By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Although much is said today about following one’s conscience, the struggle between choosing right or wrong goes right back to Adam and Eve.
The Bible “has a lot of stories where people exercise their conscience,” starting with the Garden of Eden, a priest with a recently formed religious order told a gathering of the Catholic Physicians Guild of Phoenix.
If people didn’t have free will, they wouldn’t need a conscience to point them toward choosing correctly, said Fr. Ignatius Mazanowski, chaplain to the physicians’ group and director of medical ethics for the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix.
His presentation on November 11 lasted nearly an hour and a half in a meeting room at diocesan headquarters. It was titled: “Conscience: Medical Moral Decision-Making.” It was preceded in the diocesan facility’s chapel by prayer and availability of Confession, as well as a Mass celebrated by Mazanowski, followed by lunch.
Mazanowski is one of seven members of the Franciscan Friars of the Holy Spirit (FHS) who previously belonged to the Third Order Regular Franciscans. In July 2016 the Phoenix diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Sun, reported the establishment of their new order, with Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted as their superior. The FHS website says three more men were received into its novitiate in December 2016.
They wear a gray habit with a white cord around the waist.
The Sun story had quoted Fr. David Sanfilippo, diocesan vicar for priests: “This truly is a momentous occasion. Just over a year ago a group of men felt called by God to form a new Franciscan charismatic community in the Diocese of Phoenix. After prayerful discernment, the Church officially recognizes and affirms their decision as an authentic call from God.”
In his November 11 talk to the physicians guild, Mazanowski examined different approaches to considering conscience, taking care to explain that a correctly formed conscience isn’t simply an individual’s inclinations of the moment.
After Adam and Eve sinned, “they find themselves ashamed,” he said — because of a sense of right and wrong they were created with.
A few definitions of conscience he provided included these:
Catholic Health Care Ethics: A Manual for Practitioners: “Conscience is the voice of God speaking within us in the core of our being.”
Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The interior voice of a human being, within whose heart the inner law of God is inscribed.”
Gaudium et Spes, one of the pastoral constitutions resulting from the Second Vatican Council: “For man has in his heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged.”
Misapplications of conscience, Mazanowski said, include a “hypersensitive sense of sin, which often leads to scrupulosity and an unhealthy sense of self-condemnation,” and an attitude that “judges good as evil and evil as good. In a word, it misreads the objective moral situation.”
Violating one’s conscience leads to “anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, internal conflict,” he pointed out in a printed outline he distributed.
The fact that “you experience these emotions is actually good. It means you have a conscience,” he told the listeners.
It’s a false view, Mazanowski said, that conscience is the final arbiter and is infallible.
“First, conscience is not identical to personal wishes and taste,” he said in the outline. “Second, conscience cannot be reduced to social advantage, to group consensus, or to the demands of political and social power.”
St. Basil the Church Father said “the love of God, which is concrete in the Commandments, is not imposed on us from without, but has been implanted in us beforehand,” Mazanowski said.
A false view, he said, is that “(c)onscience is . . . a sort of deification of subjectivity, a rock of bronze on which even the Magisterium is shattered. It is said that in light of the conscience, no other cases apply. Conscience appears finally as subjectivity raised to the ultimate standard.”
However, the correct view is that morality is “the conformity of man to the will of God and the consequent correct perception of things as they really are,” Mazanowski said, adding later:
“In the final analysis, only the will of God can establish the boundary between good and evil.”
Deformation of conscience in the world today to suit secular powerbrokers is more than familiar to people trying to live according to the Ten Commandments.
The priest noted what might be called “the American way of life” or “California style.”
Conscience “can become stunted, it can be stamped out, it can be falsified so that it can only speak in a stunted or distorted way,” he said. “The silence of conscience can become a deadly sickness for an entire civilization.
“Included in the concept of conscience is an obligation, namely, the obligation to care for it, to form it and educate it. Conscience has a right to respect and obedience in the measure in which the person himself respects it and gives it the care which its dignity deserves,” Mazanowski said.
When he asked for comments from listeners, one physician replied that in today’s society, a person needs to have an already-formed conscience, because “in the heat of battle, it’s difficult to make these decisions. . . .
“We’re trying to inject morality into an abnormal setting,” where 13-year-olds already are having sexual relations, the physician said.
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