Is masturbation ALWAYS a mortal sin?

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Bbentrup~~"*God’s eternal truths cannot change. What was once true is always true.*Absolutely!!! Appealing to the Church’s history as evidence that its teaching on masturbation could somehow be different then than it is today is a baseless argument. I am not claiming that the church’s teaching has changed, but that it is misleading. The Bible asked us to be pure and told us how impure actions are very sinful. Scripture is about the last useful “proof” or validation of anything, as it is intrinsically metaphoric and mythological teaching historicized onto what it is not. Your views are not aligned with the Church’s magisterium. Thank the God You need to stop trying to subvert its authority, at least on these boards. I have no need to subvert what is already in grave doubt by any but cradle believers habituated into such thinking.

The history of Catholic teachings about masturbation: from
forums.catholic-questions.org/newreply.php?do=postreply&t=243471

A study by Giovanni Cappelli of the church’s stance on masturbation during the first millennium CE shows that:

The Bible is silent on the topic.
None of the Apostolic Fathers wrote about masturbation.
The first mention of masturbation within the Catholic Church is found in sixth century CE
penitentials. 1 These were books or a set of church rules concerning the sacrament of penance. They were first developed by priests as unofficial handbooks that gave standard penances for the most commonly confessed sins.

In commenting on Cappelli’s findings, Fr. John Harvey suggests that silence by the Apostolic Fathers does not necessarily mean either a tacit approval or indifference towards masturbation. Their silence may have been caused by their prime concern being interpersonal sexual sins. 1 (Or not)

However, the Church has placed much greater emphasis on masturbation later in its history. For example, Thomas Aquinas (circa 1225 to 1274 CE) is the most famous classical proponent of natural theology, founded the Thomistic school of philosophy and is considered by many Catholics to be the Church’s greatest theologian. 16 He taught that God designed the penis to insert sperm into a woman’s vagina. Any other use of the penis, except perhaps for urination, or destination for the sperm is unnatural and a “grave offense to the sagacious plan” of God. This concept makes a number of sexual behaviors immoral: bestiality, anal sex, oral sex, masturbation, and any other activity that prevents conception.

So it is about 900 years aftter the exppropriation of pagan mythology into the formation of our Catholic religion that it even becomes a concern

And ditto tjm190
 
bbentrup said:
Benjamin8o8, you talk like a Protestant. In your last poast, you write, “I decided not to…”; “I thought I shouldn’t…”; “I don’t believe I’m in…”; “I believe I am not in…” Do you realize you are under the tyrrany of your conscience? Why, as a Catholic, would you subject yourself to that state? Protestants have no choice in the matter and must use such language, and I pity them. But you - you have the full teaching magisterium of the Catholic Church on this matter, which as Jesus has promised, is free from error when teaching on faith and morals. Why do you worry or argue about what you yourself believe? It doesn’t matter! Submit to Holy Mother Church and she will raise you up on the path to wisdom and you will have eternal life. Allow a misinformed conscience to raise you up (and you have to admit that your conscience might be wrong), and you risk separating yourself from the Church. Again, pray for understanding as to what the Church teaches. I know it is very hard to accept and abide by what you can’t understand with the mind, but trust and have faith in Jesus’ church on this matter if your conscience is telling you to do something different. If you follow your conscience, and your conscience ends up being wrong, the amount of guilt attached to your sin may be lessened, but you may find that you neglected to form your conscience properly when you were younger, and that sin may have even greater guilt attached to it. Better to be safe than sorry - submit to the Church’s teaching.
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Well, doesn’t the Church teach there is exception on masturbation being a mortal sin?
 
Try as you may there will be no free passes regarding sexual sins regardless of what you want Sacred Scripture to say.
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Try as I might and what I want scripture to say? Excuse me, but I am just doing my best to try and understand scripture as I read it. I am finishing up with a Catholic Bible study tomorrow… and after having read ALL of the Old Testament, I am more confused about my faith than ever with the many MANY contradictions of what scripture says and what Catholics believe. I have still yet to find any scriptural references to masturbation period. All I asked was for someone to point it out to me in the scriptures. I’m not trying to find a “free pass” at all. I am no biblical scholar, I am simply asking for information.

Just so you know, your answer was no answer at all. I found it rather rude.
 
Benjamin8o8 said:
Well, doesn’t the Church teach there is exception on masturbation being a mortal sin?
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The Church teaches there is a theoretical exception for masturbation being a mortal sin, that is, in this case if you had full knowledge but not full consent. The problem is, who determines that? Maybe you actually did give full consent but aren’t even aware of the fact yet!? Only God knows for sure whether or not you committed a mortal sin - the best you can do is make an educated guess, and your viewpoint, I hope you’ll admit, may be prejudiced. Does every sinner who commits this sin and is sorry for it guess rightly? Why risk your immortal soul on an educated guess while receiving the Eucharist perhaps unworthily when you can instead wait and have the promise of Jesus himself for complete forgiveness of your sins in the confessional? The best thing you can do is to make every effort you can to find the holiest priest around, bring him the problem in confession, and do as he advises. Let’s keep up with the mutual prayers here. All glory to Jesus! Amen!
 
This thread has been pruned of marginally off topic/debate posts because this is a discussion/education thread and not debate. Those who wish to debate the authority of Church moral teaching need to take that to Apologetics.
Sincerely,
 
bbentrup said:
The Church teaches there is a theoretical exception for masturbation being a mortal sin, that is, in this case if you had full knowledge but not full consent. The problem is, who determines that? Maybe you actually did give full consent but aren’t even aware of the fact yet!? Only God knows for sure whether or not you committed a mortal sin - the best you can do is make an educated guess, and your viewpoint, I hope you’ll admit, may be prejudiced. Does every sinner who commits this sin and is sorry for it guess rightly? Why risk your immortal soul on an educated guess while receiving the Eucharist perhaps unworthily when you can instead wait and have the promise of Jesus himself for complete forgiveness of your sins in the confessional? The best thing you can do is to make every effort you can to find the holiest priest around, bring him the problem in confession, and do as he advises. Let’s keep up with the mutual prayers here. All glory to Jesus! Amen!
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That is a scary thought:eek:

Thank you so much for talking to me bbentrup, I really do appreciate your responses, I just don´t know how much appreciation i can show through forums. But please, keep me in your prayers, satin wants me man, he wants my fall, I can only thank God that I never truly committed this sin when I was younger because I know if I did (and if I ever felt the pleasure of…uhh you know), I would have committed masturbation as much as an average teenager. So now I think satin is there to get his revenge or even worse. Please, please have me in your prayers. I want to serve Jesus and His Holy Mother Church. I want to be pure. If you´re wondering, Saint Therese of the Child Jesus is my favorite Saint.

All glory to Jesus! Amen!
 
I masturbate, I am a sinner…but why can’t the law be generous to us who are having a very hard time about this?

It’s a struggle to be generous to myself, so im finding refuge in the law, and yet, even there I could find no respite.

What would Jesus say?
 
Jesus might say something similar to Mahatma Gandhi: “I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians, they are so unlike (misinterpret) their Christ.” To me, Christians refers, A-phile, to the laws of the Chuch as made up by those interpreting Gospels that we don’t have originals of. Did Jesus leave a canon, other than Love? All the magesterium, all the dogma, all of that is add-on by people who were less than He and trying to codify the uncodifyable. The only possible result is the kind of confusion you are experiencing. Even your hero, Augustine, wanted to burn his work in the end, no? Perhaps he saw through letters to Truth.

Are you hurting anyone? eg, if you do it in private and no one knows, no other is hurt.
If you do not do it to excess or obsession, you do not hurt yourself. In either case, God is not effected one iota, as nothing anyone can do can make God less God. And if you think God or Jesus have the means, time, or interest to watch you do what you do, maybe that idea needs som re-examination. I assure you that when you die, you will have a more than adequate record of your doings in your own heart. “God is Love. All the rest is commentary.” and most of it is both unnecessary and pecuniary on the part of clerics who had nothing better to do than invent sins to titilate themselves by their enumeration and hearing their confession. Old time porn, in other words. Just don’t hurt others, and don’t hurt yourself. And promote what is goo in both cases. Love is the fulfilling of the law, my friend, not the reading and mincing of tracts. “Love one another, as I have loved you.”
 
Benjamin8o8 said:
man…cant we then compare masturbation to cigaretts. When you smoke, you hurt your body, and who knows you`re most likely KILLING YOURSELF. so Smoking as well as masturbading should be a mortal sin. Now come on, explain me why it shouldnt be. Anybody that smokes a cigarett comits a mortal sin RIGHT???

please pray for me…😦
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I believe in 2008, the Vaticam came up with a new list of 7 Deadly sins, and drug abuse was one of them.
 
Benjamin8o8 said:
But I must ask. What about premature ejaculation. Wouldn´t sex take like 43 seconds if I don´t have any experience at all? I mean geesh, I waited patiently this whole time because I keep thinking the wait will be awarding…really really awarding:(
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Does anyone have an answer for this person? 🤷
 
Hmmmm… There is a great idea The “Vaticam.” (Thanks, cjcapta) We could have a “Big Brother” system, and if you are masturbating, a priest would rush to your house and whack your pee-pee and prescribe a penance. Jeez, when is the Church going to give up this exceptional silliness? Don’t you have better things to think about y’all, than if your natural body functions that God gave you are evil? Talk about rule by fear! Satan must be laughing his fargin’ head off!
 
bbentrup said:
Some other posters have already cited the Catholic Church’s teaching on why it is indeed a grave sin. First, I think you need to realize that while intellectually you may understandably disagree (at least at first), please realize the extreme position this has put you: you are pitting your wisdom against that of thousands of saints over thousands of years and the full Magisterium of the Church. To think that your wisdom is somehow more correct than theirs strikes me as very risky at best and arrogant at worst. Wouldn’t it instead be better to pray: “Lord, I do not understand this teaching. As far as I can make out, Your Church seems wrong, but give me the intelligence to understand.” and in the meantime, until you get that understanding that masturbation is gravely sinful, to simply submit in holy obedience to the church teaching (even if you think they are possibly wrong)?

You say that you don’t think you are going to Hell if you committed this sin with full consent and knowledge. If you did not commit an act of true and full repentence, wouldn’t it make sense in that scenario that you would go to hell if you died in that state? Perhaps you did make an act of repentance. The Church teaches that if you make an act of perfect contrition after committing a mortal sin, then you will not go to Hell, even if you have not been to Confession since that sin. So, in a sense, you would be right about that. But here again, we get in to very dangerous waters for the penitent. You have to make a PERFECT act of contrition. This is doable, but it is not a standard that I would normally like to be required to meet. Among other things, it means complete detachment from worldly passions. To think that you can have made that perfect act of contrition is very risky at best and arrogant at worst. Much better is instead to confess your sins to a priest in confession. In the confession, you have the promise of Jesus that all your sins will be forgiven and IM-perfect contrition is all that is necessary to remove the mortal sins, it could simply be fear of hell and intent not to commit those acts in the future.

The church does teach that you can receive Communion after a mortal sin and a subsequent act of PERFECT contrition, but it needs to be by way of being an emergency, like near death, or leaving the country perhaps, but the intent must be to go to confession with a priest very soon. If you had committed a mortal sin, and there was no emergency, it was wrong to receive the Eucharist first, even if you planned on going to confession almost immediately after.
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Your argument is a little bit biased. You say he is putting just his wisdom against that of thousands of saints over thousands of years and the full Magisterium of the Church. However, there are probably many other people who also believe what he believes, maybe even more. If I’m not mistaken (and correct me if I’m wrong), there is/are protestant religion(s) that believe(s) what he believes. Wouldn’t the Magisterium of the Church be arrogant too?

And another question: What is the difference between perfect contrition and imperfect contrition?
 
As I understand it, the problem with masturbation is not the pleasure, though Catholicism is notably suspicious of nearly any form of enjoyment, but with the idea that ejaculation “wastes” (good grief*) seed and doesn’t allow the possibility of impregnating someone in a world already using 1.3 times its renewable resources.

There is an easy way around this. Go and get yourself a copy of The Multi-Orgasmic Man by Mantak Chia & Abrams Arava. It is a manual (heh-heh) for training oneself to separate orgasm from ejaculation. That way, you can have the funzies without the spillage and God and everyone will have their weird criteria satisfied, including the woman you will eventually end up with. She will go stark raving mad with her strong-man’s inducing so many orgasms in her poor shaking body that she will faint, and adore you forever, you poor sob. Hmmmm… Maybe God won’t like that…😃

*Let’s see: One ejaculation out of N produces a child. Each ejaculation = about 0>3,000,000,000 sperm, so 1,500,000,000 average, so N x 1.5 x10 to the 9th power, so, say N = about 100, and say about 150,000,000,000 sperm or more, or 25 times the entire current world population die per one successful conception. Glad the Church is watching out for my little swimmers!
 
Bbentrup~“Lord, I do not understand this teaching. As far as I can make out, Your Church seems wrong, but give me the intelligence to understand.”??? What if you DO have the intelligence to understand, and the Church is just wrong?
 
I don’t know that it is “wrong.” I do know that it is inefficient and misleading in its presentation of many aspects of knowledge which could more easily be assimilated and used form another perspective. That perspective is at the root of the two Great Commandments attributed to Jesus and at the root of the two forms of the Golden Rule. Everything else offered by the Church is a an un necessary complexification of simple Truth. But each one of us has to choose their own way. As a friend of mine who was studying to be a Jesuit said, " Each herring hangs by its own tale in the end." You are responsible for the story you tell yourself about how things are. You can take one off the shelf, as most do, or you can visit the manufacturer and inspect the source and value of their goods. In any case it is ultimately what you choose. Neither a church, nor “Satan” nor Truth have any claim on you save you give yourself to it of your own will.
 
cjcapta said:
Your argument is a little bit biased. You say he is putting just his wisdom against that of thousands of saints over thousands of years and the full Magisterium of the Church. However, there are probably many other people who also believe what he believes, maybe even more. If I’m not mistaken (and correct me if I’m wrong), there is/are protestant religion(s) that believe(s) what he believes. Wouldn’t the Magisterium of the Church be arrogant too?

And another question: What is the difference between perfect contrition and imperfect contrition?
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In addition, what exactly is that “wisdom”? Real wisdom is more than just repeating an assertion - there has to be reason behind it. I have yet to hear a cogent explanation as to why masturbation is intrisically wrong, other than “because the Church says it is”. Language like “gravely disordered”, or “destroys our relationship with God” is just an assertion without reason. What, precisely, is the actual harm caused by masturbation?
 
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