The Good Decision Project asks practitioners to identify and begin the work of decision making from a continuously evolving and maturing, individual “Sense of Good”.  The global internet has shown the expression of religion to be vastly diverse and we must tune our consciences to the undeniable. Unfortuately that task of conscience frightens people, so these days we live in an atmosphere of stubborn often narrow certainty.  So stubborn in fact that, given time, a lie can become truth based on nothing but a stubborn refusal to consider evidence for any other possibility.  This stubborn certainty threatens to tear us apart as the authorities that provide the broad framework of social order fray and crumble under the relentless attacks of ‘the certain ones’.  

Pope Francis recently stirred up this age of stubborn certainty from his historic seat of authority.  David French addressed this topic in the New York Times in his article entitled “Pope Francis is Turning Certainty on Its Head” (September 19 2024) .  He quotes the Pope  as saying at a inter-religious meeting held at a Catholic Junior College in Singapore, different religions are: “like different languages in order to arrive at God, . . . we are all sons and daughters of God.”  The response to this inclusiveness was quick and often hostile citing liberal failings.  French then tracks back to a far more conservative authority, Pope John Paul II,  who also said: “It will be in the sincere practice of what is good in their own religious traditions and by following the dictates of their own conscience that the members of other religions respond positively to God’s invitation and receive salvation.”  These two authorities certainly let the air out of the arguments for a national religion. Rather we the people are reduced again to the hard work of discerning the common good rather than indulging in religious warfare.  Finally this week Pope Francis spoke to his flock regarding the American Election, saying that our two candidates presented for Catholics a choice of ‘the lesser of two evils”. In short he instructed people to vote their own individual consciences while not relieving anyone of the responsibility to decide and vote.  

Abandon hope some of you who expected to be told for whom to vote by an authority higher than your own conscience or sense of good.  Perhaps we should recall the lessons of the Nuremberg trials while we are at it as we consider our vote..  This decision is yours and yours alone.  Make it a good one for the better person.