Hello. I recently confessed my sins which included watching pornography and masturbation. Recently, i gave into the temptation again broke down, and watched porn. I began to masturbate, but stopped before I could ejaculate. I’m planning on confessing this as soon as I can to my priest, as guilty of watching pornography and masterbating. My question is, are both of these mortal sins? I know they could keep me from heaven. However, I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. I also tried to resist, but failed. And, like I said before, stopped myself before ejaculating.
I’d also like to add this happened at night. The temptation came at first, and I managed to resist. It later returned and I tried once again but couldn’t resist any more. I was overcome by a surge of temptation and passion.
I’m 18, and have been doing it since I was around 13. I’ve been trying to quit for a while now.
Again, i stopped the act before ejaculating. Also, I feel absolutely terrible. I feel so guilty, and it’s eating away at me…the worst part is that the next available confessions in my city are on Friday morning, and it’s barely Wednesday. I honestly feel like sleeping for two days straight until I can confess. So again, the question is, given all those details, did I still commit two mortal sins?
hey how are ya!
Its tough thing to overcome physical pleasure especially at 18. But we have to turn and look at what the church teachs. Abstinance till marriage. Imagine the pleasure you get now but doing it when married!
While both masturbation and pornography are considered mortal sins. No distinction is made between masturbating until ejaculation or not.
However, leniency may be granted given that you stopped as soon as you realized what you were doing, and the fact that the Catechism teaches that the gravity of the sin may be diminished by the habitual nature of the act (this is not license to continue to sin, however).
In short, whether or not you are in a state of mortal sin is between you, your conscience, and your confessor. I had this issue as a teenager as well, and I can tell you that frequent confession (preferably with the same confessor), prayer, and an active, healthy social life are the best ways to combat these sins.
You need to resist the choice and decision to seek to watch porn.
If you play with fire you’re asking to burn your fingers.
To form your conscience you may find it helpful to read from the Catechism.
The paragraph that I bolded may help to answer your question.
May God bless you and guide you to create new habits that will overcome your old habits.
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, regarding the sixth commandment.
"Offenses against chastity
2351 Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.
2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. "Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action."138 “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.” For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved."139
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 lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability.
2354 Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials."
Porn is addictive. I wonder how priests avoid it.
Brother I sympathize with you. Both masturbation and porn can become very addictive habits. Yes, they are both wrong and they are both sinful. First you ask God for forgiveness and you must also forgive yourself.
You will need more practical advice than just " Pray and don’t do it again!"
Don’t do too much too fast. Try to slowly wean yourself off of both habits. Porn is by far the most destructive and dangerous habit so I advise you kick that one to the curb as soon as possible. Try to resist the urge to watch it as much a s possible. I’ve seen the damage it can do. If you feel like you are going to fail and watch porn then find somewhere private and masturbate. It will help relieve some sexual tension. It is not ideal but it is the lesser of two evils.
You also need to try to wean yourself off of masturbation. If you masturbate an average of 14 times a week then starting from today cut that down to 7 times a week or half the actual number. Do that for a month and then cut it down to half again. Try to get it down to once a weeks, then once every 2 weeks, then once even month, then once ever 2 months etc.
Practice little acts of self control during your day. Don’t think mama’s food has enough salt? Resist urge to put salt in it. Feeling for a soda? Go drink some water instead. Your favorite tv show is on? Skip it just for this week and watch it as a rerun next week. Do one or two little acts of self-control everyday to help build your level of self control. Trust me, it works wonders 
BE PATIENT WITH YOURSELF! You know what I love so much about the Catholic Church? That Saints we have look up; the Saints that are our heroes to are not perfect beings without flaws. I bet I can find more than a few Saints who had personal struggles with sexual impurities like masturbation. I’d bet that even the holiest of them gave into the temptation of touching themselves, even after they have attained some level of holiness, at times. You are a human being and you are imperfect. Of course this should not be an excuse to indulge in such activities but always remember that no matter how many times you fall you can run to God. He is a God of 2nd and 3rd and 4th and 5th and 4000th chances.
Try to see your struggle as a cross. Jesus endured the worse for you on a cross out of love. How beautiful is it that you have the chance now to share in his suffering and struggle. Let your struggles with porn and masturbation be your cross. Let it by your way of saying, “Jesus you did a lot for me and I am grateful. I wanna show it by resisting the urge to masturbate and watch porn. I may fail at times but I will try my best not to again.”
God bless you and best of luck to you brother 
sorry for the typos
Don’t get wrapped around the axel about the fine points. As was said before, be patient with yourself. Make up your mind that you won’t view Pornography or masturbate. Keep working at it. If you fall, go to confession as soon as possible. Many men these days fight with this problem. With the help of God, it can be defeated. It might also help to check one of the help sites like pornnomore or the others. Also Jason and Cristialina Evert have great resources to help get free of this. Their site is chastity.com/node/442
Unfortunately it is threads like these that lead to a previous ban. It was also the tremendous burden of continuous guilt the lead me away from the church. Glance at a pretty girl twice and I have committed lust, hitting the snooze button made me a sloth, choosing a donut with sprinkles made me a glutton, etc.
Enough was enough. No god/gods would create a world with so many ‘do nots’ that simply go against human nature. I rejected my faith years ago and never looked back. I did not become an immoral person but a person that now lives a life without irrational fears.
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I don’t think the appreciation of God’s revelation to humanity is expressed nearly so much in Catholicism as in Judaism.
In Judaism, there is even an explicit day of the calendar which is a feast about the giving of the covenant law. The Jews are elated that God has chosen to reveal his law so that they can obey it. Read Psalm 119, for example.
Read Psalm 1, The righteous man meditates on the law of God night and day and does not walk in the way of sinners or scoffers (atheists).
Read right at the beginning of the Bible, around Genesis 4:6, after Cain kills Abel, and God is making a speech to Cain about how sin lurks around us, and then God says “master it.”
This is the expression in scripture of using our free will to overcome sin. And, so, we have to take a step back from all sin and temptations to sin, and learn to use our free will to master our inclinations.
In the case of pornography and masturbation, we all have to learn to recognize the temptations (in the first place) and then to distance ourselves from them. The book of Sirach advises us to flee from sin as from a snake. Someplace else, I think it says to treat sin as poison, because it poisons our relationship with God.
In the positive expression of free will, in Deuteronomy 6:4ff, God commands us to pray “Hear O Israel, the LORD is our God, he is the one and only. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
with all your heart: be in constant prayer with God
with all your soul: love the LORD even unto the shedding of your blood, to death
with all your strength: love God with all our determination and resources, including money
We are all challenged with this command.
The Hebrew word that is translated “command” is also translated “blessing.” When we obey a command of God it is a blessing. Why? It is a blessing because we know that we are doing God’s will, and we should be blessed by knowing that.
When you avoid pornography and masturbation, you are obeying God’s will.
When we sin (in any way) we are causing God to suffer, we are offending him. consider what Jesus underwent for our sins.
On the negative side of the issue, the book of Sirach also reminds us that we will be repaid for each and every of our sins. The pornographer will be punished for every copy of immoral photos that is published.
AsSt. Paul says, we must be sober and watchful. We must run the race (against sin). We are in spiritual battle for our souls and eternal destiny.
It matters. This is not based on irrational fears.
It’s best to confess these sins as soon as possible. Now, if the situation went you started watching pornography and masturbating, but as soon as you realized they were sins you stopped, neither of these were sins at all. It takes three things for something to be a Mortal sin, and knowledge of what you are doing is one of them. If you stopped when you realized what you were doing, it was not a Mortal sin. However, if you did continue on even when you realized what you were doing, even if you did not ejaculate, it still counts as masturbation. Masturbation is defined as the self-stimulation of the genitals in the Catechism. Whether you ejaculate or not does not matter. Even if you do it for a split second it still counts. If you are unsure if this is what happened or not, go to confession and explain the situation. Don’t be too explanatory or detailed, but just tell the Priest you did these things a few days ago and that you were unsure if you stopped right when you realized what you were doing was mortally sinful. If you do recall realizing it but going on for a while anyway but then stopping over guilt, it doesn’t matter. Mortal sin is mortal sin, and these both constitute as both. As others have noted, addiction lessens culpability, but when I was going through these problems I confessed them anyway to make sure, and it helped me to stop immensely.
I’ve probably been watching too much of the baseball championship playoff series. There are so many instances where a batter takes a half-swing at the ball and then pulls back. There’s often an appeal to a base umpire whether he swung at the ball.
I don’t think you need an instant replay camera to decide if and when somebody committed a sin e.g. a “split second” in the above comment. I think temptations take moments to overcome. Our concupiscence does not operate on such a split second basis. Jesus was really tempted by Satan in the desert. Jesus did not sin in any sense, ever, certainly not just by the fact that he was tempted. A temptation is not a sin, although it is very close to the act of sin itself.
I sit up front in church. I don’t want to have a lot of people ahead of me to distract me and to cause various temptations during Mass. A Jewish commentary says a man should never walk behind a woman, because of the temptation to sin in thought. In conservative Jewish synagogues, women sit in a separate area, so that the men can concentrate on prayer – alone.
Even when I sit in one of the first pews in church, I usually have my eyes closed,for the above-mentioned reasons.
I find that it’s hard to rid myself of temptations to sin by thought. A thought may persist in my mind, even though I don’t want it and pray for relief of the temptation. It takes time for me to fully switch my thoughts to what is good.
Distractions during prayer, for example, convince me that the mind is capable of several thoughts at the same time. I try to focus on the wholesome thoughts to eliminate the undesired thoughts.
In the context of this thread, I think that the less pornography one is exposed to, the smaller the number of mental distractions one might have. I have vivid images of pornography I viewed a long time ago. Once they’re in my head, I’m not very good at eliminating them. They torment me, even though I reject them wilfully. The saints were tortured by their thoughts, sometimes. I mournfully recall sins of my past life, which includes a recollection of the temptation that I had at the time.
Sensuality in religious art is a related, but independent subject.
You stated “When we sin (in any way) we are causing God to suffer, we are offending him. consider what Jesus underwent for our sins.”
With all due respect Jesus was murdered, not unlike thousands before him and thousands after him. Hardly a unique situation…just saying…
Next time you find yourself tempted to lOPK at pornography, think about the people involved, not as objects, but as PEOPLE. What has to happen to a girl to make her think that her only option is to have sex with strangers on camera for money? Can you even imagine? She was probably abused, mentally and emotionally for sure, but possibly also sexually and physically as well. Most of these girls are also drug addicts, because they have to be high to even be able to cope with the shame of what they do. This is somebody’s daughter. This is a soul that Jesus died for, suffered for, and when people watch pornography, they are contributing to the misery, humiliation, exploitation, prostitution, abuse and possible damnation of the poor souls involved. Most women in porn make about $5000 for a movie in which they have sex with multiple people in the most degrading ways possible, about enough to buy a 10 year old car. Not very sexy, is it?
I say this of course not to make you feel guilty about your past. What’s done is done and God will of coirse forgive you, no matter how many times you fall I say this to make you think before you do it again, because maybe if you put it into this context next time, it will. E far less appealing to you. These are REAL people, whose lives are so beyond messed up, that this is what they do for a living.
Except that Jesus was completely innocent, not only of the crime for which he was killed, but COMPLETELY innocent of ANY wrongdoing EVER. Pretty unique if you ask me. Of course, being an atheist, you don’t believe that.
Well, yours is a point of view, but not a popular one, generally, on this website.
The best explanation of who Jesus was and what he was and what he did is in Benedict XVI’s first volume of Jesus of Nazareth. To plan the atheist, minimalist game you have to say “hardly a unique situation” many times. It’s hard to do in Benedict’s book.
SHORE, even Jesus was crucified between two “other” criminals, not a penetrating observation, either. And how many of those “before” and “after” Jesus were reported to have risen from the dead? (just a thought)
I never said temptation was sinful. I said if you realized what you were doing was sinful but continued on, even for a little bit, that was a sin. There is a difference between being tempted to masturbate and actually masturbating all the while knowing what you are doing.
And I definitely know what you mean by remembering past images of pornography. There are videos I saw two years ago that I still vividly remember. According to Jason Evert this is because the brain is programmed to lock images of naked women in your mind. He said it had something to do with God wanting us to remember our wives.
While this is a matter best discussed with one’s confessor, I have a few thoughts…
Any time someone who is struggling with masturbation stops before completing the act, they should be pleased to have fought off the temptation. Mark it in the win column, not the loss column.
Is it mortal sin? Let’s consider that mortal sin needs to have full consent. Or another way it is put is sufficient reflection. The fact that one stops himself (or herself) before completing the act shows, or at least strongly implies, that they did not fully consent. In fact, their reflection on what they were doing caused them to stop.
Is there some sin? Sure, there may be some venial sin when you start to give in the the temptations. Be sorry for your weakness.
Disclaimer: these are abstract thoughts and of course these matter should be discussed with one’s confessor.
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Brothers/sisters,
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If the Lord designed you with these feelings inherent, maybe they aren’t sins at all. Perhaps it is a mechanism for avoiding premarital activities… Best not to feel ashamed about yourself - as you are a reflection of Him.