When conscience is damaged: the lax conscience and the seared conscience

“You have all been given a God-born conscience. The Creator, your Father, did not birth you in ignorance.” – Jesus, November 24, 1973

 "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