Posted on 03/10/2008 10:21:49 AM PDT by Froufrou
The list came as the Pope deplored the “decreasing sense of sin” in today’s “secularized world” and the falling numbers of Roman Catholics going to confession.
The Catholic Church divides sins into venial, or less serious, sins and mortal sins, which threaten the soul with eternal damnation unless absolved before death through confession and penitence.
It holds mortal sins to be “grave violations of the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes,” including murder, contraception, abortion, perjury, adultery and lust.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell.”
Although there is no definitive list of mortal sins, many believers accept the broad seven deadly sins or capital vices laid down in the 6th century by Pope Gregory the Great and popularized in the Middle Ages by Dante in "The Inferno": lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride.
Christians are exhorted instead to adhere to the seven holy virtues: chastity, abstinence, temperance, diligence, patience, kindness and humility.
Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, said after a week-long Lenten seminar for priests that surveys showed 60 percent of Catholics in Italy no longer went to confession.
He said that priests must take account of “new sins which have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.” Whereas sin in the past was thought of as being an individual matter, it now has “social resonance.”
“You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Steppenwolf?
It’s the men who are doing the thrusting - for all their false bravado women rarely sit on top.
Of course, you bring up a good idea. If a Catholic couple no longer wants to have children, the wife can perform fellatio several times a week for the rest of their lives - sounds good to me and to all red blooded men who are not metrosexual gay wannabees!
Of course, once menopause is over you can thrust to your heart’s content - it’s an absolute lie that the Catholic Church discourages sex except for procreation - people who mistakenly believe that need to read a book once in a while.
LOL!
Yours truly,
The Woim
Incorrect. Fortunately we don't have to rely on people like you to explain Church teaching.
2370 Periodic continence, that is, the methods of birth regulation based on self-observation and the use of infertile periods, is in conformity with the objective criteria of morality.157 These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage tenderness between them, and favor the education of an authentic freedom. In contrast, "every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible" is intrinsically evil:158
Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality.... the difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle . . . involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality.159
157 HV 16.
158 HV 14.
159 FC 32.
Rightwhale - did you stupidly forget that you mentioned “a century now” in your post?
Try to be bright, if you fail you’ll at least be less dim.
Yours truly,
The Woim
Correct. Written by Hoyt Axton, however.
Hey, Bob, thanks so much for the flat screen TV! I'm gonna screw it to some 2x4s and it'll make an excellent workbench!"
More like, "Thanks for the flat screen TV, I'm going to set it unopened in the attic so that no one can ever touch it."
God intends for us to rejoice in his gifts.
No, it’s not right to insult RightWhale.
It’s probably a misunderstanding.
Yours truly,
The Woim
Cloning was being done a century ago. It isn’t news. It should not be ingored, that would be s . . . not smart.
No, cloning wasn’t being done a century ago.
Or, if I’m wrong, Dolly wasn’t the first cloned animal.
Please answer that question first. 1998 was in the last century - it wasn’t a century ago.
Mating is a different subject than cloning.
Yours truly,
The Woim
Since no form of contraception is 100% effective in preventing pregnancy, can their use really be considered "closed to the possibility of life"?
It seems like they simply "reduce the possibility" of life. I guess this could be seen as immoral as well, but then wouldn't that make NFP (which also reduces the possibility of life) immoral too? Or is it all a matter of degree?
A cruder way of stating it is this: whatever you do, just make sure you are at the line of scrimmage when the ball is snapped.
Actually, I thought this was a rather clever way of expressing what I was trying to get at :) Do you mind if I use this the next time I am discussing the topic with my religious friends?
Holocaust victims, especially children, were subjected to the "scientific" experiments of Nazi Mengele. Because Nazism and the Holocaust are played out so often as examples, the human conscience grows tired of this continuous recollection. But it happened, and it still happens. Although it happens under a microscope rather than behind closed walls in remote Eastern European villages, the horror still continues.
I think our friends who have 15 kids would be very surprised to hear that their gifts are "lying unopened in the attic". :)
I agree, God intends us to rejoice in his gifts. So please tell me how birth control constutes "rejoicing" in sex. Is it rejoicing to take artificial estrogen to mess up a woman's natural fertility? Is it rejoicing to put a latex barrier between a husband and wife? Is it rejoicing to snip and tie back your own plumbing?
I guess it would fall under “lust”...having sex for pleasure rather than procreation. I see the point and happily concede
http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a8.htm
II. THE DEFINITION OF SIN
III. THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF SINS
IV. THE GRAVITY OF SIN: MORTAL AND VENIAL SIN
1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: “Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.”
“(5) causing poverty”
That is about as vague a statement as I have ever heard. My sister could run up $45,000 worth of credit card bills, or my brother blow $45,000 at the casino, and then the credit card company and the casino are at fault for “causing poverty”? Or am I “causing poverty” because I live in a nice house and hire a maid — because by having enough money to do both, I am somehow “causing poverty” to the woman down the block who has not worked hard and thus has neither?
Is “causing poverty” raising my taxes so high that their total outstrips what I pay for food, clothing, shelter and transportation combined? What if the tax-raiser then takes my money and hands it out to The Poor?
This is way too vague to be a sin. I would define it more as a whine.
The word ‘clone’ has been around a long time. That’s because cloning has been around a long time. Possibly you are referring to the minor application of animal cloning.
Mrs_Victor had to have a hysterectomy as a result of complications of the birth of our third child. Would God have me never again touch my wife because we cannot procreate?
Rejoicing is rejoicing. The details of how are an issue between husband, wife, and God.
5 and 6 of the big 10:
5- Thou shalt not kill.- covers alot of territory up to and including killing someone else’s spirt with gossip and malice.
6- Thou shalt not commit adultery.- covers many many sexual practices. Leviticus Chapter 18 lists many. Furthermore, when one reduces the sex act to just an act for their pleasure, they reduce their partner to, well, essentially a piece of meat. The lowest common denominator. See#5 and killing spirit.
(ps. really hoping the 10th graders get this)
If put to a vote, I'll bet that most people prefer to organically procreate with no artificial interferences of any kind.
Re-focusing upon what Nature provides for our procreation means that we must elevate and safeguard our delicate reproductive selves from whatever might pollute this important and very beautiful act.
Some might think it god-like to fly, swim beneath the seas, know all things, or move about at great speeds. But I tell you, this is merely angelic. No, what is like God is to create and to participate in what He has made and declared “good”. From thence, we learn the additional Grace of Our Good God and that's to forgive in the same manner as He forgives us.
Sin pollutes what He's given us, and no amount of twisted frankenstein science will overcome the greatness of what is already provided by Nature's Author.
I prefer Organic Procreation.
Hmm. You make an interesting moral point. Let's push this to the absurd. If I wanted to kill you, the means I might use are not 100% effective. You could still live if I stabbed you or shot you or poisoned you. Does that lessen the moral culpability on my behalf? No. And why not? Because no matter what eventually transpired, my *intent* was to kill you.
So I'd say intent is everything here. Suppose a guy wore tight underwear not realizing that was making him (in his case) 100% infertile. That wouldn't be a sin. But the person who used a condom at 50% effectiveness could be more in sin territory because he was actively trying to thwart conception and he knew it.
NFP is not immoral because all a couple is doing is not having sex during fertile periods. Nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with having sex and THEN blocking conception. It's trying to eat your cake and have it too.
However, and just to complicate matters, I and most other traditional Catholics would seriously question the morality of someone who was slavishly devoted to NFP to avoid pregnancy *and had no good reason to.* Just because it's allowed doesn't mean you should use it all the time.
Actually, I thought this was a rather clever way of expressing what I was trying to get at :) Do you mind if I use this the next time I am discussing the topic with my religious friends?
I probably picked it up from someone else...(I think G. Gordon Liddy has said similar things). So feel free!
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