Is this what "grave matter" means?

[Dinosauce1994]

For a sin to be mortal, all of these conditions must be meet:

1. Grave Matter.
2. You know what you’re doing is a sin.
3. You are fully committed to doing this sin.

If you don’t meet just one condition, then it is a venial sin.

Now here is my interpretation for #1:
It means your sin has to be serious enough. This means everything that is petty cannot be a mortal sin, but a venial sin. Like stealing a some gum from a grocery store. For example, if your mom asks how you think her dish is like, and you truly don’t like it, you would of course lie and tell her you to love it. However, in that case, this sin is simply too minor to be considered a grave matter. A grave matter would be like setting up a charity for disease and using all the money to buy a new fancy car would be grave matter because you lied to people for their money.

Is this correct or wrong? Thanks and God bless!

 

[JerryZ]

The easiest way to discern what is grave is to correlate the action to 1 of the 10 Commandments.
For example the Church tells us that not attending mass on the days of obligation is a grave sin.
What is the 1st Commandment? By not attending the one day to offer sacrifice to GOD we are in fact breaking the 1st Commandment.
Peace!

 

[fhansen]

A chief characteristic of grave matter is that it always opposes and destroys love in us. From the catechism:

1855 Mortal sin destroys charity [love] in the heart of man by a grave violation of God’s law; it turns man away from God, who is his ultimate end and his beatitude, by preferring an inferior good to him.

Venial sin allows charity [love] to subsist, even though it offends and wounds it.

1874 To choose deliberately - that is, both knowing it and willing it - something gravely contrary to the divine law and to the ultimate end of man is to commit a mortal sin. This destroys in us the charity [love] without which eternal beatitude is impossible. Unrepented, it brings eternal death.

 

[HomeschoolDad]

For a sin to be mortal, all of these conditions must be meet:

1. Grave Matter.
2. You know what you’re doing is a sin.
3. You are fully committed to doing this sin.

If you don’t meet just one condition, then it is a venial sin.

Now here is my interpretation for #1:
It means your sin has to be serious enough. This means everything that is petty cannot be a mortal sin, but a venial sin. Like stealing a some gum from a grocery store. For example, if your mom asks how you think her dish is like, and you truly don’t like it, you would of course lie and tell her you to love it. However, in that case, this sin is simply too minor to be considered a grave matter. A grave matter would be like setting up a charity for disease and using all the money to buy a new fancy car would be grave matter because you lied to people for their money.

Is this correct or wrong? Thanks and God bless!

Yours is a very good, simple, shorthand way of describing the three conditions for a mortal sin.

You might find a currently open thread helpful. My comments at answer #207 address the very same thing:

Why are there so many homosexuals? Moral Theology

Sure… so your way of putting it " Anything that any two people do — straight, gay, or whatever — that deliberately brings completed sexual pleasure is mortally sinful outside of marriage." was incorrect. That is fine by me. Traditional, classical, orthodox Catholicism makes this very simple: Mortal sin is committed when: The matter itself rises to the level of mortal sin, or to put it in the simplest possible terms, “it’s bad enough to go to hell for” (this is the phrase I used in teachi…

There is a lot of confusion these days as to what “mortal sin” really is.

 

[stpurl]

You are pretty much on the mark but there is just one small caveat.

Stealing gum from a store is a petty issue now (though 200 years ago you might have wound up hanged or transported for doing the same, even if you were a child).

Same with stealing a $5 loaf of bread. . . Except for two things.

First, if you are starving to death, and you need that loaf or you are going to die, or your child is going to die, then many will say it isn’t even a sin to take it. Of course again we are talking about things which are ‘small’ in nature. You can’t take your neighbor’s Cadillac and say that you simply had to have IT in order to drive to work, because if you didn’t show up at work you’d be fired and starve to death. There are just too many other ways to deal with that prospective scenario that don’t involve grand theft auto.

Second, and this is not for the scrupulous and is much rarer than the things we’ve been addressing:

There are times when even ‘petty things’ can be mortal sins.
Taking “$10 from a man. . .why that’s a petty sum —but it could be that man’s only money on which he relied to claim something he had pawned that would help him immensely (say it was a violin and he was going to use it to earn money). Obviously he’s not going to be able to put his hands on another violin easily, he won’t be able to make the money he would have with his own violin, and he might wind up homeless for good. So even though the sum is seen as petty, to that one man it is his livelihood. in THAT case your stealing a ‘petty sum’ is truly a mortal sin in its effect; you have literally taken ‘all the man had’.

This is one of those exceptions that prove the rule, more or less, but it’s more to say that instead of defining a mortal sin as stealing a ‘great amount of money’ and venial sin stealing “a little money’, it might be more accurate to say that mortal sin is taking a person’s livelihood or inflicting great personal damage —even if the livelihood seems to be only $10, or even if we don’t think something is great damage because it wouldn’t damage US.

 

[kapp19]

For a sin to be mortal, all of these conditions must be meet:

1. Grave Matter.
2. You know what you’re doing is a sin.
3. You are fully committed to doing this sin.

Is this correct or wrong? Thanks and God bless!

Your description of grave matter is not entirely false, but your proposal of these three conditions is problematic. For example, a person who doesn’t believe in God will not even think there is such a thing as sin at all - is he exempt now? A man rises up in a sudden and violent rage without deliberation and kills someone next to him. Is this just a peccadillo? It’s true that “knowledge” and “freedom” are part of the equation, but… it’s not exactly the most helpful way of thinking about it. We are responsible for having certain knowledge and for maintaining some freedom…

Grave matter means the act is of the sort which is itself directly opposed (and incompatible with) the virtue of charity (God’s supernatural friendship), usually as described by the Ten Commandments and their immediate derivatives. It is an act that is contrary to what human beings exist to do…

-K