The Christian tradition calls this process of learning how to be free the formation of conscience. 'Conscience is the interior space of our relationship with God, who speaks to our heart and helps us to discern, to understand the path we ought to take, and once the decision is made, to move forward, to remain faithful' (Pope Francis, 2013). Formation of conscience involves learning how to make free and responsible moral decisions based on compassion, sound knowledge and moral reasoning. Pope Francis, in Amoris Laetitia (2016) paragraphs 259-279 writes insightfully and comprehensively about the ethical formation of children.

With freedom comes responsibility. We are responsible for our moral behaviour because we are made in God's image as rational beings, capable of knowing what the morally right and good thing to do is and as free beings, capable of choosing to do the morally right and good thing. These two capacities, to know and to choose, together form what is called conscience. Loosely translated, conscience means 'with knowledge'. In other words, when we make moral choices, we make them based on what we know about the goals we want to achieve, the ways or means to achieve them, the circumstances in which we need to achieve them and the consequences of both the means we choose and the outcomes we achieve. When we have weighed all these things, we make a judgment based on our knowledge of what the morally right thing to do is. We are then obliged to follow our conscience and do the morally right thing, taking responsibility for our decision.