Primacy of Truth vs. Primacy of Conscience

For many years, Archbishop George Pell has expressed reservations about the appeal many Catholics make to the primacy of conscience. In a recent speech, he has said forthrightly that, while individual conscience is important, the ‘misleading doctrine of the primacy of conscience should be publicly rejected’. He argues that ‘conscience has no primacy; truth has primacy’.

Although these claims are made in the terms of a long standing debate among Roman Catholics, they are of wider interest. For they touch the relations between individual and society, between personal freedom and law, between allegiance and dissent, that are being renegotiated in a world shadowed by September 11.

Outstanding article. Read it here.