Masturbation?

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Catholicgirl93

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I never learned that masturbation was a mortal sin when i was 12 or 13. I always felt like I was doing something wrong but was really scared to ask my parents or my priest. I guess my parents always thought I’d learn at the Catholic school i went to or from Sunday school, but they never told me anything about the church’s teachings on sexuality. I went on the internet and learned more than I could want to know (as you can guess) and it came from all kinds of UN-catholic sources. 😊 The deal is that I kept doing it and receiving Holy Eucharist anyway. I kind of thought it might be a sin or possibly a mortal sin, but I was too embarrassed to find out. I never confessed it either. Now I definitely know it is a mortal sin, but I keep slipping up and am worried about all the times I received communion. I’m also scared to confess it to my priest and don’t know what to do. How do I end this mess now? :confused:😦 😊
 
Go to confession, and use the screen so that your priest will not see you. I personally know how difficult it is to confess sinful acts that are sexual in nature, and I can bet that the ones I have confessed are much more embarrassing in nature. I promise though, once you get out of the confessional, it will feel wonderful to have all the anxiety of knowing that you are living in sin off of your shoulders.

Go as soon as you can. Do not put off receiving assurance of our Lords mercy any longer than you must. Until then, do not receive communion. Peace, and God bless!

P.S.

Here is an examination of conscience and guide to confession I found real fast through Google. Use it, and confess all of your other sins while you are there (I usually make a list so I don’t forget any of my sins!😃 ). Please, please, whatever you do, do not be embarrassed. Go with a humble heart, but also with joy, knowing that the Lord’s mercy is available to all who ask for it.

catholicparents.org/oxcart/Examination%20of%20Conscience.pdf
 
Well,
Let me tell you. One of the biggest struggles that I went through in my young teenage years was also that. I had a hard time not doing it. I also had fear of confessing out of fear that the priest would give me this huge penance and remember and look at me weird everyday.

It is a Mortal Sin and you should not receive communion if you have been doing this. Doing so will be a bigger sin for you.

Fear that we feel to make that confession is the Devil that wants to have fuel to be able to hold you. You will not be able to stop unless you pray for strength and confess your sin.

Once I went to confession and asked for forgiveness (must be truly Sorry remember) and vowed to try to sin no more. I gained this strength from God that helped me. Now, I did fall once or twice since then but I knew that I had to go confess it each time and each time I felt even more sad than the first.

Do not worry about going to confession and confessing this sin because the priest is vowed to remain in secret with confessions. He can not repeat it. He is an instrument used by the Lord to forgive you of your sins and he can give you some counseling on how to handle this issue.

Remember that many people have this issue but God has given you the wisdom to work at breaking away from it. That already is God wanting to work in you to clean you.

Be Strong and Go Confess and pray each time you get the sensation that you are going to masturbate. For a woman it is good to ask the Virgin Mary to help you. I will pray for you! I know how tough it can be.

Be Blessed! Let me know how things are going for you.
 
It’s grave matter…no act in itself is a mortal sin. For anything to be a mortal sin, it has to meet three conditions.
  1. Grave Matter (it is)
  2. Full knowledge (which you did not have)
  3. Full Consent (which you did not have either, b/c you have made it a habit)
I’m not a priest, but I’m sure your confessor will assure you that you past activities were not mortal sins.

You can not accidently fall into mortal sin. You really really have to strive to commit one.

With masturbation, there are several conditions of self that can cause it not to be a mortal sin. (A venial sin probably, but not even that at time). If a confessor finds the penitent has a ingrained habit, psych issues, sexual imbalance, conditions of anxiety, etc in a person’s life, he will not counsel that the penitent has committed mortal sin.

Most of the issues mentioned above are what cause a person to masturbate. If everything is A-OK in a persons life, and they still plan ahead to masturbate despite what the church teaches about the subject (‘to hell with what the church teaches, I don’t give a flip’), then that person most likey will be counseled that he or she has comitted mortal sin.

The Church, esp in practice, treads very lightly on this subject, despite what some here think. I have talked to 4 priests about this very subject, and all have told me the same thing. They did not say it was Ok, they did not say it wasn’t a sin, but they did say not to be too hard on yourself, that internal issues cause 99.9 percent of good catholics to commit this activity. Internal psych issues cloud full consent, therefor by definition, you can not be guilty of mortal sin.

I trust the opinions of 4 good holy priests over someone on the internet that I’ve never met. As one priest told me, ‘Always struggle. Never just do it b/c you think you can. If you loose the struggle, that’s ok. You will win the battle’.
 
Chuckle. If you’re lucky, the priest will take you seriously. He will understand that now you KNOW, you are changing your views and your practice. He will be compassionate and encouraging.

Chances are equally good that the priest will say: Oh, THAT! Why are you bothering me; it’s not a sin any more!

Of course, he would be dead wrong. But it happens – more than you would imagine.
 
There’s a saying/joke that goes: 99% of young men will tell you that they masturbate, and the other one is lying. Not really a kneeslapper, probably more of a truth. This sin is a pretty common one for both men and women. You’re not alone.

Go to confession and realize one thing, the priest, unless it is the first confession he has heard, has heard this one, many, many times before. I’m not trying to soft peddle your concern, but there are sins of malice and sins of weakness. This is a sin of weakness, and it is my experience that priests don’t dish up fire and brimstone when they hear it. That you recognize your situation and want to rectify it speaks well for you. Remember, you can’t commit a mortal sin in retrospect, and a good confession forgives present and past sins. The only case where that isn’t true is if a mortal sin is knowingly and willingly concealed, and it doesn’t sound like that’s your situation.

In the confessional, tell the priest that you realize your past actions were rooted in a spiritual and physical immaturity and you want to put all this behind you. I think you’ll do fine.
 
joeybaggz said:
There’s a saying/joke that goes: 99% of young men will tell you that they masturbate, and the other one is lying. Not really a kneeslapper, probably more of a truth. This sin is a pretty common one for both men and women. You’re not alone.

Go to confession and realize one thing, the priest, unless it is the first confession he has heard, has heard this one, many, many times before. I’m not trying to soft peddle your concern, but there are sins of malice and sins of weakness. This is a sin of weakness, and it is my experience that priests don’t dish up fire and brimstone when they hear it. That you recognize your situation and want to rectify it speaks well for you. Remember, you can’t commit a mortal sin in retrospect, and a good confession forgives present and past sins. The only case where that isn’t true is if a mortal sin is knowingly and willingly concealed, and it doesn’t sound like that’s your situation.

In the confessional, tell the priest that you realize your past actions were rooted in a spiritual and physical immaturity and you want to put all this behind you. I think you’ll do fine.
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Frankly, if a young person is not confessing that he struggles with impurity, then there’s either something wrong with him, he doesn’t know that there IS such a thing as impurity, or he’s being dishonest.

I use the pronoun “he” in the grammatical sense, not as an exclusionary gender identifier.
 
I think that a good confession is definitely in order but make sure you cover all the bases.

You would want to confess that you are committing impure acts with yourself.

You also stated in your post that you now KNOW that it is a mortal sin AND you continued to slip up and do it. So, what you are saying is that you have committed mortal sins (if you knew it was a grave sin and still did it any way).

Also, don’t forget that you received our Lord in that condition, so you might want to add that to your list in the confessional…
 
Slip ups are not always mortal sins…depends on the circumstances.
 
Charybdis said:
Also, don’t forget that you received our Lord in that condition, so you might want to add that to your list in the confessional…
Click to expand...
No “might” about it. It’s part of the package.

Let’s give catholigirl93 credit for even pursuing this. In this day and age, hardly anybody understands why this is a problem.
 
I am greatly discouraged by this thread.
Some of you seem to say: everyone is doing it. over 90 percent of Catholics and 100 percent of all men. If this is the truth, which I dont believe it is, then you must be really be sad all of you.

What I hear you say is that serious Catholic men who are supposedly converted by Christ (“serious”) have not turned from their sin.
If all Catholic men are doing this on a regular basis and unable to change (since you say they all do it you basically say they live in unrepented sin and the Holy Spirit was not strong enough to help them get free) then why are you telling this young lady to stop it? To save her purity for a good Catholic man who is masturbating all the time himself because “all men do it”…?

Yeah… I am being sarcastic… I really wonder how encouraging you think it is for the OP to hear that 1) you commit only a venial sin, and 2) EVERYONE does it.

In my short experience with impurity one great urge to help me wanna live a chaste life again was that I one day want to be prepared to meet a good Catholic man who does also lives a lifestyle of chastity. My feeling that thousands of Catholic young women and men practice chastity made me ardently want to be a part of that clup of winners…
But you seem to imply such men (and women) hardly exist.
🤷

To the OP. Next time you think about masturbating consider what you will tell your future husband who might be both a virgin and living in chastity… you will tell him that you have fallen in the sexual area in the past.
It will matter to him that you have repented and that this is long over.
Save your self for him from this day on. Masturbation is such an empty act that the devil laughs at… And throw that stupid computer right out of your window literally if it causes you to sin.
And remember: Jesus is always with you and is looking at you. Not to keep an account of your sins but to tell you what He has called you to be and how much He loves you.
:hug1:
 
Grace, unfortunately it’s probably more close to fact than fiction.

It is said it is the most commonly heard sin in the confessional.

The priests (4) that I have talked to more or less agreed that it takes deliberate no-inhibitions masturbation to be mortal sin.

If one is struggling to stop, and fails, then its venial. They did not have full consent.

If one does not fight the temptation, and deliberately goes and watches porn, stimulates themselves from 0 to 100 to prepare to masturbate fully with no regrets, then yeah, it’s showing that the person has made his/her decision to commit a grave sin with full knowledge and full consent.
 
Hi. I’m a guy (18yrs) and I’m struggling with this too. I was pure for about three or four years, but I’ve recently fallen. I encourage you to take this situation, as bleak as it may seem, as a blessing (in a weird sort of way). Every time I’ve fallen, I’ve learned to focus not on why I’m so weak and gross, but rather that God loves me so much even when I slip up, he still calls out to me and begs my soul to be near Him and His grace. I Confessed for masturbation last week…and I’m going to have to this week too, but I know that this is a process. If being a Christian and redeeming our sexuality was easy, everyone would be Christian. However, it’s a learning process and I thank God that I’m learning more about Him and myself through this struggle than ever before. I’ll pray for you that you can receive the same grace. Please pray for me too!
 
ForwardProgress said:
Grace, unfortunately it’s probably more close to fact than fiction.

It is said it is the most commonly heard sin in the confessional.

The priests (4) that I have talked to more or less agreed that it takes deliberate no-inhibitions masturbation to be mortal sin.

If one is struggling to stop, and fails, then its venial. They did not have full consent.

If one does not fight the temptation, and deliberately goes and watches porn, stimulates themselves from 0 to 100 to prepare to masturbate fully with no regrets, then yeah, it’s showing that the person has made his/her decision to commit a grave sin with full knowledge and full consent.
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FP…
then howcome, within one year, I have meet two men who had a problem with masturbation who overcame that sin through the help of the Holy Spirit? Is it likely that these two were two out of a million Christian men?
Please do allow me to go to Church thinking that not 99 percent of the kneeling men there practice masturbation on a regular basis.
Or when I go to AveMaria singles all the men there who “live chastity and search that in a partner” are they not really honest?
… :confused:
Besides… I think that some people would want to say “everyone does it” in order to excuse themselves and say its impossible to stop. Its like when people say: everyone does it, about sex… and then you go and have sex and then you find out that a huge amount of Christians are “saving themselves” and you were only given part of the truth…

As for the last part of your post. I agree that there are mortal and venial sins… but lets face it. Everyone has reasons for doing what he does…Everyone has a phsyche and emotional wounds of some sort… We are all human. In a way we can use the logic you use to call all sins venial and none mortal.
I dont see why doing something a thousand times makes me less and less culpable…? maybe if I continue long enough I’ll be a saint? :confused: Actually it says the opposite in the Bible. It says that people who continue in their sin are, at the end, given over to blindness and darkness and will be lost. (beginning of Romans)

I thank God that my priest, once I told him of my own impurity and said that I would likely sin again, he said; “then, I tell you, fear hell”. I was frigtened … as I should be. I had the unease of the sinner… that unbearable anxiety and I knew I could not live like that… I had become lawless and thus had lost the peace of Christ.

Can we give the criteria to abortion too? severel abortions make people less culpable? Or how about fornication or adultery or phedophile acts?
I’d say once the Holy Spirit convicts you of sin in your heart, then you need a priest who takes sin seriously… you need to encounter the real expectation from your self and others that the first christians did: that you wont sin again…

I too have met priests who told me… your weak… dont be hard on your self… That never helped me one bit.
Sometimes I sure think we need more firmess in the Church. Charitable firmeness.
 
I agree that strong encouragement is a good thing – not just for this: for a lot of things.

Pretending something isn’t serious, isn’t a sin, doesn’t matter, just dilutes the importance of life.

Hang in there. You’re definitely on the right road – as are your friends.
 
An experienced priest has heard it all. You can’t shock him.

If need be, use the phrase ‘self gratification’. He will know what you mean.

Once you confess, you will be amazed at how wonderful you’ll feel.
 
This is a good example of a pretty good confession. The Priest do NOT need/want to know all the nitty gritty details. They may ask a question or two just to asses the circumstances/nature of your falling but that’s it. Don’t be flip, just be humble and repentant. You will not believe how much weight will be lifted form you after you are forgiven and cleansed.
  • As you make the Sign of the Cross, say: Bless me Father for I have sinned it has been, XX weeks, months, years since my last confession. Since then:
  • I looked at impure pictures and images, XX times or many, many times in the last 1 1/2yrs.(or several dozen times).
  • I have been impure with myself in self gratification, XX times or many, many times in the last 1 1/2yrs.(or several dozen times).
  • I have not followed the teachings of the Church and done things with my spouse in our marriage that have not been within Church Teachings of Conjugal Love.
  • I have been impure with a women/man outside my marriage XX times(or several/many times over the last 10yrs.
  • I have been impure with a women/man and not yet married, XX times(or several/many times over the last 2yrs.
  • I have received the Eucharist during this time of sinfulness also.
  • I have been selfish and not given to my husband/wife and our marriage, as fully as I should, XX times(or several/many times over the last 1 1/2yrs.
  • I have been neglectful of my children and not set a good example for them XX times in the past year.
  • I have disobeyed my parents and been disrespectful to them XX times in the past year.
  • I missed Sunday/Holy Day Mass XX in the past year.
  • Etc.
When you have finished confessing all the sins that you remember, say:

For these sins and all the sins of my past life, especially the sins against Charity, Chastity, Fidelity, Honesty, Humility and Purity…(mention the most important virtues, like Purity, Chastity, Honesty, Charity, Humility, etc.) I ask absolution and penance from you, Father.

Act of Contrition:

O my God, I am heartily sorry
for having offended you.
I detest all my sins,
because I dread the loss of heaven
and the pains of hell;
but most of all because they offend you,
my God, who are all good
and deserving of all my love.
I firmly resolve, with the help of your grace,
to sin no more, to do penance,
and to amend my life. Amen.
 
GraceDK said:
FP…
then howcome, within one year, I have meet two men who had a problem with masturbation who overcame that sin through the help of the Holy Spirit? Is it likely that these two were two out of a million Christian men?
Please do allow me to go to Church thinking that not 99 percent of the kneeling men there practice masturbation on a regular basis.
Or when I go to AveMaria singles all the men there who “live chastity and search that in a partner” are they not really honest?
… :confused:
Besides… I think that some people would want to say “everyone does it” in order to excuse themselves and say its impossible to stop. Its like when people say: everyone does it, about sex… and then you go and have sex and then you find out that a huge amount of Christians are “saving themselves” and you were only given part of the truth…

As for the last part of your post. I agree that there are mortal and venial sins… but lets face it. Everyone has reasons for doing what he does…Everyone has a phsyche and emotional wounds of some sort… We are all human. In a way we can use the logic you use to call all sins venial and none mortal.
I dont see why doing something a thousand times makes me less and less culpable…? maybe if I continue long enough I’ll be a saint? :confused: Actually it says the opposite in the Bible. It says that people who continue in their sin are, at the end, given over to blindness and darkness and will be lost. (beginning of Romans)

I thank God that my priest, once I told him of my own impurity and said that I would likely sin again, he said; “then, I tell you, fear hell”. I was frigtened … as I should be. I had the unease of the sinner… that unbearable anxiety and I knew I could not live like that… I had become lawless and thus had lost the peace of Christ.

Can we give the criteria to abortion too? severel abortions make people less culpable? Or how about fornication or adultery or phedophile acts?
I’d say once the Holy Spirit convicts you of sin in your heart, then you need a priest who takes sin seriously… you need to encounter the real expectation from your self and others that the first christians did: that you wont sin again…

I too have met priests who told me… your weak… dont be hard on your self… That never helped me one bit.
Sometimes I sure think we need more firmess in the Church. Charitable firmeness.
Click to expand...
Grace,

What you say can be/is true. We can overcome the struggle.

However…

What FP says is also true. Many people fall into sin that become habits (sex, drug, alcohol, etc.). They are so in-grained that it is hard to stop (and compounded by our culture). In these cases, people cannot stop cold turkey, but need some more/drastic help. I think this is why the priests may tell people it is not mortal - their conscience and will has become so worn down that it’s hard to keep yourself under control 100% of the time (not trying to make excuses).

Maybe you, and some of the people have met have been blessed and saved before their problems got too bad. And that’s a good thing, and many of us wish it was that easy.
 
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