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Dovekin
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It does not.
Excommunication is a disciplinary measure to bring a member of the Church to reconsider divergent behavior/beliefs.
What if someone in RCIA doesn't accept all of the Church's teachings?
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Excommunication is a disciplinary measure to bring a member of the Church to reconsider divergent behavior/beliefs.
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stpurl
Guest
Mortal sin, right?
Or if you will, for ‘at worst’, in grave danger of committing mortal sin through obstinacy and denial.
I find that the modern use of ‘grave sin’ confuses people into thinking there are three types of sin, venial (little things like white lies, Mortal which is the really bad stuff like murder, and ‘grave’ which is sins that are serious in nature but ONLY if you really fully know it, or fully commit them, but are on the same level as venial if you don’t fully know they’re ‘grave’, or you don’t ACCEPT that they’re grave).
Again, very confusing to the poor modern Catholic especially given in the last 50 years or so they’ve had usually terrible catechesis and this has actually been their teaching!
Or if you will, for ‘at worst’, in grave danger of committing mortal sin through obstinacy and denial.
I find that the modern use of ‘grave sin’ confuses people into thinking there are three types of sin, venial (little things like white lies, Mortal which is the really bad stuff like murder, and ‘grave’ which is sins that are serious in nature but ONLY if you really fully know it, or fully commit them, but are on the same level as venial if you don’t fully know they’re ‘grave’, or you don’t ACCEPT that they’re grave).
Again, very confusing to the poor modern Catholic especially given in the last 50 years or so they’ve had usually terrible catechesis and this has actually been their teaching!
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OraLabora
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- It depends on what is being denied, and whether one is publicly promoting that denial or simply carrying it on one’s conscience.
- No. Excommunication means separation from the sacraments. It is a disciplinary measure designed to bring the penitent to repentance, not a measure to kick someone out of the Church.
Depends if all three conditions are met.
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neophyte
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In that case he cannot honestly affirm to believe all that the Catholic Church proposes for belief, should not do falsely and should not present himself for entry into the Church.
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JimG
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I think that this is an accurate observation. We always knew the three conditions for mortal sin, even in the ancient times in which I grew up. But we didn’t always fixate so much on the three conditions, except the first one. We pretty much all knew what was mortal and what was venial. Full knowledge and full consent seemed pretty much a given for moral sins. People didn’t try so hard to psychoanalyze their state of mind.
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Dovekin
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But you undercut your position by trying to do this. If the Church is to be believed when it teaches against Tiddlywinks, the Church is not a reliable witness. We know Tiddlywinks is not sinful. There are many who are alienated from the Church because the Church teaches something that they believe is trivial. You articulate quite well the reasons why Tiddlywinks is not sinful, you just do not seem to realize the harm an example like this does.
Your argument about capital punishment is similarly confused. You begin with in modern circumstances and end with Right and wrong never change. If the second is true, the first is irrelevant. If the first is relevant, the second becomes problematic.
Precisely!
That is why I object to minimizing the teaching of the Church by rejecting conscience. God has made us to be free, responsible people.
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ioannes_pius
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Okay, thank you for the clarification. I’m realizing that it’s probably more an issue of semantics than anything else. I still have a few issues though. That excommunication is “separation from the sacraments” is true in general, but there is more to it than that. Take Fr. Hardon’s definition in the Modern Catholic Dictionary:
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esieffe
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If a RCIA program is woth it’s salt, there IS a “list” of sorts given over time in the program, starting with the ten commandments. While some Christian groups play fast and loose with some of the the 10 commandments , the Catholic goal is to follow them strictly. Whereas some think abortion is ok, we know that it is killing. While some feel premarital sex is part of dating, we consider it adultery.
Being Catholic is not for everyone. It isn’t always easy, yet I can easily and without hesitation that my became better many times over when I converted. I sometimes feel bad for cradle Catholics since they don’t know just how bad it is on the other side of the fence.
My advice to people who disagree with doctrine is to finish RCIA until the rites begin and stop there. Stick around as members if you like, you are most welcome to, and refrain from communion and just see how things go. At my church there were people who stuck around for years before they finally became Catholic. There isn’t anything wrong with that as long as you refrain from receiving communion.
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OraLabora
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Actually, we don’t. The correct term for unmarried people engaging in illicit sex is “fornication”. Adultery is when at least one person is married.
We do though, include it as an extension of the sixth commandment which we broadly interpret to include any form of illicit sexual relations.
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esieffe
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Yes of course, didn’t put enough thought into the post. Thanks for the correction.
You relate a beautiful narrative here, and I found it very inspiring to read.HomeschoolDad:
I wouldn’t say that’s always true. The Natural Law for instance, speaks of the law of God written in our hearts, and that is even revealed to non-believers.
I do realize that there is such a thing as natural law, and that it is said to be engraved on our hearts. Well, all I can say, is that there seem to have been a lot of people who were out sick on Engraving Day. They just don’t get it.
I think my example is just fine. I hate to “call out the posse”, but is there anyone else here who had difficulty with it? I was obviously using “tiddly winks” as a surrogate for certain activities that are not obviously sinful to the mind uninformed by divine grace. If you find this disagreeable, think of some things that the Catholic Church teaches as being sinful, but people outside of the Catholic Church (and, sadly, far too many within it) simply do not see anything wrong with. Pick out one of those things and plug it in wherever you see the words “tiddly winks”. My point will be clear.HomeschoolDad:
But you undercut your position by trying to do this. If the Church is to be believed when it teaches against Tiddlywinks, the Church is not a reliable witness. We know Tiddlywinks is not sinful. There are many who are alienated from the Church because the Church teaches something that they believe is trivial. You articulate quite well the reasons why Tiddlywinks is not sinful, you just do not seem to realize the harm an example like this does.
No, I stick by what I said. Capital punishment, in and of itself, is not sinful. It is a drastic solution only to be used when it absolutely has to be, and when there is no other alternative. The mind of the Church in the present day is that we do, indeed, have alternatives in our modern world, so there is never an excuse to resort to it. The principle itself is unchanged. If some catastrophe took place (the present situation in the spring of 2020 is not that catastrophe) and the world were reduced to a brutish, terrifying, squalid place without the social institutions needed for incarceration and rehabilitation, and if roving criminals were killing, raping, pillaging, and otherwise behaving very badly, then yes, the civil authorities might have to perform executions. And there would be nothing wrong with that.
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You’re telling me!
I agree with every word you say here.
I was reading my trusty 1958 edition of the catechism Life in Christ the other day, the best simple adult catechism I’ve seen yet, and what a breath of fresh air! There is mortal sin, and there is venial sin. Beautiful in its simplicity and elegance. Just like I remembered it. (I hadn’t read this chapter in many years.) I may try to take photos of these pages and reproduce them here, when I get a chance.
I have to wonder sometimes, if this widespread use of the term “grave sin”, and people getting all testy about saying “mortal sin” (and “objectively mortal sin” — nobody likes that anymore!), is a way to slip in through the back door the concept of “you can continue to commit certain grave sins, and even live in grave sin if those are your circumstances, but it falls short of being ‘mortal’, so you can go ahead, receive communion, and not have to worry about going to hell”. Nobody comes right out and says that, but I suspect the concept is starting to leach into us. I don’t so much fear what is obviously evil and in-your-face about that evil. I fear far more the analogy of the frog starting off in a pan of cold water, and then the water being slowly heated until he finally dies without having noticed the water was getting warmer and warmer until it was too late. Death by a thousand cuts.
I’ve noted this on CAF threads before, but back in the 1980s, the word to use was “serious” sin. Examinations of conscience would refer to “venial sin” and “serious sin”. Not mortal sin, but “serious” sin. (“Grave” came along later.) I asked my pastor what the difference was, if any, between “serious” and “mortal” sin, and his answer was absolutely priceless! — “well, all sin is serious”. Beautiful. Positively beautiful.
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stpurl
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How I long for the clarity of the old Baltimore catechism and its assumption that even children could be trusted to think logically if they were taught properly.
Now it is assumed that we are all ‘in different places’ and ‘need to be met where we are’ and that ‘black-and-white thinking’ is totally wrong, there are always exceptions, what’s right for YOU may not be for ME, conscience trumps truth because what is ‘well informed for YOU may not be for ME”. . . It’s all a monkey house. Pick and choose, remember that a word means only what the speaker chooses it to mean, remember how offensive it is to ‘our sisters and brothers’ to be ‘judged’, to have something imposed upon them, to have to accept that there might be an absolute truth for all people and not just ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’, to even have the chutzpah to believe Jesus is the ONLY way, etc.
Even before the 1960s the world, secular and sacred, was being conditioned to accept ambiguity and wholesale impositions of what words ‘meant’. (Look when I was a small child watching the original Flintstones, nobody sniggered about Fred and Barney having a ‘gay old time’. By the time I was in college in the 1970s, ‘gay’ meant nothing BUT homosexual. In about 15 years the entire English speaking world completely ‘rewrote’ the definition of ‘gay’ simply by ‘shouting down’ anything BUT that definition. (The Protestant world did the same thing over the same period of time, more or less, with the terms ‘prayer’ and ‘worship’, to the point where no Catholic can use them in the sense they had been used for centuries, the sense the PROTESTANTS THEMSELVES had used albeit for a shorter time, and again, simply by shouting down any ‘resistance’ and playing the victim card and guilting Catholics into mumchance ‘acceptance’ lest the CATHOLICS be seen as bullies. Oh quaint injustice!
We’ve already turned communication among English-speakers into a complete Babel where people can spout words, sentences, even whole books, communicating what the speakers say means X and what the readers read as saying -not-X. As a child I could not have imagined OUR world turning into the Orwellian one where I could read plain simple English words knowing that what was being ‘conveyed’ by them could be meant by their exact opposite, depending upon what our ‘betters’, I.e. our media, our government, our society gatekeepers etc., determined them to be.
But it’s happened.
Now it is assumed that we are all ‘in different places’ and ‘need to be met where we are’ and that ‘black-and-white thinking’ is totally wrong, there are always exceptions, what’s right for YOU may not be for ME, conscience trumps truth because what is ‘well informed for YOU may not be for ME”. . . It’s all a monkey house. Pick and choose, remember that a word means only what the speaker chooses it to mean, remember how offensive it is to ‘our sisters and brothers’ to be ‘judged’, to have something imposed upon them, to have to accept that there might be an absolute truth for all people and not just ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’, to even have the chutzpah to believe Jesus is the ONLY way, etc.
Even before the 1960s the world, secular and sacred, was being conditioned to accept ambiguity and wholesale impositions of what words ‘meant’. (Look when I was a small child watching the original Flintstones, nobody sniggered about Fred and Barney having a ‘gay old time’. By the time I was in college in the 1970s, ‘gay’ meant nothing BUT homosexual. In about 15 years the entire English speaking world completely ‘rewrote’ the definition of ‘gay’ simply by ‘shouting down’ anything BUT that definition. (The Protestant world did the same thing over the same period of time, more or less, with the terms ‘prayer’ and ‘worship’, to the point where no Catholic can use them in the sense they had been used for centuries, the sense the PROTESTANTS THEMSELVES had used albeit for a shorter time, and again, simply by shouting down any ‘resistance’ and playing the victim card and guilting Catholics into mumchance ‘acceptance’ lest the CATHOLICS be seen as bullies. Oh quaint injustice!
We’ve already turned communication among English-speakers into a complete Babel where people can spout words, sentences, even whole books, communicating what the speakers say means X and what the readers read as saying -not-X. As a child I could not have imagined OUR world turning into the Orwellian one where I could read plain simple English words knowing that what was being ‘conveyed’ by them could be meant by their exact opposite, depending upon what our ‘betters’, I.e. our media, our government, our society gatekeepers etc., determined them to be.
But it’s happened.
There is a legendary gift shop in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina called the “Gay Dolphin”, and nobody gives it a second thought. When I took my son there on vacation last year, he commented on it, and I explained to him that it was named long before anyone gave a second thought to the word “gay”.
We also used to buy “Gay 90s” white bread when I was growing up. I don’t know if they sell it anymore.
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stpurl
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The gay 90s of the 19th century was a far cry from the gay 90s of the 20th.
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pnewton
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The Catholic Church also proposes for belief a distinction between dogma and doctrine, the primacy of conscience and lifelong job of forming that conscience. That is why I keep saying these simplistic answers are not pat. The priest should explore the issue. I made that same promise even though I had not yet the same Catholic understanding of the death penalty. People are not perfected before entry into the Church, either morally or intellectually. Salvation is not a theology quiz.
The Church defines what does bar entry into the Church, a lot of it having to do with sex. Then there is dogma. Anything else should be discussed with the priest.
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neophyte
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This is a very strange objection to what I said, given that it simultaneously affirms it and rejects it.
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1Lord1Faith
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I think it would be helpful to have three major classifications of sin (venial, serious, and mortal or grave - I prefer grave, mortal sounds so dramatic) instead of two (venial and mortal).
So are you saying that, in your view, dogma and only dogma cannot be disagreed with, or dissented from? That doctrine which does not rise to the level of dogma, is free game? Some doctrines but not others? Where would you draw the line? And why?neophyte:
The Catholic Church also proposes for belief a distinction between dogma and doctrine, the primacy of conscience and lifelong job of forming that conscience. That is why I keep saying these simplistic answers are not pat. The priest should explore the issue. I made that same promise even though I had not yet the same Catholic understanding of the death penalty. People are not perfected before entry into the Church, either morally or intellectually. Salvation is not a theology quiz.
The Church defines what does bar entry into the Church, a lot of it having to do with sex. Then there is dogma. Anything else should be discussed with the priest.
The Church consistently and authoritatively teaches many things that, strictly speaking, are not dogma. Doctrine can develop and become more refined, but it cannot change from X to non-X. True cannot become false.
Case in point: I have wondered if we could say that the use of condoms, within the marital act, solely to prevent the transmission of disease (such as HIV, Zika, herpes, and some would say cancer — it is possible that cancer could be transmitted via the male issue, I’ve known of possible instances with married couples), with the prevention of pregnancy being tolerated but not positively willed, could be admissible. So far as I am aware, the magisterium has never specifically addressed this issue. It’s just fallen under the rubric of “contraception is intrinsically evil, can’t do it”, and that’s been the end of that. But is my theory right? If not, why not? What’s wrong with it? We use BC pills to treat female conditions, and tolerate the contraceptive effect as an unintended, unwanted consequence. What’s the difference?
To my mind — and I could be wrong — my theory does not change or deny the Church’s teaching on contraception. My “conscience”, if you can call it that, tells me that there wouldn’t be anything wrong with it. But my “mind”, and my “conscience”, are not the ultimate arbiters of truth — God, and His Church, are. I would await the judgment of the magisterium on this matter, as on all matters, and would joyfully accept anything they decided, one way or the other. The matter doesn’t affect me — I live celibately (no annulment) and I am not diseased. I just use this as a case in point.
Might be something to pester the Holy Office with, once this worldwide plague has passed.
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pnewton
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I did not say it was an objection.
Draw the line where the Church does in its definition.
A rejection of any of these is a rejection of the Church herself. There are other precepts which present a bar to communion with the Church, as a matter of canon law, like unlawful marriage. Also, unrepentant mortal sin (living together in a sexual union outside of marriage)would be a bar. On the other hand, disbelieving the Catholic doctrine on capital punishment would not, or at least, I did not deem it so. For one thing, there was no action on my part that was immoral based on this doctrine. Likewise, not believing some of doctrines of Mary that have not been defined as dogma do not require any action under threat of sin ( like the Mediatrix/Co-redemptrix concepts). One is not in a state of grace or not depending on one’s ability to understand these.
I guess, one can simply assent (whatever that means) and not believe or disbelieve, but that is a little to close to intellectual dishonest for me. That is why I think a priest needs to make this decision. We do not know what is going on.
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