On Confession and back sliding

[eleusis]

CA team,
Here is a mind game.

A person has an addiction. Goes to confession, resolves never to allow it to mark his soul again and moves on only to find the sin has returned to his life. The cycle continues for awhile but he discovers that if he partakes of the sin and personally repents but DOES NOT go to confession he is able to resist a return to the sin for months at a time. And from what he told me currently its been quite some time.

However, this is still a mortal blemish on his soul, but it apparently keeps him from further mortal sin. Should it be confessed and confessed over and over to, what he says, no effect. Or held in obeyence in a sort of understanding between he and God that the sin is a sort of break on further sin?

Is he just fooling himself to avoid seeing the same priest for the same sin and looking weak? (This is my guess)

Thanks for your insight.

 

[puzzleannie]

this individual is confusing his own efforts in this matter with the action of Christ in his soul through the sacraments. Because he does not detect visible signs of the graces of the sacrament in a form he recognizes or appreciates, he assumes those graces are having no effect. Also, if he is in an objective state of mortal sin he must confess before receiving communion whether or not he thinks he is “getting anything out of” the sacrament.

 

[mrs_abbott]

My husband doesn’t go to Confession because he doesn’t feel like he should have to confess his sins to a priest and that God knows what’s in his heart and soul.
I told him that it teaches us to be humble if we have to say them out loud to someone else.
He told me that’s bologna and that he feels humble when he prays to God at night to forgive him.
Unfortunately, that stumped me and I had no response for that.
Help?

 

[otm]

mrs_abbott:

My husband doesn’t go to Confession because he doesn’t feel like he should have to confess his sins to a priest and that God knows what’s in his heart and soul.
I told him that it teaches us to be humble if we have to say them out loud to someone else.
He told me that’s bologna and that he feels humble when he prays to God at night to forgive him.
Unfortunately, that stumped me and I had no response for that.
Help?

The easiest lie we tell is to ourselves.

It is not for no reason that many, if not most moral theologians will put pride as the deadliest of sins. If he is saying that he “feels” humble, he has missed the issue. It is not a feeling of humilty that we seek, but humility itself. It is humility that allows one to confess their sins to a priest; it is pride that prevents one from doing so.

If we are to believe the beginning of John’s Gospel, that all was created through the Word, and nothing was created without Him, and we believe that christ is the God man, the second person of the Trinity (the Word), then Christ through whom as God all things were created, is the most knowledgeable person in the world concerning our psychological makeup. and it was Christ who instituted the Sacrament of Reconcilliation, because he knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. He knows our ability to deceive ourselves, our ability to sin and deny the depth of that sin, and our need to confront that sin head on by doing what we seem to abhor - tell it to someone else, and ask forgiveness.

What gives your husband the right to tell God that His Son was wrong, that the Sacrament is not the way we need to reconcile with Him?

In a word, the sin of pride.