Fatal or trivial?

Not the Catholic system

For hundreds of years, the basic language of Catholicism about sin has rested on the distinction between mortal and venial sin, that is, serious and not-serious. The language, I believe, comes from St Augustine but I know little of its history.

Mortal sin is sin which, as the term suggests, kills. That is, kills the life of grace in the soul. Extinguishes it. Venial sin is pardonable sin (from venia, forgiveness, pardon, excuse), which damages the soul, but not fatally. Fifty venial sins do not equal one mortal sin. One mortal sin does something which a hundred venial sins can't.

Mortal sins require a certain commitment. You have to be dealing with a serious matter, know that, and still freely choose to do it. If the issue is grave matter, one which normally is a mortal sin, but you either A. don't know that or B. don't fully consent to what you are doing, then it reverts to venial.

If you commit mortal sin, just one, you may not approach the altar for Communion. All grace is gone from you. You must go to confession first. Otherwise, you add sacrilege to the mix. If you have committed only venial sins, even many of them, you are welcome, even encouraged to go. One of the little known effects of Holy Communion is the forgiveness of venial sins, something taught both in the Baltimore and new catechism.

Dante understood the difference. Mortal sin sends you to the Inferno, which only goes downward to a dead end and from which there is no escape.

Mohammed eternally having his gut split open in Hell 

because he introduced such division into the world.

Venial sin puts you in the Purgatorio, a mountain you have to climb, but whose eventual top is the entrance of heaven, the Paradiso. Someday purgatory will be empty. Hell, never.

So you can see that, theological niceties aside, the message and the effect of this language is pretty clear: certain kinds of sins are serious; others simply are not. Capital crime vs misdemeanor. Mortal, to hell. Venial, no big whoop.
Consequently, the only practical way the Church has of marking something as important and serious is to make a related transgression a mortal sin*. Cause unless it's mortal, it's venial. And if it's venial, let's face it, for most people, it's trivial. The difference between adultery and stealing a stapler from work.

How this has played out is that if the Church really doesn't want you to do something, no matter what the act is, it has to be a  mortal sin. No other option, really.

That's why, to prevent anyone from even starting down a road that might damage the place of sacramental marriage-and-family, a seemingly ordinary and trivial thing like wanking off is a mortal sin. If it weren't, everybody would do it...

That's why, in the days of the Six Precepts of the Church, it was a mortal sin to miss Mass on Sunday, to fail to make your confession and go to Communion once a year, to marry in contravention of Church law. The famous rule against eating meat on Friday was included in this list, as was contributing to the financial support of the Church.

Like the original Ten Commands of God, these Six Precepts are best understood as a whole rather than one by one. These six items described, in real and concrete terms, who was a practicing Catholic and who wasn't. Since that is/was a big deal, at least 4 of the 6 were clearly marked as mortal sin territory. Friday abstinence was universally believed to be a mortal matter, although if you look in the Catechism, it's not specifically there. Same thing for giving money.

So the question is, in terms of a human institution performing what it considers a divine mission, not "Would God really send little me to hell for all eternity if I just went to the beach one Sunday out of 52 instead of to Mass, like I do all the other Sundays?"  The question is, "Does the Church think apparently small thing is important to some larger issue or value on which its mission depends?" For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. (A poem my Dad knew from memory and made me learn!)

From this quite non-theological, even political/sociological point of view, what's mortally sinful (missing Mass = committing murder = sleeping with your own sex) is not always the act itself --though the Church's theology can't admit that-- but what role it plays in the larger scheme of things.

If missing Sunday Mass were only venial, then that means Mass is not important. And if Mass is not important in Catholicism, then nothing is. If homosexuality were only venial, that means male-female differences, which are institutionalized and sanctified in the Sacrament of marriage-for-procreation as their purpose and shape, are not important and neither is the Sacrament.

Unlike our recently discarded complex Homeland Security schema, it's pretty much --aside from subjective conditions**-- an either-or language. Not elegant, but clear. And, in a way, it understands its audience.



*There's excommunication, but that's a this-worldly administrative penalty laid on top of certain mortal sins.


**Catechism,2352. "To form an equitable judgment about the subjects' moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired
habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that can lessen, if not
even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability."



--