The sainted John Paul II warned against the facile tendency to invoke “conscience” in order to give a cover of the portentous and sacred to things that one just happened to feel strongly about. Conscience, rightly understood, was directed to a set of objective moral truths that rightly claim to govern our acts. It was not to be reduced to matters of merely personal feeling:
[I]n this way [he wrote,] the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and ‘being at peace with oneself’, so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment.
But this is precisely what Mitt Romney has given us.
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