, your
Creator, but you can with your inborn conscience know in your hearts that
you have misled, O bishops and cardinals, Our sheep! Turn back, I say unto
you, for you shall be punished.” - Jesus, May 20, 1978
NO EXCUSES
“Yes, your prayers and sacrifices are needed for those who do not have
the power of grace to help themselves. If you could see the vast numbers who
have already succumbed to the evil, you would spend all your time on your
knees. No excuses must be given in defense of worldly gain. No excuses will
be accepted if you did not care enough to save your brother. You will be
held accountable for all discard of duty, of inborn godly conscience.” -
Our Lady, May 30, 1971
A NEW CHURCH
“Yes, My child, as My Mother has told you in the past, man is
endeavoring to build a new church upon earth, a church of naturalism and of
free conscience, a church of satan.” - Jesus, November 20, 1978
HELL
“My children, if I could take you with Me and allow you to look into the
abyss, I assure you with--though I count three who come on the journey, two
could not withstand the terror and the fright; their hearts would surely
stop on viewing this scene in the abyss: torments and endless torture, both
of feeling conscience and body!” - Our Lady, May 27, 1978
INBORN
CONSCIENCE
“We gave you all an inborn conscience. These evils must be
stopped because of the children. The heavy load will be upon the parents.
They must keep the Faith in their hearts. Keep the Faith in the hearts of
those you love. It will not be easy. Your only refuge would be your home.
You will have to bar the doors against evil. Yes, you can be deluded and
misled when you do not see the evil about you. It could be, My child, like
mass hypnotism.” - Our Lady, June 17, 1971
RIGHT FROM
WRONG
“Every man, woman, and child of the age of reason knows right
from wrong, for he has been given an inborn conscience. At the moment of his
conception life is within the womb, and at the moment of conception a life
is forming, regardless of what the agents of hell now pollute the minds of
mankind with, creating murders of the young! I say unto you, life begins at
the moment of conception and all who extinguish this light are murderers,
and without repentance shall be condemned to hell!” - Jesus, June 18,
1977
Directives
D95 - Law PDF
D96 - Conscience PDF
D97 - Soul, Part 1 PDF
D98 - Soul, Part 2 PDF
D99 - Salvation, Part 1 PDF
D100 - Salvation, Part 2 PDF
D123 - Catholic Church, Part 1 PDF
D124 - Catholic Church, Part 2 PDF
D125 - Ecumenism PDF
D277 - Fallen-away Catholics PDF
Links:
A pastoral
letter on morality and conscience,
Bishop John Keating, September 17, 1994
http://www.ewtn.com/library/BISHOPS/PASTORAL.HTM
Conscience and Truth, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
http://www.cin.org/avatar/ratzcons.html
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Revised:
April 11, 2018