Someone said that everything begins with conscience and nothing is worth if not for it. These days and always we see how from politics and Economics, communication and Education moral conscience is still highly valued. It is logical that both the previous synods on the family and the preparations for the upcoming one on youth underline the importance of discernment and the training of conscience.

A jewel on topic is the small book of a practical nature published last century by Romano Guardini, graduate "The Good, Conscience and Recollection" (cf. The conscience. The good, the harvestMorcelliana, Brescia 2009).

The book is divided into three conferences or meditations. The first, the broadest, deals with consciousness from an anthropological and phenomenological point of view. The second broadens this vision to a religious and theological perspective. The third deals with what each person should put into it. All this is aimed at illuminating the training of the conscience and more broadly the moral Education .

1. The good and the conscience. Guardini begins by distinguishing between acting for an end in general and acting for a duty. Duty is not just any useful end but an "intrinsically just" end. This is what we call a "good," a good in itself. And the conscience responds to this good as the eye responds to light. Conscience is thus the natural organ of grasping the good as distinguished from evil. 

The conscience grasps the good as value universal that "must" be sought in every action, beyond mere utility, from agreement con what reality demandsThe Bible calls it the "heart," the core of the person.

Our time, Guardini understands, needs rediscover the objectives of the Education moral: to teach the value, greatness and fullness of good, to educate the ardent desire, joy and beauty of that moral duty, freeing it from being seen as mere obligation and burden; to teach how to open one's eyes to what events and things demand; to ponder the power and capacity to commit oneself, to reconstitute understanding and unity of will and thus to open to the light and wisdom of Christian morality, both for men and women of our time.

Throughout this great little book, its author considers consciousness as a door through which eternity enters into time, as the cradle from which human history, which is the fruit of freedom, arises; as a window open at the same time on eternity and on daily events.

Conscience warns, we would say today, like a light or a red pilot light on the dashboard of the car about gasoline or oil levels, like a thermometer indicating body temperature. It informs us about the way in which the ultimate and eternal good asks to be realized here and now, perhaps in a small action.

The conscience, Guardini also observes, is like our supreme compassThe latter can be spoiled by superficiality and frivolity (lax conscience), by rigorism, obsession and scrupulosity (scrupulous conscience) or, finally, by psychological alterations in the perception of reality, and in general by a lack of harmony between intelligence and will, the senses and the affections.

The training of conscience, according to Guardini, is the Education to be able to leave the circle of one's own "I". This is so, and the secret of conscience - there can be no other - is openness to love.

2. The "agreement"(or the compliance) with God. Now, according to this illustrious theologian, this going out of the "I" can only be achieved completely through religious reality. And this is so because the good is not something abstract, but, in its fullness, it is "the holiness of the living God: this is the good"; that is, the agreement or conformity with God.

The conscience is, therefore, an organ capable of grasping the reality of God and His will, His presence and His Love; and capable of guiding us to act in His presence, under His gaze, to act for the honor of God, to live in God, as the Scripture says. That is why the conscience is like a witness of God, like the "living voice of the holiness of God in us". And to the one who lives by faith, Guardini points out, God gives the grace of a clear conscience so that "his will may be done on earth as it is in heaven".

This quotation of the Lord's Prayer is not accidental, because the role of conscience and therefore its training is understood, according to our author, and "reaches its fullness in the mystery of our elevation to (being) children of God". Therefore, for a believer and especially for a Christian, "the fulfillment of the moral law is no longer merely the fulfillment of an abstract duty, but the Building of our salvation". It is a matter, in fact, of collaborating with one's own salvation and that of others, on the basis of the saving initiative of the Triune God and on the framework of the family of the Church, of the vocation and mission statement of Christians in the world and for the service of humanity.

3. The exercise of recollection. In continuity with the previous two, in his third meditation, Guardini considers that consciousness has a character of call The call to participate in the holiness of God, a call that demands a response on the part of the Christian.

This is why the fact, which Guardini evokes, that our "name" is placed in the baptism. It is the "white stone" of which the Bible speaks (cf. Rev 2:17).

But, Guardini acknowledges, understanding all this and lending oneself to it is neither easy nor automatic. It can only develop and function at the human level with the years of interior maturation and exterior experience, passing through the successive stages of the person, and at the level of faith, with the grace of God. In this context our author stresses the importance of the sacrament of confirmationwhich he considers "the sacrament of Christian conscience".

In final, the training of the conscience only takes place by "dilating, correcting and enlightening ourselves" through openness to divine grace. This is what we call growth in the inner life. Guardini synthesizes this process in the term recollection. Indeed, the training of conscience, as part of the Education of faith, should teach us to cultivate the depth of the spirit, contemplation, examination or interior vigilance, the fullness of justice, the passion for the good; and, for all this, the spiritual life with its retinue of virtues, prayer and interior peace, listening to the Word of God and prayer.

At the end of his book on conscience, Guardini includes a prayer. Its author is John Henry Newman, beatified by Benedict XVI in 2010. Newman considers the Christian conscience as teacher, light and voice of God, facilitator and guide of listening, healer of the gaze, purifier of the heart:

"My God, I need You, I need You to instruct me every day, as required by workshop. Lord, grant me an enlightened conscience, capable of perceiving and understanding Your inspiration! My ears are closed, therefore I do not hear Your voice. My eyes are covered, therefore I do not see Your signs. You alone can open my ears and heal my sight, You alone can purify my heart. Teach me to sit at Your feet, and to listen to Your word".