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Vol I No. 8
Anglicans Worldwide

'Keeper of the Queen's Conscience'

by The Editors

Irish_Guards_Band_State_Opening_of_Parliament_2012At Aleteia, the Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliffe, member of the Prayer Book Society Board, reflects on ‘conscience’ as prompted by the ceremonial proceedings of the State Opening of Parliament. He writes:

When properly understood, conscience allows us to reject understanding it as a claim to mere personal autonomy. Rather, it opens to us the moral truths accessible to reason rooted in the way things are (which must reflect, to put it in grander terms, our metaphysical ontology or understanding of what there is and of the way things are in the moral as well as the physical universe) for, in the words of Benedict XVI “freedom without truth is no freedom at all.”

Conscience is thus, a phenomenon that calls us to do the good and live out our true vocation on the one hand, yet it can also, when properly formed and educated, ground a proper dissent from what is not right, however popular the error may be in a prevailing culture of post-modern relativism.

Read the rest of the article here.