Lust tops men's sin list, anger and pride for women, says papal theologian

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I thought Confession was sacrosanct, so not impressed with the results of research from the Confessional. To generalize…it’s always easy to generalize about others, but only God knows the real truth and not as filtered through the conceptions and pre-conceptions of any person or persons…🙂
 
Women who are proud of their looks and get angry when their man lusts:D
 
Men lust a lot. Wow, newsflash of the century LOL:D Any other shocking revelations? 😛
 
I think that this just proves other sins are not focused on the way lust is.
  1. other sins can be rationalized as only being venially sinful while lust is always a grave matter.
  2. we’re taught to see sexual sins as the most serious and grievous kind of sin that can possibly be committed.
I don’t think that I’ve committed more sins of lust than any other kind of sin it is just my perception that has led me to focus on them. I can remember from the time I was a child I always confessed looking at a woman lustfully when the only thing I was ever guilty of was finding women attractive. I’ve noticed that the priest also typically focuses on lustful sins and not the sins that I find much more heinous. I can confess drop kicking small puppies and looking at a woman lustfully and the advice will almost always focus on how to defeat lust.
 
KostyaJMJ said:
I can confess drop kicking small puppies and looking at a woman lustfully and the advice will almost always focus on how to defeat lust.
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That hasn’t been my experience. I find that they focus more on sins against charity, and have the attitude that lust is natural and there’s not much you can do about it.

I also think most people who go to confession regularly are probably pretty good at controlling their tempers when they realize they are angry, and changing their behaviour when they realize they are being prideful. So these things won’t often cross the line into the area of sin, which has to be a choice. Who chooses to remain angry once their conscience has pointed out the problem? But lots of people choose to keep being lustful even after they become aware of the problem.
 
Our Blessed Mother told the children of Fatima that more souls go to Hell for sins of the flesh than all other sins combined.

Antrim
 
Well, honestly, if you look at the 7 deadly sins, pride is sort of the root while the other seven deadly sins are branches of it. I think that’s why it is said that Adam’s sin was pride.

I wouldn’t be surprised though if men are committing sins out of lust more frequently or regularly than women are. I think our desires are very connected to our fertilities and as such because a man is constantly fertile while a woman is fluxuating, the man’s desires stay pretty much the same while the women’s are constantly changing. And I think that sometimes at least some women (I’d include myself) might feel morally superior to men because “Men are such pigs who only want one thing.” which interiorly is saying “I’m so much better than that.” which is more clearly confessed as an expression of spiritual pride.

So it would make sense to me that in their own examination of consciences, expressions of lust would stick out more to a man than to a woman and expressions of pride would stick out more to a woman. But if you do a very thorough examination, you can eventually see the pride within the lust, as well as the envy and the sloth all contained in one act of sin.

I am however surprised that women would be confessing anger more than men. Granted, women might feel more ashamed of anger because they feel they’re supposed to be the gentle forgiving sex.
 
KostyaJMJ said:
I think that this just proves other sins are not focused on the way lust is.
  1. other sins can be rationalized as only being venially sinful while lust is always a grave matter.
  2. we’re taught to see sexual sins as the most serious and grievous kind of sin that can possibly be committed.
Click to expand...
Sexual sins are not the most serious and grievous sins that there are. It is just that of the grievous sins, they are the most common grave sins that we commit. Most people aren’t going around committing murder on a regular basis, but they can commit sexual sins on a regular basis. The reason we obsess about them tends to be out of the spiritual pride that tells ourselves that we should ultimately be above committing grave sins.

But no, if I murdered someone, its still a graver sin than if I had a sexual fantasy. Its just that chances are, I’m probably not going to murder someone and if I do it’ll probably be so traumatic for me that I’ll only do it once and have a much more difficult time forgiving myself.

The reason I would have trouble forgiving myself is because true forgiveness is hard. We’re much more used to dismissing the seriousness of a particular sin. As such, if we don’t feel like a particular sexual sin is a big deal, we’re really expressing that we have no need for mercy. We’ve dismissed the sin. And we think that our consciences work through our pride - that is the tendency to struggle with self forgiveness. “If I really had done something bad, I’d be under the scrunity of my own harsh judgement.” But this prideful scrunity and lack of forgiveness stems from our lack of mercy overall and is expressed in our inability to be merciful to those who commit sins we’ve never been tempted to commit and can’t relate to at all. We consider ourselves morally above these types of sin, so if we do commit these types of sin, our pride beats us up and we have trouble accepting mercy.

Overall, if we’re relying on our pride to be our conscience, we’re in a really bad boat because no one gets to Heaven except through God’s mercy. It is only in finding the humility to accept God’s mercy that we open ourselves to the grace needed to enter into Heaven. And ultimately sexual sins tend to get in our way the most because to accept mercy over them requires a greater development in the virtue of humility. If I committed murder, its unlikely that I’m going to be the type of person who goes into denial over the severity of my sin. I know I need mercy and this can disposes me to acknowledge that I need to beg for God’s mercy. Of course, the temptation is to begin hating yourself so much that you refuse God’s mercy “because I don’t deserve it.” So there’s a little delay there, but unless you fall into despair and commit suicide, chances are eventually God’s grace will win over your heart and you’ll learn to humbly accept God’s mercy.

However, with sexual sins, its harder. We find these grave sins so tempting that our mechanism with mentally dealing with them becomes dismissing them. We start comparing ourselves to the murdering and saying “Look that over there is a serious sin. How can you say this is?” And as such, we’re much more likely to go through longer periods of time of non-repentance. We see this ultimately in how frequently people live in their sexual sins without going to confession or striving to stop. As such, while their grave sins are less grave than other sins, it is a more common sin to end up in Hell over because of the lack of repentence.

And again this gets to the core of all sin. Pride is the root of all sin and the only reason for non-repentence. Pride holds us in our sins, causes us to reject God’s mercy and thus has been said to be the gravest of all sins. For ultimately the only sin God cannot forgive is final unrepentence. He offers mercy to all sinners, and it is our lack of humility that causes us to reject His mercy.
I’ve noticed that the priest also typically focuses on lustful sins and not the sins that I find much more heinous. I can confess drop kicking small puppies and looking at a woman lustfully and the advice will almost always focus on how to defeat lust.
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The priest will ultimately focus on the sin that you’re most habitually falling into or of which he is identifying a seemingly reluctance to completely admit the wrongness of your sin. As such, a random terrible one time horribly graveful sin probably isn’t a sin he’s going to focus his time counciling you on. Its unlikely you’re going to commit it again or that you’re struggling against it, and if he does focus too heavily on it, you may find it too humiliating to bear and may find it harder to come to confession the next time. He’s there to offer mercy and to help you persevere in the battle to hand more and more of your heart to Christ.
 
Fr. Larry Richards, who is still hearing thousands of confessions more than current papal theologians are, says that the two main capital sins for men are: lust and anger. That makes perfect sense to me. How many female enrollees are there in Anger Management classes – especially those ordered by family courts because the guy has “gone postal”? When is the last time a woman closed down a bridge because she claimed explosives were in her SUV and “someone would have to pay” for her spouse leaving her? It is exponentially more frequent that men immediately turn to anger either when competitiion arises with another man or when there’s an emotional crisis in their lives that they don’t know how to handle. It’s very clear: anger is the first reaction of men, and many men have so little control over their anger that they go public with it. Way more rare for women to do that.

It takes men to know other men from the inside, and the same holds true for women. As a woman, I agree that pride is the number one capital sin for women; I would say in second place is a tie between anger and envy. Male boundaries with other males protect them more from envy; female enmeshment with other women provide many opportunties for envy, in many facets. For example, men have rarely expressed to me envy over another man’s parenting skills, but this is a very, very frequent area of envy for women, because motherhood (or surrogate motherhood/responsibility in the case of women without children) is so prominent in most women’s self-concept. Competition for invisible motherhood prizes is intense among women, but maybe our papal theologian hasn’t heard a lot of female confessions recently, and envy is also something that I think many women are not honest about, aware about, with themselves.

And pride is very much tied to envy, because of the importance to women of their physical appearance as an aspect of their attractiveness to men and competition with women over men. An ongoing aspect, hardly just as very young women. And that can be true even if she’s happily married.
 
I must of surprised the preist I confessed my sins to. Because most of my sins are lustful sins. :eek:
 
gurneyhalleck1 said:
Men lust a lot. Wow, newsflash of the century LOL:D Any other shocking revelations? 😛
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Yep. I’m surprised WikiLeaks hasn’t been all over this one already 😛
KostyaJMJ said:
I can confess drop kicking small puppies and looking at a woman lustfully and the advice will almost always focus on how to defeat lust.
Click to expand...
I actually was at a talk about this sort of thing. The priest gave a hypothetical about a penitent confessing a bunch of sins that includes masturbation. At the end the priest asks, “So, what should we talk about?”. The penitent predictably responds, “The masturbation”, to which the priest responds, “Sure. But first this situation with your aunt sounds like it’s bordering on murder…” :eek: .

The “moral” (I guess you could call it) was to remember that there are more Commandments than the 6th (although, I would bet that we break it disproportionately more than the others).
 
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