Give em' Pell

His Awesomness (not a formal ecclesiastical title) Cardinal Pell in reference to politicians voting for ESCR.

“Some seemed to suggest that while a football club, a political party or a business certainly could in some circumstances sack or exclude a member or employee, it was totally out of order to suggest a Christian Church might even consider a similar possibility,” said the cardinal.

“A few intolerant politicians want to ban religious argument in public life, so that the only permissible reasoning will be irreligious or anti-religious,” he observed.

The cardinal said the debate also raised questions about what it means to be a Catholic.

“A Catholic is someone who believes Christ is Son of God, accepts His teachings and lives a life of worship, service and duty in the Catholic community,” he explained. “Catholics are not created by the accident of birth to remain only because their tribe has an interesting history.”

“All Catholics who continue to reject important Catholic teachings, even in areas such as sexuality, family, marriage, abortion, euthanasia, cloning where “liberals” claim the primacy of conscience rules, should expect to be confronted, gently and consistently, rather than comforted and encouraged in their wrongdoing,” he continued.

The cardinal concluded by saying that every Catholic politician who voted recently in favor of the cloning bill “should think twice and examine his or her conscience before next receiving Communion.”

I love the reference to Tribal Catholicism, as Mark Shea calls it, by the Cardinal and his mentioning that those using primacy as a conscience as a dodge should expect to be "confronted, gently and consistently."

Not a good idea to try to use conscience with Cardinal Pell who has written extensively on the subject such as this First Things article: The Inconvenient Conscience.

The key is that if your examination of conscience is shorter that the transition between two energy levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom you are only echoing your will and not evaluating the message from an informed conscience.