How long do Catholics normally go without committing mortal sin?

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I find mortal sins are pretty easy to commit in the moment.

Lust is pretty self explanatory.

Things like gossip, for instance. We know it is wrong, but sometimes we do it anyway. Desiring harm unto someone for hurting you/envy at someone’s blessings…etc.

I tend to make excuses for myself by saying ‘well, I didn’t know that it’s definitely a mortal sin at that second/I wasn’t thinking’…but if I’m going to be honest, I do know it was wrong and I still choose to do it anyway. And I do feel I would probably end up in hell if it weren’t for confession. Jesus did say that the road to heaven is pretty narrow, which is alarming but totally understandable if you look around.
 
Lea101 said:
if I’m going to be honest, I do know it was wrong and I still choose to do it anyway
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Knowing something is wrong and choosing to do it anyway dies not make it a mortal sin if the sin is not grave matter.
If your gossip was going to ruin someone’s reputation, get them fired, break up their marriage etc then that’s grave.
If it’s just that you made a snark remark about someone’s hairdo, then it’s a sin, but not grave.
 
  1. You cannot accidentally sin mortally.
  2. Mortal sin takes effort, including a deliberate turning from God
  3. You must have the full - 100% - consent of your will.
  4. Habitual sin moderates (but does not eliminate) one’s culpability.
  5. Go and speak with Father at your next confession.
  6. Points to ponder: are you scrupulous? Do you have constant or occasional doubts about God’s forgiveness?
If so, it is possible that you have some form or degree of anxiety. 1 in 5 today suffer from some form of anxiety - 64 million in the US alone. Know this: anxiety runs exactly counter to God’s desire that we live in peace - thus we know its source.

The Lord greatly desires that we live in peace. If you are not consciously, rebelliously, obstinately deciding to commit what you know to be a mortal sin, you should be at peace.

“IF” you believe that you have some anxiety, please speak with Father and your doctor.
 
The Holy Spirit, acting through my conscience, tells me when I’ve committed a serious sin. I go to confession ASAP. This sacrament keeps me going.
 
A Catholic should go their entire life without committing mortal sin.

Non-Catholics have their peace disturbed because of their actions all the time. It makes no difference if you’re Catholic or not as long as you are a human being in a fallen world. if you live in this world then there will be many things that can take your peace away.

The sacrament of Confession provides a physical means of receiving absolution that for a non-Catholic remains forever an abstraction. A person might make their peace with God but they might always doubt their own sincerity.
 
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I have not committed a mortal sin for many years. As many have said here, for believing Catholics who strive daily to love and serve God, it is not that easy to commit one. You don’t merely “fall” into a mortal sin; such a sin is choosing to disobey God and deliberately committing an act you know is serious evil. Although I did commit mortal sins when younger and stupid and distanced from God, and have confessed and been absolved from them, some of them I am sure were done more in ignorance than not. At this point in my walk with God I would not commit a mortal sin against Him as I’ve learned to love Him and trust His way is BEST for me. On the other hand I do commit a lot of venial sins which are certainly humiliating and equally stupid in their repetition. It is a life-long process of trying to overcome these.
 
It’s not easy to commit a mortal sin it’s not something one can do by accident.
 
That is not true, I think that mortal sins are easy to commit though I agree that we cannot do them by accident, I mean one can commit certain sins easier than others, murdering is hard if not impossible for the vast majority of people to consider but even that sin is difficult for a very small minority to avoid. Lust is a easy sin to commit for instance and if you look at my scenario of a priest who has sex with a parishioner and dies immediately afterwards and goes to Hell, is it not hard to feel sorry for the priest? He found it hard to avoid lust and had sex occasionally, you may think it is rare but as we see through church history there are many priests who have had sex and committed other sexual sins yet these priests mainly have also sought forgiveness and have been willing to repent. God should have mercy no matter how big the sin, this means that only those who are non repentant should go to Hell.
 
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The peace we feel when in a state of grace is not disturbed by the prospect of committing mortal sin and thus falling out of a state of grace… unless we begin to consider mortal sin, at which point our conscience will start bothering us.

Then we will have to deal with a condition of tension in which the temptation appeals to us and the conscience is hurting us–total lack of peace.

And if we fall into the sin, oh, then we are beset by awful and despairing thoughts, while our conscience tries to draw us back to confeession.

All this information is from discernment of spirits which St Ignatius first outlined.
 
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SergiusPaulus said:
I cited Romans 3:10-18. Paul literally says that all of us are guilty of turning from God. I don’t know how that could possibly be an interpretation.
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You are taking this passage out of context to Paul’s entire meaning, which he explains further in chapter 3.

28 For we consider that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law.
[3:27–31] People cannot boast of their own holiness, since it is God’s free gift (Rom 3:27), both to the Jew who practices circumcision out of faith and to the Gentile who accepts faith without the Old Testament religious culture symbolized by circumcision (Rom 3:29–30).

Paul is admonishing the Jews who demand that Gentiles be circumcised in order to fulfill the Old Testament Law. He exonerates the Gentiles saying that when they . . .14 who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law.15 They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts.

These verses are from Romans 2, and precede the third chapter from which you quoted and further explains his gospel that Gentiles do not need circumcision, but are justified by faith, not circumcision.

To answer your question about how long a person may go without committing mortal sin, I have been free of this for so many years that it would shock you if I told the number of them. When a person loves Jesus with their whole being, it is abhorrent to even consider committing a mortal sin.
 
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I just wanted to point out that there are variant translations to this verse (as see, e.g., the NAB footnotes), which instead read “let us have peace.” In any event, the sense is the same. We are given that peace and therefore must treasure it and be careful to preserve it, as a continued reading of Romans shows.

St. John Chrysostom, who would have been working off an early Greek manuscript, says the following on this passage:
What does Let us have peace mean? Some say, Let us not be at variance, through a peevish obstinacy for bringing in the Law. But to me he seems to be speaking now of our conversation. For after having said much on the subject of faith, he had set it before righteousness which is by works, to prevent any one from supposing what he said was a ground for listlessness, he says, let us have peace, that is, let us sin no more, nor go back to our former estate. For this is making war with God. And how is it possible, says one, to sin no more? How was the former thing possible? For if when liable for so many sins we were freed from all by Christ, much more shall we be able through Him to abide in the estate wherein we are. For it is not the same thing to receive peace when there had been none, and to keep it when it has been given, since to acquire surely is harder than to keep. Yet nevertheless the more difficult has been made easy, and carried out into effect. That which is the easier thing then will be what we shall easily succeed in, if we cling to Him who has wrought even the other for us. But here it is not the easiness only which he seems to me to hint at, but the reasonableness. For if He reconciled us when we were in open war with Him, it is reasonable that we should abide in a state of reconciliation, and give unto Him this reward for that He may not seem to have reconciled untoward and unfeeling creatures to the Father.
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http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/210209.htm

Cleary, a Christian can break this peace with God by deliberately breaking His commandments, as many Christians do. God does not lie and say there is peace when there is no peace (saying there is peace, when there is no peace, is a sign of the wicked in various places of Scripture, e.g. Eze. 13:10,16; Jer. 6:14; 8:11; etc.)
 
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I’m heartened to see so many Catholics on here manage to avoid mortal sin. I am more used to the posts that assume everybody marching up to Communion must be in a state of mortal sin unless they hit the confessional in the last hour. This simply is not the case in my experience. It’s still good to go to confession at least every couple months to receive the grace that helps you avoid sin, but it’s not like I have a mortal sin every week that I need to confess so I can receive Holy Communion. When I was young and had sins of lust, I committed more frequent grave sins, but most of us don’t continue our teenage or college-age thoughts and habits through our lives. By age 23 or so I was already rejecting a lot of the pure lust stuff as pointless and stupid and unnecessary and destructive, even if I still had confusion about the sinfulness aspect of it.
 
SergiusPaulus said:
Let’s take someone who’s normally considered to be holy or righteous–say, Pope St. John Paul the Great, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Padre Pio, Pope St. Pius X, or even lay evangelists like Scott Hahn, Jimmy Akin, Tim Staples, or Trent Horn–and let’s be generous and say that they normally last a year without mortally sinning
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I don’t think that’s generous. I imagine when you’re on the level of relationship with Christ that the likes of JPII or Benedict XVI are at, you probably go years without mortally sinning. I mean, it’s possible to never mortally sin at all.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
I am more used to the posts that assume everybody marching up to Communion must be in a state of mortal sin unless they hit the confessional in the last hour.
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Many probably are, they just don’t realise it and aren’t culpable. For example, Catholics that vote for abortion.
 
If you “don’t realise it” then it’s not a mortal sin because an essential element of a mortal sin is that you know it’s grave and freely choose to commit it anyway.

It may still be a grave sin, but not mortal. So what you mean to say is that some (not all ) people may have committed unconfessed serious sins without realizing their sinfulness. I’ll agree with that but you cannot say these people have all committed mortal sin. Nor would confession help because they don’t think what they have done is a sin and so wouldn’t confess it.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
If you “don’t realise it” then it’s not a mortal sin because an essential element of a mortal sin is that you know it’s grave and freely choose to commit it anyway.

It may still be a grave sin, but not mortal. So what you mean to say is that some (not all ) people may have committed unconfessed serious sins without realizing their sinfulness. I’ll agree with that but you cannot say these people have all committed mortal sin. Nor would confession help because they don’t think what they have done is a sin and so wouldn’t confess it.
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This is exactly why I say it is so hard to commit a mortal sin. It has to meet ALL THREE CRITERIA. I do believe people can commit serious sins without being really aware of just how serious it is, or perhaps they have done something under coercion or distress but for a person to willingly do something they know is seriously grave and evil - well, that’s something I find very difficult to understand.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
So what you mean to say is that some (not all ) people may have committed unconfessed serious sins without realizing their sinfulness. I’ll agree with that but you cannot say these people have all committed mortal sin. Nor would confession help because they don’t think what they have done is a sin and so wouldn’t confess it.
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I believe I covered that in saying they aren’t culpable. They still may be committing sins that are objectively considered to be mortal.
 
I don’t think any sin can be “objectively considered mortal” because as nunsense noted, the conditions always have to be met, which are subjective to the person’s state of mind. It’s similar to the legal elements for murder under some state law. You cannot say that every homicide is objectively considered murder. The element of intent or perhaps recklessness or similar would always have to be met for it to be murder, and that is always subjective.

You can however say that a certain act is objectively considered grave matter, and that is what the Catechism does say.
 
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