Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 3 — The Southern Cross, April 25,1974
Is There Any Such Thing As Mortal Sin Today?
BY DONALD THORMAN
(NC News Service)
Some things are eternal and this
includes mortal sin. Grievous offenses
against God will always be grievous
offenses. The possibility of committing
a mortal sin is always present, even
today. But that is not all there is to say
about the subject.
As a boy I was taught there are three
criteria for the commission of such sin:
It must indeed be a very serious matter;
we must be aware this is so; and we
must give the full consent of our will to
the act, after comprehending its
significance. This is still true in our own
time. (I limit my comments here to the
personal aspects of sin, not opening the
subject of sins of social justice and
charity.)
However, there are many dimensions
which enter into those three conditions
which are new and which can give us a
vastly different view of mortal sin from
that of my youth. Even in the dark ages
of preconciliar days, I recall a discussion
BY CHRISTOPHER DERRICK
(NC News Service)
Mr. Thorman and I agree, up to a
point, about modem psychological
knowledge: it can usefully remind us
that the mind isn’t simple, and that we
shall often be making fools of ourselves
(as well as disobeying the Lord) if we
jump to conclusions about the formal
guilt of other people.
But if I may speak as an Englishman,
he does display a characteristically
American tendency to take
book-psychology rather too seriously!
Let’s remember that ‘transactional
analysis’ will probably look quite
absurdly out of date within a year or
two: more seriously, let’s remember
that much of the most influential
writing about psychology comes from
about this with a dogmatic theologian
of some repute during which I stated
my view that I thought it most difficult
for a normal person to commit a mortal
sin. Needless to say, I received a stem
1957 type lecture and fatherly warning
to cease and desist from such dangerous
positions.
I thought my theologian friend was
wrong then (and told him so) and I still
believe it is most difficult for ordinary
run-of-the-mill sinners such as you and
me to offend God mortally.
In the past generation we have
learned a great many new things about
God, our states of awareness and the
matter of full consent to any act of the
will. I do not desire to psychologize
personal sin away, but without doubt
contemporary psychology has given us
new insights into our states of
awareness, ego states and the process of
decision-making which can be helpful to
us in determining how guilty we are.
For example, let’s just take the
current popular psychological method
of understanding ourselves and our ego
people who assume from the start that
all religion - and the sense of sin in
particular - is a neurotic illusion.
Against all thought so based, we need to
be on our guard.
Beyond that, I think we need to
remember that the habit of harping on
sin, and on the consequent danger of
hell, is not something which we get
from the wicked old institutional
Church in its corruption. It’s right there
in the Gospel, very insistently. What the
Church did, later on, was to temper it
down and qualify it a little -
‘development’ of which some
controversialists disapproved loudly,
and they had a point.
Mr. Thorman takes a beautifully
comfortable view of this matter: what
sticks in my mind is that Jesus of
Nazareth didn’t agree with him.
states: transactional analysis. Our
personality has three different aspects:
the parent, the adult and the child.
Sometimes we act as a critical or
nurturing parent; other times we are
adults exchanging information or
processing data; but, not infrequently,
we come from our child ego state,
acting as a conforming or a natural or
sometimes as a rebellious child. There is
evidence that each of us has certain life
scripts which “program” us early to act
in certain ways throughout our lifetime.
Mother told us this is the way to keep
house, or to behave in certain
circumstances; other authority figures
have told us other things we should do.
So, in certain cases are we coming from
a rebellious child ego state or are we
deliberately making a mature decision
to offend God with full knowledge of
the eternal consequences?
My point is simply that it is no easy
matter to sort our motives, our
decisions, our awareness of what we are
doing -- and why. The institutional
church not infrequently acts as a critical
parent treating its members as children.
Does not transactional analysis make
many of the actions of those members
more understandable? I think it does.
Transactional analysis is only one of
many developments in the behavioral
sciences which are helping us gain new
understandings of our behavior and why
we act the way we do. Gestalt
psychology, behavior modification
techniques, new understanding of how
we communicate (or don’t
communicate) - all of these, and more,
don’t make mortal sin a simple cut and
dried matter as so many of us have
thought in the past.
Nor, on the other hand, does all this
new information negate the possiblity
of mortal sin. Man is still capable of sin,
even mortal sin. Karl Menninger’s recent
book on sin and the devastating effect
of “The Exorcist,” the book and the
movie, on so many persons convince us
of this. But though sin is eternal and
present even today, it still is individual
and as individuals we need all the help
and insights we can get in deciding
whether our own sins are mortal.
Response
BY CHRISTOPHER DERRICK
(NC News Service)
Speaking personally, I feel quite sure
that mortal sin does still exist -- though
if you asked me to justify this certainty
of mine, I might have to take refuge in
the Fifth Amendment. And as my
censorious eye wanders round the
world, it detects no sign that the Ten
Commandments have suddenly started
to be obeyed on all sides, or that the
Seven Deadly Sins have ceased to be
popular.
But our way of talking about this
' N
Dialogue
in
Print
S J
subject has certainly changed recently,
partly for the better and (I would say)
partly for the worse. For one thing,
modem psychology has taught us that
moral choice must always operate in
complex non-moral situations, and that
the real scope of free will is less that we
thought. (The casuists have known all
this for a long time, but don’t let’s
deprive the psychologists of their
triumph.) “Sin” in the full and formal
sense of the word - the deliberate
refusal of love and obedience - may
always have been a more uncommon
thing that most of us used to think: in
the sight of God, we may be a good deal
less wicked than we seem and a good
deal more crazy. An eminent prelate
once told me that it was only this
thought which kept him from despair.
(And wasn’t there an English cardinal
who said that it takes a Frenchman to
commit a mortal sin?)
Then, in our sense of morality and
therefore of sin, we Catholics have
recently become much less legalistic,
less individualistic. I once heard one of
my small children rebuking his even
smaller brother for eating bacon - quite
inadvertently -- on a Friday. (This was
before the Flood, of course.) “Don’t
you know that it’s a mortal sin?” he
bellowed. “If you die now, you’ll go to
hell!” Even a six-year-old would be
much less likely, nowadays, to speak
like that; and there’s a similar benefit in
our new awareness that good and evil
exist also in social and public versions,
not only in the souls of individuals.
But we gain and we lose. If we now
see morality more in terms of love and
less in terms of regulations, that’s all to
the good, so long as we still remember
that there is an objective moral law and
that the law of love obliges us to obey
it. “If you love me, keep my
commandments.” If we forget this,
self-deception is the great danger. It’s
easy to kid yourself that you’re entering
upon a loving and meaningful
relationship when you aren’t: it’s much
less easy to kid yourself that you aren’t
committing adultery when you are. It’s
like that right across the board: we need
the regulations to keep us honest.
So with individualism. The trouble
with social and public morality is that
the big sins (war, racial prejudice, social
injustice, and the like) are always
somebody else’s fault, or the fault
maybe of the system, the establishment.
We must remedy them as far as we can;
but too much moral judgment about
faults other than our own is likely to
make us into shrill self-righteous
Pharisees.
But the greatest danger is a more
general one. If we soft-pedal the whole
idea of sin and the danger of hell, we
shall be in danger of abandoning our
faith and falling once again into the
tired old heresy of the Gnostics, which
the Church saw through many centuries
ago. We shall also be depriving Christ of
nearly all His ‘relevance,’ since sin was
the thing He came to remedy and hell
the thing He came to save us from.
We shall also be fooling ourselves:
mortal or killing sin has not ceased to be
a real and terrible danger to eadh one of
us. Even so, we should only think about
it in moderation, and chiefly in the one
place where we can see it most clearly
and certainly, right there in the
shaving-mirror.
Response
BY DONALD THORMAN
(NC News Service)
Mr. Derrick’s remarks - particularly
about the casuists (those who deal with
cases of conscience) - remind me of a
long practice of many Church officials.
Take the insights of modern
psychology, for example. Now that the
evidence is overwhelming about the
complexity of making mature, clear-cut,
unencumbered decisions, there are
plenty of apologists around to say, “As
the Church has always taught. . .”
The fact is, though, that the Church
has not always taught this - at least not
in practice. Sins were neatly and clearly
catalogued mainly for one purpose - to
make it easy for the confessor to make
decisions in the confessional.
From my personal experience of over
40 years of dealing with the sacrament
of Reconciliation as a consumer, my
overwhelming impression from
confession manuals, sermons, retreats
and parish missions is one of making it
simple and easy for penitents to classify,
enumerate and present their sins neatly
wrapped up to a confessor. (How else
could those long confessional lines on
Saturday afternoon and evening ever be
handled?)
The problem is that we human beings
are messy, always with loose ends and
nonsequiturs and unexplained impulses.
We don’t come in neat little packages
with only one layer of easily identified
emotion and feeling present.
Mr. Derrick comes dangerously close
to wrapping Christ up in a message of
sin and hell. That’s not the kind of
one-message Man who has won the
hearts and allegiance of the saints for
centuries. I simply don’t believe fear of
mortal sin is what has made Jesus
attractive to persons in every age.
CONFIRMATION AT OUR LADY OF LOURDES,
Port Wentworth -- On April 3rd, the Most Reverend
Raymond W. Lessard, Bishop of Savannah, made his
first official visit to administer the Sacrament of
Confirmation to this group of young people of Our Lady
of Lourdes Parish. Pictured with the Most Reverend
Raymond W. Lessard, Bishop of Savannah (center
back) and the group of young people are: left to right,
Sister Mairead, Sister Rose, Reverend Patrick O’Brien,
Pastor, Reverend Ralph E. Seikel, former pastor, Sister
Teresa and Sister Terence. (Pollack and Daly Photo)
Georgia Paint & Body Works
24 HOUR WRECKER SERVICE
RADIATOR SERVICE
28 YEARS EXPERIENCE
90-Day Guaranty on all work
722-5346 518 13th Street Augusta, Ga.
A new kind of club that gives you unlimited
checking, no charge for checks and 10 other
valuable services. All for just S3 a month!
SAVANNAH BANK
S. TRUST COMPANY
Columbus' Finest hi Fosbion
KIRALFY’S
DOWNTOWN AND COLUMBUS SQUARE
NITE AND DAY*
COUGH SYRUP
This is a special offer. Now, for a limited time only,
you can get a 3 fluid oz. bottle of NITE AND DAY
cough syrup for only 50C- This value is
substantially lower than the retail price planned for
this product. For the present time, this product may
be purchased only through the mail.
Send your 50d now.
Please send bottle of NITE AND DAY cough syrup to:
Name —
Address
City State Zip Code
Send coupon and 50< in coin to:
Vick Manufacturing Div.,
P.O. Box H Hatboro, Pa. 19040
j
DIOCESE OF SAVANNAH
OFFICIAL DIOCESAN PILGRIMAGE
UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF:
The Most Reverend
RAYMOND W. LESSARD
Bishop of Savannah
22 DAYS -
Departing Savannah
JUNE 10, 1974
$1298
.00
ALL INCLUSIVE
PILGRIMAGE INCLUDES VISITS TO:
SHANNON
BUNRATTY
KILLARNEY
BLARNEY
DUBLIN
LOURDES
ROME
ASSISI
FLORENCE
PRICE INCLUDES:
• ROUND TRIP AIR TRANSPORTATION • TWO MEALS DAILY • FIRST CLASS
HOTELS • TWIN BEDDED ROOMS WITH BATH • TRANSFERS AND SIGHTSEEING
BY PRIVATE MOTOR COACHES • ENGLISH SPEAKING GUIDES • ENTRANCE FEES
Reverend Monsignor DANIEL /. BOURKE, P.A. — Coordinator
IRISH AER LINGUS
BASED ON AIR FARES EFFECTIVE JANUARY 1, 1974
Faith tours
inc.
RESERVATION FORM
Reverend Monsignor Daniel J. Bourke, P.A.
Diocese of Savannah
225 Abercorn Street — P.O. Box 8789
Savannah, Georgia 31402
Dear Monsignor Bourke:
□ Please register me/us for the Pilgrimage departing on June 10, 1974, My/Our name(s) are:
PHONE:
NAME:
ADDRESS
City
State
Zip
NAME:
PHONE:
ADDRESS:
City State Zip
Enclosed please find check in the amount of $100.00 (Deposit $100.00 per person). Final payment due
April 29, 1974. If single accommodation is desired, enclose additional $85.00 with deposit.
Please make your check payable to: FAITH TOURS, INC.
□ Please send descriptive brochure.