Obedience Alone Won’t Make Us Holy: Rediscovering the Catholic Conscience

Catholics are often ranked by the virtue of obedience. Those who are most obedient to Rome are considered the most faithful. And we know Jesus praised obedience to authority (think "render unto Caesar"). Yet we forget that the gospels include numerous stories where he breaks religious laws and confronts religious authorities. We forget that our tradition of Saints includes stories of tension, rebellion, and even an instance of excommunication. If their witness tells us anything, it’s that obedience to God cannot be reduced to simply following rules. This paradox must make us pause and reexamine what we mean by obedience as Catholics.

Conscience in Scripture and the Saints

Both Jesus and the Saints reveal that God does not ask for obedience for its own sake, nor rebellion for its own sake. The opening chapters of Scripture provide a window into the place of conscience in creation. God brings order out of chaos and declares it good. And yet, Adam discovers something within himself that God calls “not good”—loneliness. That interior restlessness hints at a proto-conscience: even when God’s voice declares something good, the human heart still senses when the world is not yet as it should be. It is this voice that stirs us to act.

Our Catholic history demonstrates time and time again that we must listen to that voice and bring it before the Church, not with arrogance but with holy stubbornness, trusting that fidelity to God and fidelity to the Church are never at odds. Joan of Arc defied both civil and ecclesial authorities, was condemned as a heretic, and was eventually excommunicated. It was only years later that the Church recognized her as a Saint. Teresa of Ávila clashed with bishops and even the Inquisition while reforming her order. Even the meek “Little Flower,” Thérèse of Lisieux, challenged convent rules because she believed she was following God’s call. Saints, in other words, often resisted the very structures we are told to obey.

The Church on Conscience

So what guided them? The Second Vatican Council, in Gaudium et Spes, answers: at the core of every human being lies conscience, “the most secret core and sanctuary of a person. There we are alone with God, Whose voice echoes in the depths.” This is a foundational principle of Christianity: that God speaks to each of us, and our lifelong task is to learn that voice and follow it, for “according to it we will be judged.”

The Church’s role is to help form our conscience, which is why Gaudium et Spes insists it must be “well-formed.” But too often that phrase gets reduced to something trite like, a conscience is well-formed when it agrees with Church teaching. That diminishes both human experience and the gift of free will. Conscience is formed through prayer, counsel, study, dialogue, and lived experience, and it must be lived out in the real, messy circumstances of our lives.

Anyone who has sat at the bedside of a dying loved one, facing impossible choices, knows that moral clarity is rarely simple. Anyone who has struggled to remain in a relationship with a child or friend whose choices conflict with their faith knows that discernment is not black and white. These examples highlight that, despite the Church's writings and teachings through the centuries, there will always be a gap between the Church’s teachings in principle and the complexity of lived experience. And while there is a human tendency to want the right answer, the Church has a far richer history of not just giving her children an answer, but teaching us how to know the right answer.

John Henry Newman, now a Doctor of the Church, is one of these great voices. For Newman, conscience was not whim or private preference, but an encounter with God’s law written on the heart. He acknowledged that conscience can sometimes be “erroneously trained” (not well-formed). But insisted that even then, if its voice is diligently obeyed, it will gradually be “cleared, simplified, and perfected,” until minds that began far from God “will, if honest, in course of time converge to the one and the same truth.” Newman trusted that those who sincerely follow their conscience will, over time, be led into truth, because we learn what God’s voice sounds like in all circumstances: both when we get it right and when we get it wrong (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine).

Boundaries and Freedom

Of course, this does not baptize selfishness or cruelty as God’s will. Violence and vengeance can never be justified by God told me so. Jesus’ command to love God and our neighbor as ourselves is always the boundary. But within that boundary, we trust the Spirit’s guidance. Far from an easy way out, this vision demands humility, reflection, and accountability. It calls us to seek wise counselors and teachers, which, thankfully, have always been a staple in Catholic tradition.

This understanding of conscience also frees us. It releases us from the compulsion to control others’ choices and returns us to Jesus’ command to remove the plank from our own eye before reaching for another’s splinter. Our task is not blind obedience to human command but fidelity to God’s voice within. And if we are sincerely seeking God’s will, we can trust God to bring good out of our efforts and even our mistakes.

The Heart of the Catholic Conscience

What grounded the Saints, and what must ground us, is the conviction Thomas Merton expressed so simply: “the desire to please God does in fact please God." That is the heart of the Catholic conscience. God is not looking for perfection, but for the sincere desire to love Him, love our neighbor, and love ourselves. Without the holy disobedience of Saints like Thérèse and Teresa, we would not have the doctors of the Church we celebrate today. Conscience, then, is not rebellion for its own sake. It is fidelity to God’s voice within us. And often, it is precisely conscience that leads us to holiness.

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