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            [In taluni ambienti cattolici è radicata la tesi secondo cui l'azione pastorale non tollererebbe leggi ne strutture istituzionali, lesive, per l'astrattezza e la generalità della dogmatica giuridica, di quel principio personalistico che così peculiarmente, connota l'insegnamento del Concilio Vaticano II.

      
             An article and Editorial of your issue of September 19th have just come to my notice.  Commenting on a recent High Court Judgment of Mr. Justice Rory O'Hanlon, you take me to task for a negative view of contraception given in my book "Covenanted Happiness" (which Justice O'Hanlon quotes in his judgment).  The implication, it would seem, is that I offer an outdated theological understanding of conjugal sexuality, unacceptable to modern concepts of human freedom and rights.

     Let us first recall a few elementary ideas about both conscience and law, and then consider some aspects of their inter-relationship.

           Conscience can be described as a personal interior faculty pointing to the right and wrong of one's actions. It is what the moral theologians call the proximate norm of morality.  Vatican II speaks of it as the interior voice "always summoning man to love good and avoid evil, speaking to his heart, saying: do this, avoid that" (GS 16).

(A lecture given in Wellington, New Zealand, 1994, to a combined meeting of the SS. Cosmas and Damian Guild and the St. Thomas More Society)