http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/10/19/pro-abortion-politicians-need-to-confess-%e2%80%98grave-sin%e2%80%99-phoenix-bishop-olmsted-says-in-booklet/ Conservative and Libertarian Intellectual Philosophy and Politics Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:00:53 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/10/19/pro-abortion-politicians-need-to-confess-%e2%80%98grave-sin%e2%80%99-phoenix-bishop-olmsted-says-in-booklet/comment-page-1/#comment-31034 sedonaman Thu, 19 Oct 2006 18:24:33 +0000 http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/pro-abortion-politicians-need-to-confess-%e2%80%98grave-sin%e2%80%99-phoenix-bishop-olmsted-says-in-booklet/#comment-31034 These pamphlets were handed out at Mass last Sunday; and as I read it, the thought occurred to me that because of erroneous beliefs among Catholics about the role of the individual conscience, the situation the Church is in today is much like that of the mythical man who moved away from Arkansas and raised the state’s IQ – Catholics as a group have been so <i>secularized</i> by the society at large as to be electorally <i>indistinguishable</i> from it; and as an <i>ironic</i> result, they could (again as a group) advance society more toward the Catholic concept of social justice if all of them just <i>stayed away</i> from the polls on election day, thus reducing the effect of secularism on the election and throwing more weight to the fundamentalist Christian vote that opposes many of the same modern ideas that the Church does. The root of this problem lies in the average Catholic’s ignorance about his faith. I doubt seriously that even one in a hundred parishioners read that pamphlet. In spite of <i>numerous</i> pronouncements about issues not all being equal, a shocking number of Catholics still believe they are. They point to some nebulous belief that Vatican II stated that the individual conscience had to be respected above all. What they conveniently overlook (or never bothered to learn) is that the individual conscience has to be <i>well-formed</i> in accordance with Church teachings, and John Paul II’s, “To claim that one has a right to act according to conscience, but without at the same time acknowledging the duty to conform one's conscience to the truth and to the law which God himself has written on our hearts, in the end, means nothing more than imposing one's limited personal opinion.” These pamphlets were handed out at Mass last Sunday; and as I read it, the thought occurred to me that because of erroneous beliefs among Catholics about the role of the individual conscience, the situation the Church is in today is much like that of the mythical man who moved away from Arkansas and raised the state’s IQ – Catholics as a group have been so secularized by the society at large as to be electorally indistinguishable from it; and as an ironic result, they could (again as a group) advance society more toward the Catholic concept of social justice if all of them just stayed away from the polls on election day, thus reducing the effect of secularism on the election and throwing more weight to the fundamentalist Christian vote that opposes many of the same modern ideas that the Church does.
The root of this problem lies in the average Catholic’s ignorance about his faith. I doubt seriously that even one in a hundred parishioners read that pamphlet. In spite of numerous pronouncements about issues not all being equal, a shocking number of Catholics still believe they are. They point to some nebulous belief that Vatican II stated that the individual conscience had to be respected above all. What they conveniently overlook (or never bothered to learn) is that the individual conscience has to be well-formed in accordance with Church teachings, and John Paul II’s, “To claim that one has a right to act according to conscience, but without at the same time acknowledging the duty to conform one’s conscience to the truth and to the law which God himself has written on our hearts, in the end, means nothing more than imposing one’s limited personal opinion.”

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