Hey guys, I was just wondering what the traditional understanding of freedom of conscience is. I know that it's become big since VII and is used by many modernist Catholics as an excuse to do whatever they want. Does freedom of conscience, traditionally understood, require a well-formed conscience that is in agreement with Church doctrine?

Another liberty is widely advocated, namely, liberty of conscience. If by this is meant that everyone may, as he chooses, worship God or not, it is sufficiently refuted by the arguments already adduced.

But it may also be taken to mean that every man in the State may follow the will of God and, from a consciousness of duty and free from every obstacle, obey His commands.

This, indeed, is true liberty, a liberty worthy of the sons of God, which nobly maintains the dignity of man and is stronger than all violence or wrong - a liberty which the Church has always desired and held most dear.

This is the kind of liberty the Apostles claimed for themselves with intrepid constancy, which the apologists of Christianity confirmed by their writings, and which the martyrs in vast numbers consecrated by their blood.

When Catholics ask for liberty in matters of conscience from a secularist state, this is the principle they must invoke. Man's true liberty, then, consists in seeking and doing the will of God that we may be delivered from slavery to the world and its deceits.

So, if I'm understanding this right, conscience is just an application of objective law to grayer situations, which may require more subjective judgments to determine what is proper in a given situation? In either case, I can't believe that freedom of conscience is what the modernists claim it is: an excuse to ignore Holy Mother Church whenever one wants.

So, if I'm understanding this right, conscience is just an application of objective law to grayer situations, which may require more subjective judgments to determine what is proper in a given situation? In either case, I can't believe that freedom of conscience is what the modernists claim it is: an excuse to ignore Holy Mother Church whenever one wants.

Yes, we traditionalists know (or should know) that conscience is not a faculty or habit but an act of the practical intellect; it's the application of knowledge to a specific fact. The Novus Ordo doesn't specifically deny this, of course, and they affirm that it's not a power. However, they talk about it in the ridiculous context of ego-centric modern psychology. The N.O.  Encyclopedia of Catholicism says it is:

"the whole self trying to make judgments about who one ought to be ...To say 'My conscience tells me' means 'I hold this conviction as true and must live by it lest I betray my truest self.'"

To my ears, that sounds like "I'm OK, you're OK".  

And of course everything now is framed by the community:

"The formation of conscience is a community achievement. While the judgment of conscience is made for oneself...it is never formed by oneself."

To be sure, there is a right interpretation to all this. For instance, the obligation to follow even an erring conscience. The N.O. entwines all that with the so-called "sanctity" and "dignity" of the conscience. I think this is just dangerous psycho-babble. That dictum is only right if we use scholastic terminology: we are obliged to follow an invincibly ignorant conscience because not to follow our conscience is to act contrary to the subjective norm of morality.  And, yes, we cannot act contrary to a vincibly ignorant conscience either, because acting without a certain conscience exposes us to sin. However, it's the language they use that should scare us the most. The N.O.'s loaded terminology like "dignity" make it appear as though any judgment of conscience deserves to be followed simply because it comes from our "most secret core and sanctuary," and that makes regular people think that we don't necessarily have to refrain from action or work to choose a safer or more probable course. Sure, the N.O. writers say that we have to inform our conscience through Scripture, Church teaching, and theology. But then they usually add something like the following:

"The goal of forming conscience is to commit one's freedom to what is right and good so that...one identifies with what one does. The moral decision becomes a commitment of the self to value."

 I guess that's true enough, but the rhetoric with its imprecisions, emotional appeal, and "poetic" vocabulary is aimed at confusing and subverting the genuine Catholic thinking that understands just how serious and complex it is to make judgments of conscience.