If God acts in our conscience showing us good and bad and guiding us irrespective of religion, what is the need of following religious rituals for salvation?

It is true that God acts in our conscience, helping us by his grace to choose what is good and avoid what is evil. However, it might help us to better understand what is meant when we talk about our “conscience.” A lot of this information can be found in the Catechism, sections 1776-1794.

First of all, conscience is something present in the heart of every single human person. “Heart” here refers to that unified interior “space” that unites and governs all the actions of our personal being. In less technical language, the heart is our “center.” Conscience is that inner voice which not only guides the actions of our heart, but judges them.

However, the voice of our conscience is not identical to the voice of God. The Lord does speak to our conscience, this is absolutely true; our conscience, though, is “a judgment of reason” (CCC 1778). What that means is that our conscience has to grow and mature by grasping the truth–it has to be formed (or informed, if you will) by the truth.

So while it is true that God speaks to us in the depths of our hearts, helping us to make right decisions, he also leaves us to learn what is right and wrong and so develop our practical reason (St. Thomas Aquinas’ definition for conscience, since it is our rational ability to make practical judgments and actions). The Catechism (1784-1785) speaks of what is necessary for the formation of a good conscience:

“The education of the conscience is a lifelong task. From the earliest years, it awakens the child to the knowledge and practice of the interior law recognized by conscience. Prudent education teaches virtue; it prevents or cures fear, selfishness and pride, resentment arising from guilt, and feelings of complacency, born of human weakness and faults. The education of the conscience guarantees freedom and engenders peace of heart.

In the formation of conscience the Word of God is the light for our path, we must assimilate it in faith and prayer and put it into practice. We must also examine our conscience before the Lord’s Cross. We are assisted by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, aided by the witness or advice of others and guided by the authoritative teaching of the Church.”

Think of everything that goes into developing a good conscience! Education, good family, habitual practice of virtues, Scripture, prayer, meditation, the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the Church. For our consciences to truly be formed, we require a full education. That means we need good, solidly formed minds. We have much to learn from human wisdom. But it also means we need grace, which is God’s action in our hearts. By ourselves, we are limited and prone to error and moral failure. But with the help of God’s grace, our human nature can be brought to its full capacity.

Think of what this means when it comes to religion. Christianity is not just one “option” among many others. It’s not merely one path to the same goal. Christianity is the path–that’s not because of some Christian superiority complex, it’s because Christianity is the way God himself gave to us!

Let’s look at Christianity in a brief snapshot. God desires all human beings to be with him in heaven, our true home, and in order to help us get there he revealed himself to us over the course of human history. He did this because we could not reach him ourselves; we needed to be saved from the errors of our ways, our hatred for one another, and our sins, which all bind us and limit our freedom (and our knowledge). The full revelation of God to us is Jesus Christ, who is both fully God and fully man. And in order to give the whole human race access to the salvation he won for us by dying and rising for us, he “deposited” those graces in the community he left behind on earth to continue his work: the Church.

That is why we need the Catholic Church! We are not following blind or empty rituals. We are partaking in the life and the grace Jesus Christ himself shared with us–and this has very practical effects in our lives. For instance, take the Mass. We read the Scripture, we are taught by the Church (through the priest’s preaching), and we partake through our prayers in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross. We receive Jesus himself in Holy Communion. At the end of Mass, the priest then says: “The Mass is ended, go in peace,” (in Latin, ite, Misa est). We are sent into the world (“Mass” and “mission” come from the same root word), having received the grace of God in our hearts to live differently, to live a better way.

All that forms our conscience! We learn to think as God thinks not just through abstract principles, but by receiving his love and his grace into our souls through prayer and worship. The word “religion” points to this in an interesting way. The word comes from the Latin re-ligare, meaning reconnect. Religion is not just a useful code of beliefs or rituals to which we are emotionally attached. It’s our journey to reconnect with God. As Christians, we believe and know that we cannot reconnect with God by our own capabilities alone. We need his help, and he gives that help to us directly in our own hearts, yes, but also in an even more powerful way through the Church.