Whalker:
(1) What jumped out at me in your OP was the passive voice:
it happened to me to use pornography
(2) Second thing that jumped out at me was your using a “reason” for your sin:
my children are small and for this reason the opportunity of being with my wife are very limited.
even though you also say in your OP:
I don’t want to find justification for what I did
At this point, being somewhat shaken, you may not remember how you introduced your sin in the confessional, but it’s always critical to use the active voice (accusing oneself for actual choices, not accusing sources of temptation or prompts such as actions done to us by others, or circumstances which “cause” us to commit evil.). It’s different if one is acknowledging one’s own conscious evil response to an evil committed, such as “Because so-and-so said unkind things about me, I justified to myself saying unkind things about her.” Then we are admitting our culpability in creating internal excuses at the time we sinned, and that in itself becomes part of our confession.
(1) Most likely the priest was using Tough Love, knowing from his experience (priests say that pornography is currently the most frequently confessed sin, a fact which I find depressing, by the way) that the habit is hard to break without intervention and radical measures.
(2) A habit like pornography becomes chronic mortal sin. If someone is living a confirmed lifestyle of unbroken mortal sin, they are in fact putting themselves in danger of separation from God. Death can come unexpectedly – a car accident, an act of terror, being an innocent victim of a crime – the wrong place at the wrong time. I.m.o., he was being pastoral – being concerned that no time be lost putting off radical change in your life. (That was probably the reason for his distinguishing between the mercy of now and the eventual justice of your Particular Judgment at death.) You haven’t been doing this for years and years (which many men have!), so this is the time to stop it before it begins truly controlling you because of your failure to make changes.
(3) Pornography is becoming an epidemic relative to marriage and family life. It is destroying many marriages, including many Catholic marriages. The sooner it is addressed in a marriage, the more likely it is that the marriage will be rescued and reinvigorated, and the opposite is also true.
I’ll PM you later.
:thumbsup:
:thumbsup:Thats a beautiful thing. Its a hard fight I know, I go to confession often , same fight.
