Once upon a time many years ago I was a young married Catholic.  I was raised as a Catholic, attended catholic elementary and high schools and joined a Catholic fraternity when I went off to college.  I even graduated from a Catholic Law School.  In short my moral upbringing was based on Catholic teaching which in turn formed my conscience.    No matter what my personal behavior was at a particular time I was always aware of this conscience judging my conduct as right or wrong.

After three pregnancies and two births in less than two years my wife at the time decided she wanted to take the "Pill" as what was then known as Papal roulette hadn't given her much rest from child bearing.  She was a nurse and her nursing background, not to mention regular morning sickness, probably helped her to be more open to birth control than I was.  However, I knew the pregnancies had been hard on her and I had to agree it was the best course of action for her health.  We switched birth control systems and that problem was solved.

Fast forwarding 14 years I found myself part of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal with a hunger for all things God related.  In consuming everything I could get my hands on I attended a Cursillo retreat.  During the retreat one of the speakers, a member of a religious order of "Brothers", mentioned that an advantage he had over us lay Catholics was that he was taught that church teachings were like life buoys used to mark dangerous shoals.  When the tide was low you had to make sure you kept on the right side of them but when the tide was high you could skirt around them.   When he was finished speaking he and others on the team leading the retreat prayed for us attendees individually.  When he happened to pray for me the Holy Spirit revealed to me that the decision I made over 14 earlier to use the "Pill" for birth control was made out of concern for my wife's welfare and superceded what my conscience thought was right.  Simultaneously with this revelation, I could feel a layer of heaviness, representing guilt, being peeled off me, starting from the sole of my foot and continuing slowly up to and off of my scalp.   What I had known with my mind was now known through divine revelation by my soul with the result that I had been delivered from a sense of guilt that had weighed me down on a spiritual level for years. 

Since then I have had to look at how I treat people I disagree with, going out of my way not to abandon them because of differences in beliefs and being careful not to take any disagreements personally (something I have often failed at, at least momentarily).  Although I have spent the intervening years "purifying my conscience" as the Apostle Paul teaches and still look to my conscience for daily guidance, I know that the whole law is summed up in this:  That thou  shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, thy whole soul and thy whole mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.