Questions Answered – October 2023

The Reasons for Marian Devotion

Question: Would Fr. Mullady please explain the Church’s emphasis on Mary? Since the answer could be lengthy, recommending a few core texts would be very helpful. It seems that Marian devotion is a wonderful gratuity, but little else. I do not mean to denigrate the Mother of God and I’m fine with the Church’s teachings on her, but I do not understand why there needs to be a Marian element at all. Could we not simply focus on the triune God? It would seem that Mary herself would encourage us to look not to her but to Jesus. So . . . why do we look to her? Why a Blue Army, a Legion, various litanies and consecrations, etc.?

Answer: The fact of Marian devotion in connection with prayer is long attested to in Christian history. If one is fine with the Marian dogmas, one must assert that they express Mary as the ultimate Christian and the model of all prayer.

Her role in the Church is to be the mother of the Redeemer, and like all mothers, the center of her life is her Son. Far from distracting us in our prayers from the Trinity and especially the Redeemer, her purpose is to encourage us to union with him by prayers. As the Magnificat states in Luke: “All generations will call me blessed for he who is mighty has done great things for me.” (Luke 1:48)

The honor due the Blessed Virgin is not accidental but because she is the mother of the Redeemer. In Genesis 3:15 she is mentioned with her child as the great enemy of Satan and in Revelation 12 she is cited as the image of the final purpose, the glory of God in creation through grace. So she is present at the beginning and end of creation as the exaltation of man as the center of history and as the culmination of the movements of the heavens as the earth. She is all this as a human person, not a goddess. As the Church is constituted of believers, she is the first and most eminent of believers because she loved much.

Her firm believing supports ours. So as the Church needs a teacher, it also needs believers. When the angel announced to her that she was to be the mother of the Messiah, she first conceived in her mind by her loving assent in faith to his invitation and that in turn led her to conceive in body. As the spiritual assent was the cause of the birth of the physical word, she brought forth the human nature of the Word with the aid of human seed through her obedient fiat (let it be done to me.) He actually takes flesh from her when she professes her act of faith. The angel catechized her when she questioned how this must be, and when she greeted Elizabeth, she also became the first preacher of the faith since her Magnificat was addressed to Elizabeth. She suffers in nothing natural but all her sufferings are united to the suffering of the Son. When she is exalted in glory she represents the final consummation of the movements of creation, clothed in nature which is the glory of God in Christ.

As a result, when we venerate Mary, we are merely affirming what is already said in Scripture, that all generations would call her blessed, and so we are calling her Blessed too. Even Martin Luther maintained, seemingly against his theology of grace: “Mary is the noblest gem in Christianity after Christ. She is nobility, wisdom and holiness personified. We can never honor her enough.”

The Nature of Sin and Moral Responsibility

Question: What is a mortal sin? Is a sin done out of habit a mortal sin?

Answer: In 1973, a famous minister psychiatrist, Karl Menninger, wrote a book called Whatever Became of Sin?  In that book he lamented the replacement of a religion of moral responsibility with psychiatry. His lamentation is perhaps even more pressing in contemporary society and, astonishingly, even more pressing in the Church. For decades people have been persuaded that they need not confess a “laundry list” of sins, cataloguing even venial sins. Many religious educators deny there is a distinction between mortal and venial sin. The whole question of personal sin and responsibility has been in escrow since the Council.

Pope John Paul II characterizes the malaise well. First he quotes Pius XII, who said: “The sin of the [twentieth] century is the loss of a sense of sin.” Then he summarizes the contemporary consequences for the Church in a lengthy paragraph.

Even in the field of the thought and life of the Church, certain trends inevitably favor the decline of the sense of sin. For example, some are inclined to replace exaggerated attitudes of the past with other exaggerations: from seeing sin everywhere they pass to not recognizing it anywhere; from too much emphasis on the fear of eternal punishment, they pass to preaching a love of God that excludes any punishment deserved by sin; from severity in trying to correct erroneous consciences they pass to a kind of respect for conscience which excludes the duty of telling the truth. And should it not be added that the confusion caused in the consciences of many of the faithful by differences of opinions and teachings in theology, preaching, catechesis and spiritual direction on serious and delicate questions of Christian morals ends by diminishing the true sense of sin almost to the point of eliminating it altogether?

Nor can certain deficiencies in the practice of sacramental penance be overlooked. These include the tendency to obscure the ecclesial significance of sin and of conversion and to reduce them to merely personal matters; or vice versa, the tendency to nullify the personal value of good and evil and to consider only their community dimension.

To understand the difference between mortal and venial sin, it is first necessary to understand the difference between physical and moral evil. The difference between physical and moral evil is that, in physical evil, the natural disorder of a being causes a disorder in action. For example, a lame leg causes a lame walk. In moral evil, just the opposite is true. The lack of order in a voluntary action (it is contrary to reason) causes the lack of order in the soul in the ability arrive at its end by nature. A mortal sin of fornication causes the loss of grace and the virtue of temperance and perhaps justice.

In the case of physical evil, nature will not be denied. If one abuses nature by drinking to excess, the body rebels against this unnatural condition and one becomes ill or even dies. In the moral universe, the origin of punishment is the reaction of reason to the condition of disorder. A person who dies unrepentant in mortal sin without grace cannot realize his final destiny. Freedom and nature forever disagree and this is hell. Someone murders an innocent person and the civil order reacts with imprisonment or the death penalty. Someone commits masturbation and not only do they lose grace but they experience a lack of freedom in virtuous formation in the sexual urge.

The voluntary nature of the sin is its essence. The punishment for the sin is very real and reasonable but outside the intention of the sinner. Therefore, the kind or species of sin is determined by what the sinner is drawn to, not the punishment. Theft, for example, is “usurping another’s property against the reasonable will of the owner.” (CCC, 2408) The specific disorder in the character involves the will in justice and is about material goods, not about life, sexuality, or the good name. The amount of the theft determines the punishment. To steal a little is a venial sin and outside virtue, not contrary to it. To steal a lot is a mortal sin and completely contrary to the virtue of justice and precludes the existence of grace and charity.

The Church still requires that for the integrity of confession all remembered mortal sins must be confessed in species and number. “All mortal sins of which penitents after a diligent self-examination are conscious must be recounted by them in confession . . .” (CCC, 1456) Regarding sin, the exterior action is the most important classification and determines the fault of the action. It is the matter of the sin. The order which is interrupted is the form and determines the punishment for the sin. Sins then are classified according to the voluntary act involved and the object aimed at, rather than their disorderedness. The goal of an action is its primary source of goodness, the object of the will involve. So to classify sins by objects and by goals amounts to the same.

The important consequence is that a part of the punishment for sin is the reaction within the soul to perceived moral disorder. Sin is not like virtue. One must have all the virtues to have one as virtue causes interior integration. This integration when perceived produces a peace of character. The opposite is true of sin and vice. It is impossible for a person to have all the sins and vices because sin causes a disorder. Two vices of excess and defect are contrary to every virtue. They are also contrary to each other, so one cannot possess them all at the same time. Sin creates disorder in the character.

When someone acts contrary to reason, the person himself, if he is healthy, experiences an emotional uneasiness at this disorder and perhaps even sadness, coupled with hatred, fear, and perhaps anger. He feels incomplete. His desires have not been formed as they naturally should be according to reason. This feeling causes emotional guilt which corresponds to the intellectual perception of guilt.

Hence, it is more than an intellectual awareness of the wrong that has been done; it is an actual feeling of incompleteness. This is the way in which well-balanced, mature individuals spontaneously react and it forms the basis of the feeling of guilt which results from performing acts that are morally wrong. It is an experience of the psychological incompleteness of the human act.

The gravity of the sin is determined not by its punishment but by its object. A progression in gravity is seen in the order of the commandments. Sins against God are the worst (Commandments 1–3). Sins against the self are next in gravity, which includes those very connected to the self like honoring parents (Commandment 4). Sins contrary to the neighbor are next; there is a “lowerarchy” among them depending on how close the good involved is to the person himself (Commandment 5–8). Actions against life are worse than actions against family.

The Original Sin is the source of all sin but it is not an act so it is neither mortal nor venial. It is a sin of nature.

The whole human race is in Adam “as one body of one man.” By this “unity of the human race” all men are implicated in Adam’s sin, as all are implicated in Christ’s justice. . . . It [Original Sin] is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original sin is called “sin” only in an analogical sense; it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed” — a state and not an act. (CCC, 404)

Actual sin, on the other hand, is an act. Actual sin is found first found in a principle, namely the will, which is the first subject of sin, and is transmitted from it to the other powers of the soul, and even to the members of the body, according as they are moved by the will. This has traditionally been divided into mortal and venial sin or sin by which charity and grace are killed because the matter is so central to the journey of the human soul towards heaven, and sin in which grace and charity can still exist.

Since mortal sin is an act, the intellect, the will and the passions must all go together. It must be gravely contrary to our ultimate end or the love of God, willed and not be a result consent. The normal ways this is expressed it that it must involve full knowledge and complete consent. The latter requirement combines both the will and the passions.

As to the issue of habitual sin, of course, if the act is not grave matter then it would not constitute a grave sin. If the passions come before the judgement, they comprise freedom, so such an act would be less free; if after the will, then they aggravate freedom and such habitual sins would be more gravely sinful.

There has been some debate since Vatican II as to whether the Church still teaches the division of mortal and venial sin. John Paul II clarified that it does: “Here we have the core of the church’s traditional teaching, which was reiterated frequently and vigorously during the recent synod.” The synod in fact not only reaffirmed the teaching of the Council of Trent concerning the existence and nature of mortal and venial sins, but it also recalled that mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent. It must be added — as was likewise done at the synod — that some sins are intrinsically grave and mortal by reason of their matter. That is, there exist acts which, per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object. These acts, if carried out with sufficient awareness and freedom, are always gravely sinful.

Mortal sin is sin in the strict sense of the word. By it, the soul loses the ability to arrive at heaven because it is an action which is incompatible with the existence of grace in the soul. The requirements for a mortal sin affect all three powers of the soul which divide sins of weakness, ignorance and malice. It must be grave matter so it must objectively be about some serious human good which is not peripheral but central to man arriving at heaven. The will must freely embrace it and so the intellect must move the will without mitigation. The passions must also not be so involved that they compromise the freedom of the will and so deliberate consent is necessary. “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’.” (CCC, 1857 quoting John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 17, 12)