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Sullivan quotes George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus out of context, but his real botching is with Pope Benedict. In an address ("Conscience and Truth") given in 1991, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger "couldn't have been clearer about how an individual conscience is by no means, for him, the final arbiter of morality or truth." At least, that's how Sullivan plays it. Not quite. According to Ratzinger, there are two kinds of conscience. One is prone to subjectivity and error. The "deeper conscience"— or anamnesis, as Ratzinger calls it—"consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and the true (both are identical) has been implanted in us." Sullivan is sloppy in describing this, perhaps because he is rushing to scream that the pope hates your conscience: "even when you think you are taking a principled, intelligent moral stand, if you are in disagreement with the Pope . . . you are not in fact exercising conscience. That's a delusion fostered by evil. You are merely demonstrating sin and guilt. There is no conscience distinct from truth, Ratzinger insisted." And since truth is revealed by the Catholic Church, "All protestations of 'conscience' against Church teachings are just further manifestations of sin."

Nonsense. In "Conscience and Truth," Ratzinger, rather than renouncing the conscience, elevates it even above the papacy. Ratzinger recalls that the great 19th-century Catholic convert Cardinal Newman once wrote that, if he were asked to give an after-dinner toast, he would drink "to conscience first and the Pope afterwards." Ratzinger makes clear that Newman believed in "a papacy not put in opposition to the primacy of conscience, but based on and guaranteeing it." The thing "which establishes the connection between authority and subjectivity is truth." Indeed, Newman converted to Catholicism despite declaring that "no one can have a more unfavorable view than I of the present state of Roman Catholics." He converted, and spent his life fighting the spread of liberalism in Christianity, because his conscience led him to a defense of what he believed was the truth.

Newman did not introduce this idea to Christianity. St. Bonaventure called the conscience "God's herald and messenger." Gaudium et Spes, a document from the Second Vatican Council, declares: "In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose on himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience can, when necessary, speak to his heart more specifically: 'Do this. Shun that.' " The Magisterium of the Catholic Church does not take the place of the conscience but rather supports it and helps it develop the truth. As John Paul II wrote in his encyclical The Splendor of Truth, "Freedom of conscience is never freedom 'from' the truth but always and only freedom 'in' the truth. … [T]he Magisterium does not bring to the Christian conscience truth which are extraneous to it; rather, it brings to light truths which it ought already to possess, developing them from the starting point of the primordial act of faith."

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October (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50