The Fathers of the Church have, at long last, succeeded.

The Catholic Army of the War on Conscience has been hugely successful.

The Army has succeeded in short-circuiting many of the spiritual energies in practicing Catholics, and better yet, even in former Catholics.

They have done this short-circuiting by the following means:
-They have derailed real spiritual hunger by offering many attractive yet futile avenues of spiritual endeavor. These dead-ends frustrate the seeker and often result in self-pity.
-They have transformed shame before God into anger, which often naturally morphs into blame.
-And most especially, they have diverted spiritual pain, such as the pain of remorse of conscience, to soul-searing guilt. This is done by instilling the idea that spirituality is painless, even joyful, and any suffering indicates that the practitioner is “doing it wrong.”

Thinking for oneself has always been widely belittled. “Greater minds than yours have told us such and such.” Those who do try to think for themselves find they are in a confusing, potholed field of ideas, difficult to navigate in the poor light the Church provides.
So instead of the reassurance of real conscience, there is a gray cloud of doubt.
Love of God has been replaced with the peace of self-calming.
The clear seeing of conscience, the View from Above, is now feared and avoided.
Curiosity becomes painful and uninteresting. It instantly raises fundamental doubts of “Who am I?”
Everywhere there are inexplicable threats to each person’s picture of themselves as a “good person”.

These short-circuiting connections usually get implanted in tiny children who trust adults not to betray them, and these connections then become buried so deeply that most people raised Catholic can not uproot them without horrible pain and serious damage to their spirits.

Conscience gradually becomes successfully starved.
It’s not dead—that would be impossible—but it’s heard faintly and is often confused with other impulses.
By the time of the body’s death, the spirit is so confused it rarely moves toward God.
This spells success. The voice of Conscience cannot disturb our sleep any more.

Like the more obvious armies of the War on Conscience, the Roman Catholic army has gradually become successful.

Lou Gottlieb 4/9/21