In the Times article attacking the beatification of Newman, John Cornwell does not lose the opportunity to have a go at Pope Benedict whom he says is "clearly bent on sanitising Newman’s progressive Catholicism."
Cardinal Ratzinger's 1991 lecture on Conscience and Truth is well worth reading for an understanding of how he understands conscience and takes Newman's view that it is not merely something subjective but the voice of God within us. As he explains when discussing the Newman toast quote:
Modern man, who presupposes the opposition of authority to subjectivity, has difficulty understanding this. For him, conscience stands on the side of subjectivity and is the expression of the freedom of the subject. Authority, on the other hand, appears to him as the constraint on, threat to and even the negation of, freedom. So then we must go deeper to recover a vision in which this kind of opposition does not obtain.He goes on to show that the lifelong opposition to liberalism which Newman himself acknowledged when speaking on the occasion of his elevation to the cardinalate, led him to understand conscience as the perceptible and demanding voice of truth.
In this lecture, Ratzinger also made a point which is relevant to other attempts to smear him. He tells of a particular conversation with academic colleagues concerning the justifying power of the erroneous conscience. Someone countered that if this thesis were true, then the Nazi SS would be justified and we should seek them in heaven because "they carried out all their atrocities with fanatic conviction and complete certainty of conscience". Another colleague responded with assurance that this would be the case. Ratzinger comments:
Since that conversation, I knew with complete certainty that something was wrong with the theory of justifying power of the subjective conscience, that, in other words, a concept of conscience which leads to such conclusions must be false.
4 comments:
Our conscience must follow the Natural law and not a subjectivity that gives into moral relativism. There are indeed moral absolutes that we must adhere to and we must not give into our subjective conscience for that will surely lead us astray and we will violate the Moral Law.
Pope Benedict explains this concept very well.
I am more of a Manning fan than a Newman man, but have these people ever stopped to wonder how a flaming liberal could ever have got a red hat in 1879? Newman certainly did not want, as did Ward, an infallible pronouncement along with his toast and marmalade every morning, but then Ward was a thoroughgoing ultramontane. The mistake is to imagine that ultramontanism and theological liberalism are opposites.
Am I making any sense?
Thanks Father, for this post. The Holy Father's comments - as Cardinal Ratzinger,on the anomaly of the subjective conscience, are very clear, very instructive, and have to be right.
And, of course, any such process does not canonise a man's thought, making it infallible.
It's about his heroic virtue.
I have plenty to critique, for instance, about Newman's ideas regarding textual criticism and inspiration. But that is NOT the point.
It's about his heroic virtue.
None of us understands everything all the time, e.g., Aquinas on the Immaculate Conception, that is, SAINT Thomas Aquinas.
And that is just so cool about the mercy of God. So...
Newman rocks!
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