There is a quote from the great writer Flannery O’Connor that is worth recalling as we approach elections next month: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it (emotionally).”
For some reason this makes me think of kale, something I have a strong negative opinion about putting in my stomach. But then I pause and consider the matter more fully: there are the health benefits of kale to be considered. Perhaps there is a sort of link between the consumption of things such as kale, and the formation of opinion and conscience.
I put the word “emotionally” in the quote above for clarity because it is critically important to retain. Emotions are certainly high right now. We are continuously inundated with political commercials designed to inflame our emotions and evoke a visceral response. If you participate in social media you also witness this emotional turmoil, and you may have even experienced the unpleasant modern phenomena of being “unfriended.”
However, what we are dealing here with is a matter of conscience and not a matter of emotion. Our visceral emotional response to what we are hearing and seeing needs to progress to a rational examination of the issues, policies and programs proposed by any given candidate or political party (spoiler alert: none will line up completely with the teaching of the Church).
We have a duty to form our conscience in a thorough and profound way, one that requires more than internet news feeds, social media and television broadcasts.
There is real truth that stands above the quagmire of relativism, and that is the truth of God’s law. St. John Paul II teaches us in “Veritatis Splendor” that “God’s law does not reduce, much less do away with human freedom; rather, it protects and promotes that freedom.”
That truth, as O’Connor observes, can be difficult to stomach but we must seek it in order to be truly free. Hiding from it is not an option, even if it sometimes seems preferable or easier to do so.
St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, “When ignorance is in any way willed, either directly or indirectly due to negligence, by reason of a man not wishing to know what he ought to know it does not cause the act to be involuntary, such an error of reason or conscience does not excuse the will.”
We should be wary also of deceiving ourselves that we have formed our conscience completely and correctly, especially if we find ourselves doing the mental gymnastics of modern ethical theories such as proportionalism or consequentialism, which seek to allow or justify “lesser” evils in light of a greater good. That would be a little bit like cooking our kale in bacon fat – easier to stomach but no longer very good for us.
The truth is that certain things are intrinsically evil, all of the time and without exception. The Vatican II constitution “Gaudium et Spes” (“Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”) covers many of them: “whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator” (27).
This is a list of truths that none of us wishes we had to stomach, but we cannot hide from these realities. We have a duty, of course, to form our conscience continuously, not only during an election year. But as we approach Nov. 3 let us look beyond our emotional response, get past the rancor and division, and pray that our nation remembers that the truth of God’s law is true freedom.
Deacon Martin Sheehan serves at Our Lady of the Highways Church in Thomasville and as the youth ministry director at Our Lady of Mercy Church in Winston-Salem.