1. 4.1 Morality: A Response to God’s Love
Chapter 4
Conscience
©Our Sunday Visitor Curriculum Division

2. Chapter Overview
Our dignity as persons created by God requires us to follow our conscience.
Popular uses of the word conscience are frequently inadequate to describe all that the term involves.
A fuller understanding of conscience includes three dimensions: awareness, development, and judgment.
Scripture and Tradition emphasize the importance of using our conscience to make informed moral decisions.

3. V Vocabulary
Hero (p. 62): Someone who follows his or her conscience in the face of difficulties.
Conscience (p. 63): A moral decision-making ability (or action) centering on what a person has already done or ought to do in the future. It involves an awareness that there is right and wrong, a process of discernment, and finally judgment.
Lax conscience (p. 68): When a person does not employ a process of conscientious decision making, thereby not facing or thinking about the morality of actions that he or she performs.

4. V Vocabulary
Informed conscience (p. 69): A conscience that is educated and developed through constant use and examination.
Erroneous conscience (p. 70): When a person follows a process of conscientious decision making but unwittingly makes a wrong decision.

5. V Vocabulary
Sin (p. 71): When people act contrary to their conscience and purposely choose to do wrong; “a deliberate thought, word, deed, or omission contrary to the eternal law of God.” (Catechism, Glossary)
The Splendor of Truth (p. 76): An encyclical on morality by Pope John Paul II.

6. 4.3 Review 1. Who were Franz Jägerstätter and Cesar Chavez?
2. Name three ways that conscience is sometimes understood in popular usage. Why is each usage insufficient to express all that conscience involves?
3. What does the Latin root of the word conscience mean? What does this root meaning tell us about conscience?

7. Review
4. An accurate definition of conscience includes three interrelated dimensions. What are they?
5. What is a lax conscience?
6. What does developing an informed conscience involve?

8. 4.5 Review 7. Define erroneous conscience.
8. What term is used in Church teaching for not following conscience?
9. What biblical term is the closest equivalent of the concept of conscience?

9. Review
10. What attacks on human dignity was the world facing that influenced Church leaders to convene Vatican Council II?
11. Name two documents of Vatican Council II that address the question of conscience?
12. In The Splendor of Truth, what are the four points about conscience that Pope John Paul II offers?