According to Donum Veritatis, conscience gives us no rationale to dissent from the Church. Conscience is “supreme,” but not subjective, and not independent from the Church. “Argumentation appealing to the obligation to follow one’s own conscience,” the CDF says, “cannot legitimate dissent.” Although every believer “must follow his conscience, he is also obliged to form it. … Setting up a supreme magisterium of conscience in opposition to the magisterium of the Church” is “incompatible with the economy of Revelation.”
Supremacy of conscience, but only if formed by the Church.
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • March 29, 2017 • Apologetics
So I was going to write a post about Cardinal Marx and his dumb remarks recently about how Catholics are perfectly free to be flexible with the Catechism, especially when it comes to those troublesome paragraphs on homosexuality. Then I saw that Bishop Strickland opened his yap about it on Twitter, and so I guess I have to sweep up the detritis of Strickland’s error before I turn to Marx’s. Strickland saw the story at Catholic World Report and, apparently without exercising any theological forethought, tweeted that Cardinal Marx had “left the Catholic faith.
Burke goes amiss when he imagines that a pope could teach error — that it’s possible to begin with — and when he speculates that the pope would have to be corrected in such a circumstance: “Therefore, any expression of doctrine or law or practice that is not in conformity with Divine Revelation, as contained in Sacred Scripture and the Church’s Tradition cannot be an authentic exercise of the Apostolic or Petrine ministry and must be rejected by the faithful. As Saint Paul declared: ‘There are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.’ ”
Steve Ray is a Baptist convert to Catholicism who likes to wear a bush hat and call himself “Jerusalem Jones” because he’s gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, by his count, “almost 200 times.” He leads tours. But he’s really worried that Pope Francis is changing the deposit of faith; and sad to say, such a worry contains its own contradiction. (I’ll get there.) Back in the day, when he was a newly-minted convert, Mr. Ray wrote a book entitled Upon This Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome. Converts seem always to be rushing out and writing books in a fervor of having Found Truth.
Exsurge Domine was the bull excommunicating Martin Luther; and the pope lists forty-one “errors,” but takes care to point that the errors fall into different categories. “Some of these,” he says, “have already been condemned by councils and the constitutions of our predecessors, and expressly contain even the heresy of the Greeks and Bohemians. Other errors are either heretical, false, scandalous, or offensive to pious ears, as seductive of simple minds, originating with false exponents of the faith who in their proud curiosity yearn for the world’s glory …” 
Strictly speaking, “infallibility” covers whatever teachings fall under a divine guarantee to be free from any possibility of error. That does not mean, and never meant, that non-infallible teachings — the Ordinary Magisterium—do contain errors. Still less does it mean that the pope could under any circumstances teach heresy. Pope Pius XII says in Humani Generis 20: “Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand consent, since in writing such Letters the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their Teaching Authority.” 
Those FaithfulCatholics™ who have been swallowing whole pharmacies of red pills over Pope Francis have a real problem. They want to reject his Magisterium, but deep down they know that’s not really consistent with their chest-thumping insistence on their own faithfulness. But if the conclave was illicit, if it broke the rules, if the pope’s not really the pope, then we have a license to throw all that out. We can get rid of Evangelii Gaudium, we can get rid of Laudato Si, we can get rid of Amoris Laetitia. And we can get rid of that pesky Bergoglio and call another conclave. 
