Vatican II and the Deformation of Catholic Consciences

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Vatican II and the Deformation of Catholic Consciences

Robert Morrison/Remnant Columnist | August 22, 2024

“It is impossible to speak with veracity of liberty, of conscience, of the dignity of the human person except by reference to divine law.” (Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, from his September 1965 intervention read at the Second Vatican Council)

In the eyes of those who want to impose their wicked agendas on society, the problem posed by Catholicism has always been about how to overcome properly formed consciences. If a Catholic has a properly formed conscience, and a firm determination to follow it, he or she would rather die than accept evils forbidden by the Catholic Church. Throughout the centuries, our enemies have ventured to solve this problem in two general ways: by coercing or manipulating us into abandoning our determination to follow our consciences, and by trying to deform our consciences. To a large extent, the Vatican II revolution has achieved both of these objectives for our enemies.

Many Catholics today no longer understand that we must properly form our consciences, so it is worthwhile to review what the Church has always taught on the topic. As with so many other questions, the three volume Radio Replies series — which presents the answers to thousands of questions addressed by Fr. Leslie Rumble and Fr. Charles Carty on their 1930s radio program — provides solidly a Catholic answer to the question of whether a person’s conscience is supposed to be infallible:

“No. A man’s conscience is not always necessarily a true conscience. A man can warp his conscience. And just as he can form a wrong judgment in literature, science, economics, business, or sport, so he can form a wrong judgment as to what is correct moral conduct or evil moral conduct. A conscience is right when it is in harmony with God’s law. If it is not in harmony with God’s law, then it is an erroneous conscience. And we know by experience that men have often done evil under the impression that they were right. When conscience is in error, however, so that a man does wrong in good faith, we have to ask whether that man is responsible for his lack of knowledge or not. If he is responsible, because ignorant of things he ought to know or was obliged to know, he cannot be excused from sin.” (Volume 3, question 994)

So our consciences are right only when they are in conformity with God’s law; and acting in conformity with an erroneous conscience is sinful if we ought to have known, or were obliged to have known, the truth. For most Catholics who have reached the age of reason, then, it is difficult to escape blame for acting in accordance with an erroneous conscience because we are generally obliged to know (or seek) the truth about faith and morals.

How, then, has the Vatican II revolution deformed consciences? For an initial candid insight into the question, we can look to Frank Sheed’s 1968 book about the aftermath of Vatican II, Is It the Same Church?, in which he describes the impact of disagreements among bishops at the Council:

“It was for great numbers of Catholics a shattering experience to learn that the bishops were divided — indeed, if the journalists were to be believed, bitterly divided. It was one thing to accept decisions issuing from the successors of the Apostles in all the majesty of their oneness. It was not at all the same thing when the decisions were arrived at by a majority, after — if the journalists were to be believed — lobbying and recriminations not unlike those of politicians anywhere.” (p. 63)

With this subtle but vital insight, Sheed evoked the reality that Catholics trust the Catholic Church to form their consciences because we rightly see the Church as safeguarding the truths Our Lord wants all of us to believe and abide by. But if we see the bishops opposing each other, or their predecessors, on fundamental matters of faith and morals, Catholics may doubt whether the Church is actually the most important truth-teller in the world. Sheed continued by layering on two other factors: the contemporaneous debate over contraception and the Council’s ecumenical treatment of non-Catholics:

“The effect of all this is to make the old unquestioning acceptance a great deal harder, especially in a matter like Contraception which can affect people continually, immediately, sometimes agonizingly, as doctrinal teachings do not. Any who are not convinced by the Pope’s utterance on it may feel that their personal decision is for their own conscience to make. And while the Second Vatican Council speaks most lucidly upon the rights of men outside the Church to follow their conscience, I have not found that it discusses the relation of the Catholic conscience to her own teachings or commands if it feels them contrary to it.” (pp. 63-64)

Before the Council, Catholics generally knew that there is no salvation outside the Church (absent the ordinary exceptions) and that they were bound to follow all of the Church’s immutable teachings. For countless Catholics, the Council completely undermined these basic truths. And so we see Sheed — whose books are still found in Traditional Catholic bookstores — pondering whether a Catholic needs to follow Church teaching when it conflicts with his or her conscience.

Beyond Sheed’s assessment of how the Council discussions shaped overall Catholic sentiment about the human conscience, we can look at Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, which states:

“On his part, man perceives and acknowledges the imperatives of the divine law through the mediation of conscience. In all his activity a man is bound to follow his conscience in order that he may come to God, the end and purpose of life. It follows that he is not to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his conscience. Nor, on the other hand, is he to be restrained from acting in accordance with his conscience, especially in matters religious.”

Although the document elsewhere encouraged Christians to “attend to the sacred and certain doctrine of the Church” in the formation of their consciences, the passage above is the one that was both the focal point of battles between bishops and the innovation that set the tone for post-Conciliar teaching. And in this passage there is no hint whatsoever that a soul could go astray by following an erroneous conscience.

In various interventions during Vatican II, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre sought to persuade his fellow Council Fathers to rectify this erroneous conception of conscience:

November 1963. Archbishop Lefebvre commented on the following passage from the draft of the Declaration on Religious Liberty: “The Catholic Church claims, as a right of the human person, that no one be prevented from carrying out and proclaiming his public and private duties towards God and man . . . according to the light of his conscience even if it is in error.” Here is the archbishop’s reply:

“The universal order created by God, whether natural or supernatural, is, in fact, in essential opposition to this statement. God founded the family, civil society, and above all the Church, in order that all men might recognize the truth, be forewarned against error, attain to good, be preserved from scandals and thus reach temporal and eternal happiness.” (Lefebvre, I Accuse the Council, pp. 19-20)

December 1963. In remarks sent to the Secretariat of the Council on the draft schema for the Declaration on Religious Liberty, Archbishop Lefebvre wrote the following:

“This conception of religious liberty derives its origins and form from an opinion which is nowadays widespread among the public, an opinion founded on the primacy of conscience and freedom from all restraint. . . . Conscience cannot be defined without relation to Truth, ordained as it is essentially to that quality. . . . Conscience, liberty, human dignity, only possess rights to the extent to which they are in essential relation with the truth.” (Lefebvre, I Accuse the Council, pp. 24-26)

October 1964. Archbishop Lefebvre’s sixth intervention at the Council also dealt with the Declaration on Religious Liberty:

“This declaration on religious liberty should be shortened, as several Fathers have already said, in order to avoid the controversial questions and their dangerous consequences. . . . Among the various acts of conscience, the interior acts of religion must be distinguished from the exterior acts, for the external acts can either edify or cause scandal. . . . Attention must be paid to the very grave consequences of this declaration on the right to follow the voice of one’s conscience and act outwardly according to that voice. And, in fact, a religious doctrine logically influences the whole morality. Who can fail to see the innumerable consequences of this order of things? Who will be able to determine the dividing line between good and evil when the criterion of morals in accordance with the Catholic truth revealed by Christ has been set aside?” (Lefebvre, I Accuse the Council, pp. 47-48)

September 1965. Archbishop Lefebvre’s eleventh intervention at the Council also dealt with the Declaration on Religious Liberty:

“Liberty is given to us for the spontaneous observance of divine law. Conscience is natural divine law inscribed in the heart and, after the grace of baptism, is supernatural divine law. . . . It is impossible to speak with veracity of liberty, of conscience, of the dignity of the human person except by reference to divine law. . . . As the Church of Christ alone possesses the fullness and perfection of divine law, natural and supernatural; as she alone has received the mission to teach this law and the means to observe it, it is in her that Jesus Christ, who is our law, is found in reality and truth.” (Lefebvre, I Accuse the Council, p. 64)

We can see very clearly that Archbishop Lefebvre saw the dangers presented by Dignitatis Humanae’s treatment of the human conscience. As Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais indicated in his biography of Archbishop Lefebvre, the December 3, 1965 commentary of Bishop di Meglio testified to the fact that many other Council Fathers also objected to Dignitatis Humanae:

“For a notable number of Council Fathers the teaching and practical applications of the schema are not acceptable in conscience. In fact, the fundamental principle of the schema has remained unchanged despite amendments that have been introduced: that is, the right of error . . . Since the declaration on religious freedom has no dogmatic value, the negative votes of the Council Fathers will constitute a factor of great importance for the future studies of the declaration itself, and particularly for the interpretation to be placed upon it.” (pp. 310-311)

Unfortunately, the fact that the declaration had “no dogmatic value” in the eyes of the Council Fathers who opposed it did not stop it from being a justification for monumental changes in what the Conciliar Church teaches about religious liberty and the primacy of even an erroneous conscience.

Some may object that the Council’s innovations related to conscience applied primarily to non-Catholics — this was part of Sheed’s inquiry above. But Dignitatis Humanae’s innovations on religious liberty and conscience were just one part of an overall barrage against how Catholics understood the Faith:

• As we can see from the interventions on the Declaration on Religious Liberty, bishops clashed over how the Council could contradict what the Church had always taught, throwing into question the reality that the Church is the divinely appointed truth-teller.
  
• The Council’s ecumenical push also confused Catholics with its undermining of the reality that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church — if that was no longer the case, why do Catholics have to follow difficult commandments that Protestants neglect?
  
• The debates over contraception added an emotionally-charged component to all of this, and effectively normalized the rejection of Catholic moral teaching. Once one could choose to follow an erroneous conscience over Church teaching in one matter, there was no real barrier to doing similarly on any other matter.
  
• Shortly after the Council, everything about the Church seemed to change: priests got married, nuns left religious practice, the Mass changed, and previously settled teachings were open to discussion. All of this undermined the belief that the Church is the guardian of the immutable truth that God requires us to follow.
  
• Over time, seminaries became increasingly corrupted, leading to poorly formed priests who became the heretical bishops we see today. Once we have openly heretical bishops, then many Catholics find it difficult to believe that they are required to obey the Church’s apparent hierarchy.
  

Archbishop Lefebvre predicted that there would be “very grave consequences of this declaration on the right to follow the voice of one’s conscience and act outwardly according to that voice.” As is evident today, he was correct. This, however, is no reason to despair: the immutable truths that Archbishop Lefebvre believed then are still true today and always will be. Those who follow those truths will honor God — in fact, one honors God even more when he or she must adhere to immutable truth in opposition to enemies who try to persuade us to abandon it. We also have the mixed blessing of seeing more clearly now than ever that the pre-Vatican II popes were correct: they told us these catastrophes would occur if Catholics abandoned the truth, so each harm of the Vatican II revolution confirms that what they said is still true.

On a more immediate practical level, it is apparent that there is a grave danger in trying to form our consciences without respect to what the Church actually teaches. When we have the openly heretical Cardinal Blase Cupich delivering the invocation at the Democratic National Convention, we have good reason to suspect that demons have more power than ever to distort what the Church teaches. For many of us, though, the real risk is not that we would form our consciences based on the anti-Catholic antics of Francis and Cupich, but that we would conclude that we can no longer turn to Catholic clergy for guidance on moral questions.

It is this latter danger — that we would decide that we could no longer seek counsel from the Church, as represented by good clergy — that seems to pose a real threat today for sincere Catholics who truly want to do God’s will. We face this temptation in many different areas, ranging from our thoughts on Francis to whether we can vote. We know that we cannot seek guidance from heterodox priests, but should also recall one of the evils of Protestantism is that it makes each man his own ultimate judge of religious truth. If it is literally impossible to find a Catholic priest to guide us, then it seems we should not despair because God does not ask us to do the impossible. However, as Archbishop Lefebvre insisted in his September 1965 intervention, we should always try to turn to the Church (represented by the clergy) when questions of faith and morals arise:

“As the Church of Christ alone possesses the fullness and perfection of divine law, natural and supernatural; as she alone has received the mission to teach this law and the means to observe it, it is in her that Jesus Christ, who is our law, is found in reality and truth.”

Ordinarily we learn what the Church teaches through its shepherds so it seems that we must at least seek to find clergy who can guide us, particularly when trying to apply the Church’s teaching to matters that arise through the challenging circumstances in which we find ourselves today. If this is truly impossible, then we can trust that God will provide. If, however, we neglect to seek advice from the clergy because we want to guide ourselves, it may be the enemy of our salvation (rather than God) who provides.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!