An excellent observation

Cardinal Pell has an excellent insight, taken from the works of Cardinal Newman, on conscience. He quotes Newman, saying:

Even conscience, therefore, must be ‘judged by conformity to the truth, and to the Word of God.’ As Newman’s Letter to the Duke of Norfolk declares, conscience is in fact fulfilled and completed only when it embraces the Faith and Morals taught by the Catholic Church.

Detached from this vocation to objective truth, Newman knows that conscience degenerates from discerning what is right into ‘the right of self will’. From this flows ‘the dictatorship of relativism’, according to which truth is sacrificed to human passions and opinion.

The conscience as self-will is precisely what we see today in so many controversial "personal" decisions. It is certainly the fraudulent line of arguing used by liberal Catholics to justify their un-Catholic positions. The rest of his address is also excellent. Hat-tip to Fr. Z (WDTPRS)

-Amator