How do you “recant?”

How do you “recant” and begin to believe something you don’t believe?The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF, is ordering Father Roy Bourgeois M.M. to recant his belief and support for women’s ordination. If not, he will be excommunicated in thirty days.

But does the CDF have some secret formula or operating instructions for going against one’s conscience when ordered to do so?

I understand how Vatican authorities might solve their problem of dissent by simply expecting people to lie, if you just say the right words all will be forgiven. Inconveniently of course, lying and bearing false witness (even against yourself) has been forbidden since Sinai, so that option is out.
 
Perhaps the Vatican is really simply aiming to impose silence, so the troubling issue can be ignored. Admittedly in certain situations choosing strategic silence can be a moral option if it staves off harmful consequences to self or others. St. Thomas More took refuge in silence until his conscience no longer allowed him to do so.

The CDF, however, seems to be demanding something more than external behavior, since they command Bourgeois to recant his belief and committed conviction. So how do they think he can manage to change his conscience and belief on demand?

It appears to require extreme conditions like those in the Gulag or a Chinese reeducation prison in order to brainwash or actually persuade people into believing and confessing things on command. Given enough prolonged torture, sleeplessness, isolation and psychological manipulation, persons can make up false memories and new beliefs that conform to their inquisitor’s plan for some show trial, or public submission. But then again, torture and physical coercion while incarcerated in monastery cells have also long been repudiated by the Church.

So the problem remains. A mentally stable and mature person’s Christian conscience cannot be coerced or evaded. In fact, a person cannot renounce a settled conscience since it is the sacred core of the person’s whole identity. A self cannot will to deny one’s own self or repudiate mind, heart and life experience.

I fear that Vatican concepts of conscience and human psychology are based on the old idea that an abstract isolated act of the will can mechanically change a person’s belief.  With such an over-rationalized reductive psychology, abuses of authority can become frequent. Attempts at coercion give the lie to Vatican II’s great affirmations of the freedom and dignity of conscience.

Well, perhaps I am wrong on the matter of conscience.  If so, I’d like to be enlightened forthwith.  The next Synod should take up the questions of human psychology that underlie so many current Church disputes involving conscience, dissent, contraception, celibacy, women, homosexuality, divorce and abortion. In the meantime, perhaps the CDF can send along by express mail another letter, this one explaining how Christians are supposed to recant.

Sidney Callahan