Mortal Sin

[marvinb1]

hi every one i am coming back to the faith so i have many questions. one on my mine curently is about mortal sin. one of the requirments is that we know that it is wrong. My question is what classafys it as knowing. Is it not a mortal sin for a pro choice person to get an abortion because to them it is not wrong, they know that other think it is wrong but to them it is not.

 

[Della]

Welcome to CAF and back to the faith, Marvin! :extrahappy:

Getting an abortion is objectively wrong, i. e. it’s always wrong whether or not one believes it is. However, what you are really talking about is culpability, i. e. whether or not the person can be held accountable for the sin committed.

In the case you cited, if the person knows that others believe it is wrong, it is that person’s repsonbility to find out why. Simply avoiding the question does not mean one is not culpable. If, OTOH, a person is coaxed into it by another, that person is less culpable.

God cannot be tricked. Today’s first reading, the fall of Adam and Eve, clearly shows this. Both of them made excuses, but God was not impressed with that. He knew full well what they had done and why. It’s why the Church tells us we must be absolutely honest with ourselves and not try to hide our sins for God knows everything about us, but not to fear or be discouraged for God loves us infinitely more than we can sin. All we need do is confess what we did and God will forgive us. Considering that is the case, why would anyone want to use excuses when God’s love and mercy are there for the asking?

 

[rom422]

It is true that you cannot commit a mortal sin if you do not know that you are committing one. However, it will take a great deal of soul searching on your part to decide whether you’ve really been honest, and that you were not merely finding excuses for such a horrible act. Still, every case is different, and every person is different, and there can be situations when it is really difficult to decide whether you’ve been guilty or not. In that case, just go to confession and open your heart to the priest. Then let him guide you from there.

 

[Jim_Dandy]

Could one ever say, in a civilized society, I murdered a person but I didn’t believe murder was a mortal sin?

 

[teenphilo1]

This may be more specific to your case, but if the woman getting an abortion is acting out of fear it’s a venial sin, not a mortal one.

 

[timeandeternity]

Hi marvin, and welcome back!
For something to be a mortal sin, it has to meet these three requirements:

1. *It must be grave matter. *To figure out which sins are considered grave matter, use a good examination of conscience (google will turn up plenty of results, but I’ll include one here anyways: fatima.org/essentials/requests/examconc.asp)
2. *You must know that it is grave matter. *I think this is where you are getting confused. If, for example, someone does not realize that it is a mortal sin to eat meat on Lenten Fridays, and they have chicken for dinner on one of those days, they have not committed a mortal sin because their ignorance was “invincible.” However, if they suspect that it might be a mortal sin to eat meat on Lenten Fridays, but do not take the time to find out, and then eat meat, they have committed a mortal sin because it was within their power to remove their ignorance and they did not do so. Also, no one can claim to be ignorant of the natural law, which is written in our hearts. Every human knows it is wrong to kill another human being. If a woman going to have an abortion knows that she is killing her unborn child, but thinks that it’s ok for one reason or another, still commits a mortal sin. *Thinking *something is fine even though you *know *better doesn’t give you an excuse.
3. *You must have full consent. * For example, if this woman was being coerced or abused or somehow forced to have the abortion against her will, her culpability would be lessened and she may not be committing a mortal sin. Also for example, if an impure thought pops into your head, and as soon as you recognize that it’s there, you struggle and fight until it goes away, you have not committed a mortal sin. The thought was in your head, but you did not *consent *to it, so it was not a sin.

I hope this helps. I would recommend getting “Catholicism for Dummies” (just google it–it’ll come up right away). I’ve never read it myself, but I’ve heard it’s an excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn more about their faith. The online catholic encyclopedia is also an amazing resource if you really want to go in depth with anything related to Catholicism. It can be found at newadvent.org/cathen/

Good luck with everything! I’ll say a prayer for you! Feel free to PM me if you have any questions/want to follow up on this post.

 

[wjp984]

A psychopath does not believe killing people is wrong and feels no remorse. However, they know others think it is wrong and that they will go to prison if they murder.

Some choose to murder regardless of the fact that they personally know others think it is wrong and they are appropriately punished to the full extent of the law.

The same would go true for the situation you describe, Although the person may personally not believe it is wrong, the person is aware that others believe it is wrong and in all probability aware that others believe one could go to hell for this sin. Therefore, the person is aware of the sinfulness of the action. Of course God could still be merciful but I don’t see how abortion is not a mortal sin. There is too much information out there on the subject where one cannot be willfully ignorant.

 

[Gabriel_Serafin]

This may be more specific to your case, but if the woman getting an abortion is acting out of fear it’s a venial sin, not a mortal one.

One must be careful about asserting that abortion is merely a venial sin if one does it out of fear. One can commit horrendous crimes out of fear and still be culpable of the crime nonetheless.

One can fulfill all three conditions of a mortal sin while being afraid, and many terrible sins of omission are committed out of fear; fear of public opinion, fear of whatever.

I think it is dangerous to claim that getting an abortion is merely a venial sin if you do it out of fear. What’s more, we are not required to confess our venial sins, so saying that certain abortions are merely venial is wrong. Abortion is always serious, no matter what circumstances, and if the person committing an abortion asks if it is merely a venial sin would suggest the person is not really that sorry about it. The advice would be to:

1. Realize it is a terrible sin.
2. Go to confession.
3. Do penance and make reparation for the killing of a child.

It does nobody any good to say that a terrible sin is merely venial depending on how one feel. A mortal sin can have different levels of culpability, but it is still a mortal sin nonetheless. A soul can end up in hell for many different reasons; same hell just different level…

 

[marty1818]

Specifically with abortion it is an ex-communicable offense.

From the Code of Canon Law:

Can. 1398 A person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication.

Simply by committing the act, the person is excommunicated.

 

[rom422]

Specifically with abortion it is an ex-communicable offense.

From the Code of Canon Law:

Can. 1398 A person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication.

Simply by committing the act, the person is excommunicated.

Those who procured abortion, but did not know that they would be excommunicated by that act, are not necessarily excommunicated. See the link below:

ewtn.com/expert/answers/abortio2.htm.

Many people are really not very knowledgeable about canon law (including me!) and may not be aware that procuring abortion is an ex-communicable offense.

 

[Lost_Sheep]

It is true that you cannot commit a mortal sin if you do not know that you are committing one. However, it will take a great deal of soul searching on your part to decide whether you’ve really been honest, and that you were not merely finding excuses for such a horrible act.

Suppose you are ignorant enough on the subject to THINK you are being honest, but are in fact just making an excuse?

 

[chepner3]

I have also moved away from the Church and returned. I look at this in a much more simplistic way. I consider it like a break-up with a spouse or fiancee. When you come back, you want need to re-establish the relationship again. You need to be open about everything you did while you were broken up. Did you deny the other person even existed? Did you do things that the other person would think repulsive? For instance, my husband is an avid non-smoker. If we broke up and I went off and took up smoking, then I stopped and we got together again, I think I should be honest with him that I smoked during that time. It doesn’t matter what I thought about smoking while we were broken up, what matters is how I think about smoking NOW. If I wanted to continue to smoke while in a relationship with my husband, I’d know it was wrong.

In the same way, when we return to the Church, we need to exam all our past behavior and work through all those old thought processes to come to terms with how the Church teaches us to believe. When it comes to abortion, this is a struggle point for me. I don’t think the government should make laws against abortion. I think it is wrong for the government to interfere with a private medical decision. Will I ever get an abortion? No. Will I arrange for my daughter to get an abortion? No. Will I fund abortions? No. Will I counsel people against abortions? Yes. Will I be one of those pro-life protesters? No, I won’t because it isn’t one of those hot-button issues for me.

Now we’re lucky because if an abortion occurred while you were separated from the Church, you can obtain the sacrament of reconciliation and “come right” with God - if you’re truly sorry for your part in it. If you went off and became a mercenary (killer for hire), your road back to the Church might be a bit harder. Either way, I’m going to bet that there are lots of other sins to confess while you were away from the Church, too.

 

[rom422]

Suppose you are ignorant enough on the subject to THINK you are being honest, but are in fact just making an excuse?

I cannot pass a judgment on the conscience of anyone. Nor should the priest. You alone would know whether you’ve been honest or not. In the confessional it is the penitent who accuses himself, not the priest. The penitent says, “Father, I have committed a sin against purity by … blah, blah, blah.” Or, “Father, I’ve been guilty of stealing blah, blah, blah.” The priest is there only to listen to your confession and to judge. As a priest he is given by Christ the power to release or to bind. As a judge, he uses this power based on your confession to either give you absolution or to withhold absolution. If you show that you are truly sincere, you will receive absolution no matter how horrible the sin. But if you show no sign of repentance, then the priest might withhold the absolution. It is case to case basis.

Those who know that abortion incurs the penalty of excommunication and still procured it, could have been automatically excommunicated when they completed the abortion. The excommunication can be lifted, but the sinners have to go to confession to someone who has the faculty of lifting an excommunication - that means, a bishop or a priest delegated by the bishop. Not all priests have the faculty to lift an excommunication.

 

[rom422]

When it comes to abortion, this is a struggle point for me. I don’t think the government should make laws against abortion. I think it is wrong for the government to interfere with a private medical decision. Will I ever get an abortion? No. Will I arrange for my daughter to get an abortion? No. Will I fund abortions? No. Will I counsel people against abortions? Yes. Will I be one of those pro-life protesters? No, I won’t because it isn’t one of those hot-button issues for me.

I appreciate your personal stance against abortion, and on that I agree with you 100%. However, I do not agree with the idea that the government shouldn’t make laws against abortion.

It is true that it is not the function of government to make people holy. The government should not make laws that interfere with religion, or that promote a particular religion. But it is the function of government to protect life, property, peace and order, and the common good. If the mother has a medical condition which in the process of treatment aborts a baby, then the abortion is not intended and may be tolerated. But if the mother does not have a medical condition, and the presence of the baby in the womb does not endanger the life of the mother, then killing the baby is nothing less than murder, and the government should have laws to prevent that. It is the function of government to protect life, regardless whether the person is inside or outside the mother’s womb.

 

[chepner3]

We could argue abortion semantics all day long. Heaven only knows that the argument has gone on for centuries. The leap in your reasoning is that if the mother intentionally seeks an abortion, then that amounts to nothing more than murder. However, intentionally ending a life is not always murder. Soldiers on the battlefield aren’t murderers. Nurses who give a dying patient extra morphine to calm the “death throws” aren’t murderers. Terminating a baby that hasn’t yet achieved consciousness and can’t survive outside the womb is quite possibly not murder. We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.

I don’t think there is anywhere in the US Constitution which gives the federal government the charter to define “when life begins”. For US citizenship, life begins at birth. There are multiple examples of legal precedent which establishes that laws can’t be applied earlier than that. For instance, adoption proceedings can’t begin on an infant until the birth has actually occurred. Yes, there are some laws that have enhanced punishments for the death of a woman while she is pregnant, but that doesn’t necessarily constitute the definition of life or citizenship. The person the law is protecting is the pregnant woman - and her right to chose to continue her pregnancy. In the same manner, the law shouldn’t dictate to doctors which medical procedures they can perform. Perhaps there are other avenues for controlling specific medical procedures but it shouldn’t be federal law; state law maybe; hospital policy - sure, just not federal law.

Keep in mind that the term “abortion” is emotionally charged. However, all early terminations of a pregnancy are considered an “abortion” in medical terminology. If the embryo or fetus is non-viable (already dead), then the woman may have to go through a medical procedure called an abortion to preserve her fertility and prevent sepsis. A woman who is having trouble in her uterus may need to go through a medical procedure called a D&C (the most common form of abortion) to clear out tissue and have it tested - even though she isn’t even pregnant. A pregnant woman may even lose the pregnancy at home, which many people would call a miscarriage, but there is no medical term “miscarriage”; the medical terminology is “abortion”. Yet because of “abortion statistics” which make the untrained mind think that there are thousands of woman getting a medical procedure done as a form of birth control, there are medical schools that are feeling pressured to not even teach these important, life saving procedures. Imagine the number of women who will die, become gravely ill or infertile because they couldn’t have a private conversation with their doctor without government interference.

 

[rom422]

We could argue abortion semantics all day long. Heaven only knows that the argument has gone on for centuries. The leap in your reasoning is that if the mother intentionally seeks an abortion, then that amounts to nothing more than murder. However, intentionally ending a life is not always murder. Soldiers on the battlefield aren’t murderers. Nurses who give a dying patient extra morphine to calm the “death throws” aren’t murderers. Terminating a baby that hasn’t yet achieved consciousness and can’t survive outside the womb is quite possibly not murder. We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.

I don’t think there is anywhere in the US Constitution which gives the federal government the charter to define “when life begins”. For US citizenship, life begins at birth. There are multiple examples of legal precedent which establishes that laws can’t be applied earlier than that. For instance, adoption proceedings can’t begin on an infant until the birth has actually occurred. Yes, there are some laws that have enhanced punishments for the death of a woman while she is pregnant, but that doesn’t necessarily constitute the definition of life or citizenship. The person the law is protecting is the pregnant woman - and her right to chose to continue her pregnancy. In the same manner, the law shouldn’t dictate to doctors which medical procedures they can perform. Perhaps there are other avenues for controlling specific medical procedures but it shouldn’t be federal law; state law maybe; hospital policy - sure, just not federal law.

Keep in mind that the term “abortion” is emotionally charged. However, all early terminations of a pregnancy are considered an “abortion” in medical terminology. If the embryo or fetus is non-viable (already dead), then the woman may have to go through a medical procedure called an abortion to preserve her fertility and prevent sepsis. A woman who is having trouble in her uterus may need to go through a medical procedure called a D&C (the most common form of abortion) to clear out tissue and have it tested - even though she isn’t even pregnant. A pregnant woman may even lose the pregnancy at home, which many people would call a miscarriage, but there is no medical term “miscarriage”; the medical terminology is “abortion”. Yet because of “abortion statistics” which make the untrained mind think that there are thousands of woman getting a medical procedure done as a form of birth control, there are medical schools that are feeling pressured to not even teach these important, life saving procedures. Imagine the number of women who will die, become gravely ill or infertile because they couldn’t have a private conversation with their doctor without government interference.

There is no leap in my thinking, because I do not define murder simply as “intentionally ending a life.” I define murder as the intentional killing of an innocent human being. And I consider a person innocent in this context if he or she has neither committed a crime nor is in the act of committing one. If an aggressor were to attack me and threaten my life, I sure have the right to defend myself, even to the point of killing the aggressor if necessary. This is not murder; it is self-defense. But a baby in the womb cannot in any sense be regarded as an aggressor, because it is simply living and growing in the one place where it can rightfully grow, and that is, in the womb of the mother. I think that intentionally killing the baby in this case is murder.

I know, we can still argue about whether the baby in the womb is really a human being or not. In fact, this has been the issue in many hot abortion debates. But we must be careful not to judge that a fetus is not a human being simply because it is arbitrarily defined to be non-human. If a Hitler were to arbitrarily define anyone who is Jewish to be non-human, that will not make any person of Jewish descent a non-human, isn’t it? So, the big question is whether the fetus in the mother’s womb is to be regarded as a human being or just a piece of undesirable tissue. My bet is that it is a human being. Granted that this fetus is still unable to live outside the womb, and that it is not yet conscious, then why would it not be human? It is the offspring of a human being, so it is a human being in the earliest stage. What difference is there between a fetus and a child, and between a child and an adolescent, and between an adolescent and an adult? There is no difference in nature, I think, but only a difference in the stage of growth. Let us be careful then to define the fetus as not human just because it is not yet a child, for if we tolerate this kind of thinking, someone can also say that a child is not human because it does not yet have the characteristics of an adult. Very bad thinking.

I still think that governments should protect human life even in its earliest stage.