Follow Your Conscience by Peter Cajka

Author:Peter Cajka [Cajka, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 20th Century, Religion, Christianity, Christian Living, Social Issues, Social Science, Sociology of Religion
ISBN: 9780226762197
Google: pw0mEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-05-05T22:10:07+00:00

Conclusion

In the summer and fall of 1968, a social movement led by Catholic priests coalesced around the defense of conscience rights in the area of marital sex and contraception. What began as a series of reminders to Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle to acknowledge traditional rights of conscience evolved into a set of marches, demonstrations, and letter-writing campaigns to forcibly claim these rights. These priests did not invoke conscience in a vacuum: not only did they have the backing of certain segments of the American laity, they were also tapping into the theologies promoted by scholars like Bernard Häring and key post–Vatican II texts like the Dutch Catechism. But the rebellious traditionalists came up against the strong stand made by Cardinal O’Boyle for Humanae vitae and the law. O’Boyle, as this book shows, pursued a legitimate interpretation of the doctrine. The tactics he deployed to uphold the law, however, were controversial. When he suspended priests like T. Joseph O’Donoghue, John Corrigan, and Shane MacCarthy, his actions sparked a 1968-style showdown between authority and “the people.” The terms for this dispute were set by a unique Catholic teaching on the proper calibration of objective and subjective that originated in the thirteenth-century thought of Thomas Aquinas.

The debate over conscience rights never allowed Catholics to transcend the categories of the medieval doctrine. O’Boyle and his team of supporters never ignored completely the viability of following conscience, and some of their publications even acknowledged the importance of acting on an erroneous conscience. Both sides scored victories and incurred defeats in the official statements published after the debate and in the official rulings on the matter issued by courts at the Vatican. But American Catholics continued after the 1968 debate over Humanae vitae to seek solutions to moral problems in sources other than obedience to the law. The capacity of the law to define reality had been seriously curtailed by the Association of Washington Priests’ stand for conscience rights. The next story to tell is how a generation of Catholics applied the tools of modern psychology and Jewish scholarship to conscience to make it strong enough to offer guidance in a world seemingly bereft of strong and clear laws.

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