By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
“Seems to me that Jesus wants us to love our neighbors and leave the judging up to Him.” This is a typical response of many people when they encounter the Church and her members witnessing to their faith by speaking out on moral teachings in the public square.
Christian witness in a visible, public way to the existence of God and to His teachings began with the life, teachings, and mission of Jesus Christ our Lord, particularly as He gave His life on the cross for the salvation of the world. He continues to witness today through His members and, in fact, demands of them that they take up their cross for love of Him. The Catechism of the Catholic Church underscores the necessary public component of a true confession of Catholic faith.
“The faithful should bear witness to the Lord’s name by confessing the faith without giving way to fear. Preaching and catechizing should be permeated with adoration and respect for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (CCC, n. 2145).
The sincere and public confession of the faith on the part of believers is not only a basic human right but also a demand of compassion. To share what one believes is evidence of concern for the good of others. To accuse those who witness of “judging” can be true, but only if that judgment is tinged with lack of charity, with assumptions, with condescension. But witness in and of itself is never always guilty of judgment: There is no necessary connection between the two.
Why do people who call themselves Christian and even Catholic equate witness with judgment? Perhaps because they experience in the face of witness by word or action on the part of others what we might call the sting of an informed or educated conscience.
The modern destroyers and disrupters of nature have done much to distort the human person, but they have not yet figured out how to finally and fully destroy or annihilate the conscience. Conscience is that still, small voice speaking out within the interior life of every human person that calls us to recognize and assent to an opinion that may be different from what we now hold.
Perhaps when people accuse as judges those who witness to their faith by word or action in the public square — such as young people in the March for Life each January, protesters at an abortion facility, or bishops speaking out in defense of marriage — what they in fact are describing is their recognition of the possibility that their choices and actions may not be an autonomous expression of sovereign individual will, but may in fact stand in the light of another source.
What this other source might be we need not necessarily name “truth” — but even the possibility that some person or some idea may conflict with one’s own is seen as an inadmissible oppression, even a crime to be hunted down and shut away if not entirely eliminated.
Conscience is one’s last best judgment in regard to a decision to be made or an action to be taken. Deciding properly upon the moment in which one has truly arrived at the point where such a last, best judgment is possible is very often not an exact science, thus requiring careful analysis, radical openness, and a great deal of humility. Very few human beings are capable of doing this in a thorough and unbiased way, thus the need for constant questioning in order to arrive at a properly considered decision.
“Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right. It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes the prescriptions of the divine law:
“ ‘Conscience is a law of the mind; yet [Christians] would not grant that it is nothing more; I mean that it was not a dictate, nor conveyed the notion of responsibility, of duty, of a threat and a promise. . . . [Conscience] is a messenger of him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ’ [John Henry Cardinal Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk]” (CCC, n. 1778).
This, I suspect, is what people who accuse Catholics of “judgment” are in fact themselves witnessing to, even if unwittingly: that Catholic moral teaching is right to assert that every human person does indeed have a conscience and is indeed capable of using it.
Another small victory in the battle to assert the existence of natural law as a basis for public discourse? Perhaps so.
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(Visit Reverendo Padre-Kevin Michael Cusick on Facebook and @MCITLFrAphorism on Twitter.)
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