Conscience 

“If there is anything I learned during my time as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, it is the importance of a well-formed conscience,” writes Jennifer Bryson, a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in an article appearing in a 2022 edition of The Lamp. In the summer of 2001, Bryson was an unemployed recent graduate of Yale University’s Ph.D. program in Arabic and Islamic studies. With the terrorist attacks of September 11 that year, she was quickly recruited by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency. A couple of years later, the Agency sent her to oversee interrogations of Saudi nationals at Guantanamo Bay. Back in 2003, “it never occurred to me that entering the world of interrogation might ever have anything at all to do with torture or torture-adjacent methods of eliciting information.”  Soon after she arrived, two interrogators submitted an interrogation plan of a Saudi prisoner that involved the use of a darkened room, strobe lights, and harsh music at loud volumes. The interrogators confidently explained with great technical detail that their plan would cause no lasting physical harm. Still, it did not sit well with her. She knew it was not consistent with her training or the Army Field Manual, and she wanted to deny it. But she felt “baffled and perplexed,” and she doubted herself. The peer pressure was intense, and she had very little time to deliberate and no clearly articulated reason to deny the proposal beyond her negative gut reaction. It would have been very easy to give in to the request. But she sought advice from a colleague (and fellow Catholic) who strongly supported her, giving her the confidence to reject their proposal. 

“I believe God used [my colleague] at that moment to support me because my own conscience wasn’t entirely ready…. God showered my neglected conscience with grace and a friend to offer support, just when I needed both.”  Reflecting on her experience, Bryson came to realize that conscience “is not a rabbit one can suddenly pull out of a magic hat. It is something that must be cultivated and developed over time so that it is available and ready to go when one of those ‘just when it matters’ moments comes our way.” She warns against assuming that our consciences are always fully formed and functioning, perfectly reliable even in the face of confusion, conflicting duties, surprises, threats, and feelings of depression. “Conscience itself is often just a small voice shouting to be heard over a cacophony of conflicting demands.” Failing to inform our consciences and to take seriously the cultivation of virtue before we are faced with difficult decisions exposes us to the grave danger of mistaking one of those conflicting demands for the voice of conscience.  The time for conscience formation, she urges, is right now, for “the human soul has a great capacity for profound darkness.” As Catholics we know that the proper formation of conscience involves learning what the Church authoritatively teaches about the truths of the faith and the moral life so we might avoid giving or following bad pastoral advice. But the formation of conscience is not just a matter of study. It also requires the cultivation of the habit of prayer, the development of a strong character, and habitual self-reflection as well as the presence of good examples in our lives of people who take seriously the formation of conscience. 

posted 7/1/23