The Gift of Hope from a Good and Clear Conscience

St. Peter wrote to a Christian community that was being persecuted for their faith in Christ:

Beloved: Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear, so that when you are maligned, those who defame your good conduct in Christ may themselves be put to shame.

The right antidote to their unjust persecution and suffering was an unfailing hope that comes from a good and clear conscience. The Christian’s hope begins to waver once conscience is not good and upright. Such a good and clear conscience is one formed on the truth of God’s words. The actions from such a conscience are prompted by the grace of God and attest that Jesus Christ is indeed the Lord of our thoughts, words, and actions. Such a conscience will make Christians victorious in all their trials and put their enemies to shame.  

There is spiritual power that comes from this good and clear conscience rooted in “good conduct in Christ.” It empowers the Christian to do good and endure evil out of love for Christ the Lord, “For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that be the will of God, than for doing evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous, that He might lead you to God” (1 Pet. 3:15-18).

Without a good and upright conscience, we just cannot be constant in doing the good that we should do when we face the many challenges and evils of our time. In the words of the Catechism, “A good and pure conscience is enlightened by true faith, for charity proceeds at the same time from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith” (CCC 1794).

This is why Jesus does not ask us to just love anyhow according to our whims, selfish needs, or emotions. Jesus demands from us a love for Him and for others that is always in obedience to the truth of His commandments, stating, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments…Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me.”

When we show our love for Jesus by keeping His commandments, we have a clear conscience through the sanctifying action of the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised us; “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows Him” (Jn. 14:15-21). Jesus offers us His own Spirit so that we can love Him and others in truth and enjoy the unfailing hope that comes from a good and clear conscience. 

My brethren, whenever we find ourselves losing hope for any reason, we first must examine our conscience on the quality of love that we have for God and for others. Are we truly loving God and others as inspired by the Spirit of truth or are we settling for a worldly type of love? We cannot follow the promptings of the Spirit and the world at the same time.

Are we settling for a worldly way of loving, one that is focused on self and our selfish desires and needs while ignoring the truth of God’s commandments? Such a worldly love, more appropriately called lust, no matter what we may think or believe about it, corrupts our consciences and destroys our hope. The Catechism again reminds us that sin is incompatible with truth, good conscience, and hope, explaining, “Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods” (CCC 1849).

When we follow the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in our love for God and others, we have a clear and good conscience because the Spirit will “convict us in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation” (Jn. 16:8). We cannot face our sins, strive for righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ, and avoid the condemnation due to the devil without the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Such a clear conscience from the Spirit also leads to an enduring hope because He is the “advocate who will be with us always.” We will always have a sense of God’s loving presence with us as Jesus promised, “I will never leave you orphans.” He will teach us truth about God’s love for us, our identity as God’s beloved children, and the path that we are to follow to perfect life with God in heaven.

This teaching on the need for good and upright conscience seems lost to some members of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy who seem hell-bent on imposing the homosexual lifestyle on the Catholic Church. The final report of a study group on the synod on synodality titled, “Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues,” has this shocking and blasphemous quote from a man who made the illusory claim to be married to another man: “My sexuality isn’t a perversion, disorder, or cross; it’s a gift from God. I have a happy, healthy marriage and am flourishing as an openly gay Catholic.”

The blasphemous and scandalous report goes on to claim that, based on “the lived experience of faith of the People of God,” the Church must be open to abandon her teaching on the disordered nature of the homosexual inclination and the intrinsic immorality of homosexual acts. The document also stigmatizes the Church’s moral teachings on homosexual acts as giving into “the temptation of sterile and regressive ossification of principles and statements, of norms and rules, regardless of the experience of individuals and communities.”

This report is both troubling and shameful for all persons of good will for many reasons.

Firstly, when in the world did the “lived experience” of sinful humanity in a fallen world become a source of theology and pastoral practice in the Church? Is it not the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love and truth, that is given to us to “guide us into all truth” (Jn. 16:13)? Our lived experiences do not and cannot tell us anything about God and His ways of guiding us to full communion with Him. On the contrary, it is divine revelation that helps us to make sense of our lived experiences. To appeal to our lived experience only to justify our depraved lifestyle is both devious and devilish.

In addition, a person can only claim to be happy and fulfilled in a life of grave sin because the person’s conscience is completely dead through “habits of committing sin” (CCC 1791). There is a great need for the Holy Spirit to bring life back into the person’s conscience and convict the person of the reality of sin and its damaging consequences. 

Secondly, Jesus warns us that the world cannot accept, see, or know the Spirit, but we have the Spirit within us: “But you know Him, because He remains with you, and will be in you” (Jn. 14:17). We have the power of God’s invisible Spirit within us, and He empowers us to live holy lives in this world and to be beacons of hope to a world enslaved to sexual immorality.

Instead of striving to bring hope to many trapped in the wicked bondage of depraved sexual immorality, some members of the hierarchy are telling us to be open to find beauty and goodness in gravely evil deeds that the Church has declared intrinsically evil. If we follow their wicked advice, we too will betray our brethren who have embraced this lifestyle and are living with dark and wounded consciences. We leave them hopeless and confused.

Thirdly, what about the lived experience of depression and suicide in the homosexual lifestyle? This an uncomfortable truth that the homosexual activists inside and outside the Church never speak about. The crooked report did not mention the many cases of lives lost through living in the homosexual lifestyle and the lack of meaning in such lifestyle. They ignore the grave hopelessness that comes from living with a bad conscience that rejects God’s unchanging truths.

Lastly, what about the lived experience of those who choose to live chaste and holy lives even in the face of strong homosexual inclinations? These are people who, under the impulse of the Spirit, chose to have a good and clean conscience by the grace of God. They place all their trust in Jesus and the power of His Spirit, make frequent recourse to the sacrament of Reconciliation, pray fervently, learn to love purely, examine their conscience properly, learn from their past failures, and practice self-mastery. They don’t buy into the lie to indulge, celebrate, and impose a homosexual lifestyle on others. They never lose their hope because they choose to live a life of “good conduct in Christ” (1 Pet. 3:16). I guess the Church report does not have any space to mention these true Christian heroes, but they will choose to publish skewed accounts of men who have chosen to live estranged from Christ and His commandments.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we have a choice to make when it comes to how we choose to love. Jesus pours His Spirit into our hearts in each Eucharist because He wants us to live in truth and fidelity to His commandments and thus have a good conscience and a strong and lively hope. By the power of the Spirit, we can also reject the many sinful ways of loving in our world that only destroy our conscience and hope.

The world, which is “under the power of the evil one” (1 Jn. 5:19), will offer us many deadly alternative ways that contradict the laws of God, wound our consciences, and destroy our hope. There are even wolves in sheep’s clothing within the Church herself. If we choose to follow the prompting of God’s Spirit of truth always by the grace of God, though we may not have things easy in this life or be accepted by our corrupt world, we will surely have a good and clear conscience, and there is no way that we can ever lose our hope.

Glory to Jesus!!! Honor to Mary!!!

Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash