Are Catholics Held Accountable

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doesn’t the priest say I absolve you of these and ALL your sins, so I would say they are not help completely accountable. Also, what if they don’t believe it is a mortal sin vs venial? this would be a good question to ask a priest.
 
Well, of course we are. Remember St. Paul admonishment. We cannot make a fool of GOD, we are the fools in that case.

Peace!
 
If a penitent purposely omits a mortal sin, that sin is not absolved. But if you accidentally forget a mortal sin and remember it later, it needs to be confessed at your next confession. Please someone correct me if I am wrong.
 
Yes, we are. Furthermore, if someone is choosing not to confess something, that’s a conscious decision, and it invalidates the entire confession. So not only is the person not absolved of the particular sin he or she held back, but they are also not absolved of the sins they did bring up.

So he or she would have to go confess those sins again, in addition to the one held back, I order to make a valid confession and receive absolution.
 
MW1T68 said:
If a penitent purposely omits a mortal sin, that sin is not absolved. But if you accidentally forget a mortal sin and remember it later, it needs to be confessed at your next confession. Please someone correct me if I am wrong.
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I believe this is correct. This is why a given confession is supposed to refer back to your last good confession. If you intentionally withheld mortal sins that wasn’t a “good Confession”

But if you forgot something, it was a good confession. Confess it next time. If you aren’t sure if a sin was mortal or not, so what? Confess venial sins too.
 
QuillWriter said:
Yes, we are. Furthermore, if someone is choosing not to confess something, that’s a conscious decision, and it invalidates the entire confession. So not only is the person not absolved of the particular sin he or she held back, but they are also not absolved of the sins they did bring up.

So he or she would have to go confess those sins again, in addition to the one held back, I order to make a valid confession and receive absolution.
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And the one making the confession would have to tell the priest that he/she deliberately withheld a mortal sin from their last confession thus invalidating that confession.
 
MW1T68 said:
If a penitent purposely omits a mortal sin, that sin is not absolved. But if you accidentally forget a mortal sin and remember it later, it needs to be confessed at your next confession. Please someone correct me if I am wrong.
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If you accidentally forget a mortal sin it is still absolved, however you should still bring it up at your next confession in order to help you with that sin. Remember, sacraments exist for our sake not for God’s!
 
SantaFe said:
Also, what if they don’t believe it is a mortal sin vs venial?
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A mortal sin requires full knowledge of the gravity and sinfulness of the act (and carry on with it intentionally). If the person genuinely doesn’t believe they have committed a grave sin, they lack full knowledge, thus, not a mortal sin. This does NOT mean they’re entirely off the hook; we should all be striving to form our consciences to better understand these things, and so the person may later come to full knowledge. If the sin is repeated after that, they have committed mortal sin. ***

*** It’s better to stick to discussing “grave sins” rather than mortal sins. It’s nearly impossible for someone to determine someone else’s culpability (whether something fits the “mortal” category or not) outside of the individual him/herself and their confessor.
 
BlessedSacraments said:
For all Mortal Sins they choose to not confess?
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At Confession if a Catholic deliberately does not confess any mortal sins then the entire Confession is not valid. They do not receive absolution for the ones they did confess.
Now if they deliberately withhold mortal sins but the priest does not know and he gives absolution there is none given in the eyes of God. You might fool the priest but you cannot fool God.
 
Nah, I just lifted it from the Internet. It has circulated for years. It’s very typical of 1970s children’s missals and prayer books.
 
Anesti33 said:
Nah, I just lifted it from the Internet. It has circulated for years. It’s very typical of 1970s children’s missals and prayer books.
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It would have been uncommon in the 1970s, though still lingering in a few corners. The 1970s were an(over) reaction to this kind of excess.

This kind of cartoon in the long run helped later deter people from the sacrament. Thank God for St JP2 restoring the Divine Mercy devotion, of which the sacrament is a key component.
 
I think blaming it on a cartoon is reaching. What deterred people from the sacrament (personal experience talking) was poor catechesis, the Fundamental Option, Universalism and the denial of Hell, and a denial of the Real Presence.
 
Anesti33 said:
I think blaming it on a cartoon is reaching. What deterred people from the sacrament (personal experience talking) was poor catechesis, the Fundamental Option, Universalism and the denial of Hell, and a denial of the Real Presence.
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I know, I wasn’t referring to the cartoon itself but to the mindset of the cartoon , kind of legalistic and mechanical attitude that sometimes prevailed in some Catholic places prior to the 1960s.

I never saw that cartoon till this thread. But I saw hints of that mentality. I agree with you on the water down catechesis of 1970s, for instance. But you can’t understand why they got away with some really bad things post V2 unless you understand some of kinda bad, different kind of moderate abuses pre V2.

For a few decades people painted the church of the 1950s as a nightmare. Now there’s a new generation that paints the 1950s as heaven, till V2 spoiled things.
Neither view is accurate.
 
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