ON CONSCIENCE

by Cardinal Joseph

Ratzinger

Ignatius Press, 2007

82 pages, $14.95

To order: ignatius.com

The National Catholic Bioethics Center has published a small volume on one of the most widely misunderstood topics of our day — conscience.

The book consists of two essays written by Pope Benedict XVI when he was still a cardinal, both originally delivered as keynote addresses at workshops for bishops sponsored by the Bioethics Center, the first in 1984 and the second in 1991.

Cardinal Ratzinger begins his first essay with a fascinating anecdote about a dispute he had in his academic days, in which one of his colleagues suggested that a person with an erroneous conscience should not be corrected, because that person’s sincerity would save him, no matter what he thought or did. Another colleague objected that by such criteria even the Nazi SS could be excused from their atrocities.

Yet another colleague chimed in, and, “with utmost assurance,” Ratzinger writes, asserted that no one should condemn Hitler and company, since they were deeply convinced of the rightness of their actions and therefore acted in accord with their consciences.

The fact that their actions were immoral, objectively speaking, was considered by this professor to be irrelevant.

“Since that conversation,” Ratzinger writes, “I knew with complete certainty that something was wrong with the theory of the justifying power of the subjective conscience. A concept of conscience that leads to such results must be false. … 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.”

If such a concept of conscience is false, what then is the true definition of conscience? Ratzinger succinctly states the problem: “The consciences of many Christians are by no means in harmony with many expressions of the Church’s magisterium. Indeed, it often seems that the conscience is that which gives dissent some legitimacy. Conscience is understood by many as a sort of deification of subjectivity, a rock of bronze on which even the magisterium is shattered.”

In Ratzinger’s thought, conscience is “a kind of co-knowledge of man with God, a co-knowing of the truth,” which every human has access to if his spirit listens with docility to the voice of God.

It’s clear from these essays that the Pope has been thinking about conscience for a long time.

Indeed, he’s still thinking about it: Twice in the foreword to this book, NCBC president John Haas referred to Cardinal Ratzinger’s April 2005 homily, delivered to the College of Cardinals just before the papal enclave, in which the future Pope warned that a mistaken, entirely subjective conscience leads to a dictatorship of relativism.

I wish the text of that homily had been included with these other two fine essays. Its inclusion would have further demonstrated Ratzinger’s refinement of thought on this important subject and rounded out this volume to make it a more substantial book.

Nevertheless, one can hardly complain about 75 pages of pure Ratzinger — an excellent, highly readable work from a great thinker and shepherd of souls.

Clare Siobhan is based in

Westmont, Illinois.