Scrupulous

[Agent]

How can a person determine if he is scrupulous?

 

[Brickmaker]

How can a person determine if he is scrupulous?

I found these on a traditional site; they may be helpful:

Signs of Scrupulosity
1 Fear you are committing sin while doing things even devout people don’t find sinful.

  2.   Frequently changing your mind for trivial reasons (or no reasons at all) about whether something is sinful; one minute you think something is not sinful and the next minute you think it is sinful.

  3.   Constant worry or anxiety about sin, without being able to figure out a reason for the worry.

  4.   Constant worry about your confessions, even though the priest has told you that there was nothing wrong with them.

  5.   Stubbornness with the priest in confession — thinking that you are right about something being sinful and that he is wrong — which leads you to go to a lot of different priests for confession, without really heeding the advice or instructions you receive from any of them.

  6.   Repeatedly asking whether or not an action is sinful, even though the priest has told you the answer to the question before.

  7.   Repeatedly confessing as sins — "just in case" — things which the priest has told you are not sins.

 

[Joannm]

I think you hit all the pertinent signs. While I am not scrupulous I have argued with a priest over a sin once in awhile. In each case he kept asking me “where is the sin?” He wanted me to truly reflect on it and to tell him exactly what I did that was sinful and more importantly, what was my intention when I did it. Most of the time, I come to see that it was not sinful at all. I find that many scurpulous people think that almost everything they think or see or do leads them to sin…and that simply is not the case.

Take for example the situations that someone brought up on one of these boards about sketching nude models. Could that be a sin. Maybe? Did it lead me to lustful thoughts. Did I go home and give myself pleasure? Did I think about having an affair? Or, did I simply admire the human body for the work of art that it is and keep my mind on drawing. A scrupulous person would have proabaly thought it sinful, even if their thoughts and actions didn’t lead to anything, simply because it was a naked person. They didn’t do anything sinful at all. Looking at nudes (I am not talking porn here) is not sinful.

This is just one example. There are many others that I am sure people can offer. If you are constantly thinking about sin, then you proabaly are scrupulous.