Lei natural II - “natural law positions are discernible by reason alone” and are “for everyone.”

Nota: palavras importantes que validam o que já se tem dito por aqui. A comentar mais tarde sem ser em estrangeiro.

Bishop Morlino spoke on Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican II declaration outlining the Church’s relationships to states and the proper understanding of religious freedom. Explaining the historical development of religious freedom as a concept, he said that the last three ecumenical councils – Trent, Vatican I, and Vatican II – are “the Church's responses to modernity.”

He described how prior to modernist philosophy, both the Church and society recognized that “to know the truth meant that there was a correspondence between the mind and the reality out there.” This correspondence enabled man to know the natural law – the participation of human reason in divine law.

“There was a conformity of the mind to what was real, independent of the mind,” the bishop explained.

The philosophical movement of modernity, he explained, was a “major turn in the way human beings thought about knowing.” It shifted thinking towards a more subjective view of reality, in which the individual’s perception determines what he or she thinks to be real.

“Instead of being accountable to what is independent of the mind,” Bishop Morlino said, under a modernist view, “the world is what I think it is.”

In this understanding, “it was decided that there is no reality independent of the mind.”

This understanding of reality and the truth had profound implications for the meaning of conscience. In the original understanding of the term, “the natural law holds conscience accountable” because the conscience guides the individual to recognize and act upon the truths of the natural moral law, Bishop Morlino explained.

“The conscience is not a dispensation machine from what is right,” he continued, though “this is how it’s used today.”

He said that this misinterpretation of conscience has transformed natural law arguments “into denominational beliefs” taken upon faith.

“Catholics don’t observe the natural law because we’re Catholic; Catholics observe the natural law because it is true.”

The natural law in and of itself is not a matter of faith, because “natural law positions are discernible by reason alone” and are “for everyone.”

However, “if everyone is composing his or her own world, there’s got to be conflict,” the bishop said, and the conflict between modernism and natural law has grave implications for persons of faith.

“The natural law frees me to seek the truth about God, and thus seek my salvation,” Bishop Morlino stated.

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/bishop-highlights-link-between-religious-liberty-natural-law/