How did the mortal sin - venial sin dichotomy come about?

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joecaro said:
I earlier gave you the short list of Mortal Sins against God. The following list, you will find, contain Grave Sins that are also considered Mortal Sins. You will of course, find the 10 Commandments among them:

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I’m not clear if you are replying to my question to you above, but this is an excellent examination of conscience. If I were a priest, I would gladly hand this out to my congregation at Mass one Sunday and say “take a few minutes to go over this — our organist will play some instrumental music while you’re reading — and if you have any of these things on your soul, unconfessed and unrepented, stay away from communion, we’ll be hearing confessions immediately after Mass, the priests will stay until the last confession is heard”. (And then take it back home to your loved ones who didn’t think it was necessary to come to Mass this Sunday.) And as you point out, the Ten Commandments are to be found among them.

However, the very verbiage of many of these things indicates that not all such offenses against them are serious (what I assume is another way of saying “mortal” here) — “serious slander”, “firm hatred of God”, “purposeful curse”, and so on. Calling down the damnation of God upon the hammer that just accidentally hit one’s finger (as though hammers could go to hell), snapping at that person who just worked your one last good nerve, stealing a pack of gum from Walmart, passing on a juicy tidbit about a minor failing of your neighbor — all of these things, while far from perfect, are just not “big enough” to rupture your relationship with Almighty God. (Shoplifting the pack of gum could cause a cascade of bad consequences, because our society takes pilfering a trinket from a multi-billion-dollar retail more seriously than it does gossip or crude use of God’s Name. But the mortal sin there, if any, would be in the ruination of your family’s good name in the community, putting your family through the shame of having your mugshot posted online, subjecting your children to the humiliation of being bullied at school over their father’s misdeed, and so on, not in the theft itself.)

Just out of curiosity, why did you specify the use of artificial birth control which causes spontaneous abortion? What about ABC that is not abortifacient?
 
Believe me, I didn’t ‘specify’ artificial birth control as you stated. Maybe you should ask someone knowledgeable, like a Priest. The ‘grievous’ sins outlined that often lead to mortal sin are quite scary, I agree. What makes it worse, there are more, many more! Not to mention the amount of venial sins! No wonder the Bible refers to all of us as sinners. I believe the Jewish faith have extrapolated over 450 serious sins from the same 10 Commandments. They even accused Jesus of committing the sin of labor on the Sabbath when he cured a man with a crippled hand! I heard of another current story about a person riding a bicycle on the Sabbath, that rode it on soft earth. He too was accused of labor on the Sabbath because of the tire tracks left on the ground were considered furrows for planting.
 
CRM_Brother said:
Pope Benedict XVI, while he was still the Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith stated wrote an article stating
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Would you happen to remember the name of this article or where it can be found? I’m very intrigued.
 
Sorry, I don’t. It was over a decade ago in college.
 
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Most Christians somehow feel that Purgatory is ‘punishment’ for our earthly sins - it is not. God does not ‘punish’ us (like Catholic Nuns hitting our hand with a ruler) it is US who must have snowy white souls to be with God - who is Heaven itself.
There are many so-called Christians that honestly believe because they were born again with Jesus, they can sin all they want because they are guaranteed a place in Heaven!! Imagine such silliness? In any case, with sin on our soul, we cannot gain heaven until it is all removed. Original sin kept all of mankind out of Heaven until Jesus made His life sacrifice to God as the Son of Man.
 
Venial vs mortal sin

1 John 5, 16-17

“If any one sees his brother committing what is not a mortal sin, he will ask, and God will give him life for those whose sin is not mortal. There is sin which is mortal; I do not say that one is to pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal.”
 
Judaism does have several different types of sin, more even than Catholicism. At the same time, however, although some Jews become scrupulous over committing sins, the major focus in Judaism is learning to do the right thing, NOT worrying so much about doing the wrong thing. This kind of learning is similar to yet somewhat different from the concept of sins of omission. It emphasizes acts of goodness, mercy, compassion more than dwelling on acts of evil, hatred, and injustice. Don’t get me wrong. There is plenty of atonement for sins of commission in Judaism, but mainly because sin causes us to err, to miss the mark, to reject what is our G-d-given potential nature whose actuality enables us to lead a meaningful life.

One question: in your mention of mortal sins leading to hell, you do assume the lack of confession for these sins?
 
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Actually, the sacrament of reconciliation (confession) is a gift from God who realizes how morally fragile we all are. A “lack of confession” as you state, cannot be a sin because we can avail or ignore as many sacraments as we wish . . . which by doing so may lead us into a sinful life without us realizing it. What is accomplished if we become spiritual Rebels Without a Cause?
You say that “sin causes us to err” I feel that making repeated wrong decisions in life -causes us to sin. Without some meaningful spiritual leadership, we can easily fall prey to sin -with the best intentions.
 
joecaro said:
Believe me, I didn’t ‘specify’ artificial birth control as you stated. Maybe you should ask someone knowledgeable, like a Priest.
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Artificial birth control — the directly intended prevention of pregnancy through unnatural means (medicines, barriers, acts which frustrate the natural end) — is always a mortal sin if committed with sufficient reflection and full consent of the will. It is a sin of the flesh, and all complete, deliberate sins of the flesh are mortal sins, again, subject to the other two conditions cited above. Paul VI allowed for couples who, as he put it, are in situations where “sin still exercises its hold over them”, and appealed to them to make use of the sacrament of penance (Humanae vitae 25).

This applies to all ABC, whether abortifacient or not. Abortifacient ABC, of course, is much, much worse.
 
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