An Explanation of "Conscience," and the Freedom and Limits Thereof

During the HHS crisis, a lot of people, including a lot of bishops, are speaking in terms of the rule violating freedom of conscience. Patrick J. Deneen has made a good argument here that by relying on freedom of conscience, the Church has been lured onto enemy ground. I’m not sure I entirely agree, especially when one understands the real definition of conscience, which is most assuredly not just doing what you feel like doing or want to do, as a type of self-indulgence. Peter Kreeft explains it very well here: 

The modern meaning tends to indicate a mere feeling that I did something wrong or am about to do something wrong. The traditional meaning in Catholic theology is the knowledge of what is right and wrong: intellect applied to morality. The meaning of conscience in the argument is knowledge and not just a feeling; but it is intuitive knowledge rather than rational or analytical knowledge, and it is first of all the knowledge that I must always do right and never wrong, the knowledge of my absolute obligation to goodness, all goodness: justice and charity and virtue and holiness; only in the second place is it the knowledge of which things are right and which things are wrong. This second-place knowledge is a knowledge of moral facts, while the first-place knowledge is a knowledge of my personal moral obligation, a knowledge of the moral law itself and its binding authority over my life. That knowledge forms the basis for the argument from conscience.

Douglas McManaman explains here why conscience isn’t the ultimate source of morality, but only a way in which we know the objective moral truth:

[T]o put it bluntly, conscience is not the final arbiter of what is morally right, nor has the Church ever taught that it is.  In its truest sense, conscience is the intellectual apprehension of the Divine Law.  For this reason, Divine Law is primary.  

In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Newman quotes Cardinal Gousset, who writes:  "The Divine Law is the supreme rule of actions; our thoughts, desires, words, acts, all that man is, is subject to the domain of the law of God; and this law is the rule of our conduct by means of our conscience. Hence it is never lawful to go against our conscience."  

Essentially, conscience is one's best judgment, in a given situation, on what here and now is to be done as good, or to be avoided as evil.  Because conscience is one's best judgment, hic et nunc, a person has a duty to obey it.  The Fourth Lateran Council says: "He who acts against his conscience loses his soul.”

It is also extremely important to note that the properly-formed conscience (since sometimes consciences can be in error) will never lead someone to dissent from the teachings of the Magisterium. To put it another way, if someone appeals to his conscience to say the Church is doctrinally in error (say, on birth control), then his conscience is in error and leads him away from the Church, not to a purer and superior form of Catholicism. To put this another way, a Nancy Pelosi or a Kathleen Sebelius is not more Catholic than the pope; she is less Catholic than the pope, despite—in fact, because of—her appeals to conscience. Same goes for all of the revolutionaries of 1968 and afterwards. 

Anyway, I have a strong suspicion that a lot of dissenters haven’t even thought about conscience at all—not even the erroneous understanding of freedom of conscience that we’ve tended to have these last 50 years.. They simply seized on the term because it lets them (so they think) conveniently do anything they want with their bodies without having to heed the inconvenient truths taught by the Church.