Let your conscience be your guide

Let your conscience be your guide...NOT!! Hold the phone here. It is a good line and a nice rule, but that assumes our conscience has been properly formed. In the filth of the world, it is entirely possible that the conscience has been contaminated and is feeding you wrong information. We continue to educate ourselves our whole lives with Scripture and Magisterial teachings of the Church to help us make the best decisions possible. We read the Word of God so we get to know the God of the Word.

Our conscience has most likely been infiltrated with the values and norms of our culture, which often run opposite to the Word of God. Pick your poison...abortion, the death penalty, stem cells, euthanasia, drug legalization, legalizing prostitution, illegal aliens, etc...the list is endless. All of these issues have strong secular support and a strong voice against them. Perhaps we favor some and not others. Perhaps we have just heard too much about them and we just don't care anymore. Has society beaten you down to the point that you are apathetic to the causes and we do not even want to form an opinion.

If we are weary from the world, we must pull ourselves up because God wants a decision from us on where we stand and will our voice be heard. In my first few posts from last year, I defined where the Church makes decisions on such issues and how it rules. First and foremost, the Church asks
1) Will an action promote, protect, and defend the dignity of a human being based on the fact that we are created in God's image.
2) Will an action glorify Christ, who became a human being...one of us created in God's image.

We can allow our conscience to be our guide if those two principles are a part of our being. If we don't see the human person like that, we need to continue to form our conscience with the Word of God. We must continue to learn from the Master and become like Him if we truly want to be guided by our conscience.