The Catholic Controversy over Conscience in the 20th Century
by David Cloutier, Public Discourse:
Matthew Levering’s book offers an intellectual history of a complex question in Catholic moral theology, one that recovers a biblical and Thomistic view of conscience as a limited concept within Christian moral life as a whole.
“Conscience” is a word that is often used but rarely precisely defined. In Catholic moral theology, conscience can be understood in two ways, either as a general capacity for the judgment of good and evil, or as a specific capacity to identify particular acts as right or wrong.
These are important but modest meanings. Important, because they both suggest a kind of baseline capacity and responsibility for moral judgment. Modest, because they illuminate almost nothing about the content of such judgments. The importance has led the Catholic tradition to emphasize the binding character of conscience, but the modesty has motivated the recognition that conscience must be rightly formed and is quite capable of erring. Thus, the fundamental question in moral theology is not “What does my conscience tell me?” but rather “What exactly is right and wrong, and why?”
Yet despite this modest place, debates over interpretations of conscience have dominated moral theology. Early in his book The Abuse of Conscience, Matthew Levering recounts that a prominent American bishop told him that “the most exciting movement in Catholic moral theology today is grounded in a renewed vision of conscience.” Levering, a Catholic theologian at Mundelein Seminary, said he hadn’t heard of the post–Vatican II renaissance of “conscience-centered moral theology.” But the bishop’s remark prompted his research, resulting in this book.
Levering’s book seeks to unravel a mystery: How—merely twenty-five years after Vatican II called for a moral theology “nourished more on the teaching of the Bible” and oriented to “bearing fruit in charity”—did Catholic moral theology instead turn “from confessing sins to liberating consciences,” as James Keenan, S.J., a leading theologian at Boston College, put it? In other words, how did the post–Vatican II Catholic Church shift from a conciliar direction toward the Bible and the virtue of charity to an emphasis on the centrality of conscience?
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