Tag: Sin

3 min read

Scripture

What Was Cain’s Sin?

Msgr. Charles E. Pope

August 29, 2019 8:00 am August 29, 2019

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3 min read

While there is no obvious explanation given for the rejection of Cain’s offering in Genesis, there are differences in the details of the two offerings that provide some clues: First,…

While there is no obvious explanation given for the rejection of Cain’s offering in Genesis, there are differences in the details of the two offerings that provide some clues: First, Abel gives of the firstlings (first fruits) of his flock. There is no mention that Cain gave of the first fruits of his crop.

In biblical legislation, God commanded that the tithe be given. But it was not any tenth that was to be given, rather it was the first tenth that was to be given (see Ex 23:16,19; 34:26; Lv 23:10 to name just a few). Thus Cain erred by not presenting first fruits, and God did not regard his offering. We are not to give God leftovers.

A second, though less certain, problem may be that Cain offered a cereal offering, not a blood offering. Scripture attests that it was necessary to shed the blood of animals for the remission of sin. Hebrews 9:22 says, “According to the law almost everything is purified by blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” This is confirmed all throughout the Old Testament wherein God specifies the sacrifice of certain animals for Temple worship. This theory is not without a problem, however, since cereal offerings and other offerings from the harvest are elsewhere commanded and acceptable to God (see Lv 2:14 for just one example).

Whatever the full reason, the Book of Hebrews attests: “By faith Abel offered to God a sacrifice greater than Cain’s. Through this he was attested to be righteous, God bearing witness to his gifts” (11:4).

Cain’s reaction to God’s response goes further to indicate a third area of concern, not for Cain’s offering, but for his disposition. As we shall see later in 1 John 3:12, Cain’s offering was not just lacking, it was evil. And this indicates not a merely external problem with Cain’s offering but an internal disposition of sin that renders his offering displeasing to God. And thus one can offer a technically perfect sacrifice to God, but if we offer it in unrepented and serious sin, God is displeased and we can even bring condemnation on ourselves (see 1 Cor 11:29).

Here, too, the Genesis text hints at the “heart problem” Cain brought to the moment. Scripture says: “Cain was very angry and dejected [that God did not regard his sacrifice]. Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why are you dejected? If you act rightly, you will be accepted; but if not, sin lies in wait at the door; its urge is for you, yet you can rule over it’ ” (Gn 4:5-7).

The image of sin that lies in wait at the door is a powerful one. In permitting his anger and envy to grow toward his brother, Cain is moving toward darkness and sin. He must learn to master his anger and all his passions.

Sadly, Cain gives way to sin and murders his brother. Thus the First Letter of John tersely notes: “Cain … belonged to the evil one and slaughtered his brother. Why did he slaughter him? Because his own works were evil, and those of his brother righteous” (3:12).

Rev. Msgr. Charles E. Pope is a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.

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4 min read

Sin

Conscience and Truth

Carl Olson

August 23, 2019 8:00 am August 23, 2019

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4 min read

Years ago I read a most revealing article in a national newspaper that carries the descriptive “Catholic” in its masthead but rarely carries much orthodox Catholic teaching below the masthead….

Years ago I read a most revealing article in a national newspaper that carries the descriptive “Catholic” in its masthead but rarely carries much orthodox Catholic teaching below the masthead.

The article, written by a young woman, was titled, “I Am a Prochoice Catholic.” Her main assertion was simple: “I am a prochoice Catholic because my Catholic faith tells me I can be.” She recounted spending “several years” praying, reading and studying what both the “church hierarchy” and “the Catholic church — the faithful” had to say about the “right to abortion.” The result? “In the end,” she proclaimed, “after months of avoiding my conscience as to not stir up any controversy in my life, I finally discerned that I am a prochoice Catholic.”

Three quick, initial observations. First, the language she used, especially regarding the seemingly infallible nature of conscience and the vehicle of discernment, echoes what some have been saying about persons in “irregular unions” — that is, adultery. Second, this appeal to the conscience as the final word on one’s choices and actions has been a key playing card for the past 50 years or so for those who oppose the Church’s clear teaching about abortion, contraception and other evils related to sexuality. Third, I never cease to be amused and annoyed by the glaring internal contradiction that exists in appealing to Church authority in order to dismiss that same authority!

Consider the supposed logic: 1) “I am opposed to the Church’s teaching about abortion”; 2) “I am obligated to oppose that teaching because of my conscience”; 3) “And I must follow my conscience, because the Church says I must!” In other words, such folks find it convenient to follow apparent Church teaching when they desire to deny other, inconvenient teachings of the Church. Yes, it’s moderately clever, quite superficial and entirely misleading.

If we follow the logic used above, we arrive at a singular conclusion: that one’s conscience is supreme — even greater than God, truth, good and evil (though few are willing to put it that way). And, of course, this infallible supremacy of the individual conscience is not just acceptable, but is gospel truth for far too many people, including a great number of Catholics.

Yes, it’s true the Church teaches that man’s conscience holds a special place in his person, describing it as man’s “most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1776). Unfortunately, many people ignore the fine print — or, in this case, the print period. The three essentials to keep in mind here are:

1) The conscience is not man’s creation, but “a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey” (No. 1776). Conscience is not involved in creating truth, but rather in recognizing truth. In other words, conscience is a guide, not a god.

2) Conscience must be formed and informed. “A well-formed conscience is upright and truthful”; it forms judgments that conform “with the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator.” It must be educated and formed because humans “are subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer their own judgment and to reject authoritative teachings” (No. 1783).

This education is a lifelong work involving virtue and humility. But it is worth it because “education of the conscience guarantees freedom and engenders peace of heart” (No. 1784).

3) A conscience can be bad, poorly formed and warped by sin. Many factors can contribute to a deeply flawed conscience: “Ignorance of Christ and his Gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one’s passions, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the Church’s authority and her teaching, lack of conversion and of charity: these can be at the source of errors of judgment in moral conduct” (No. 1792).

Alas, many people have it upside down, insisting that their conscience provides a unique moral code, rather than seeing how conscience guides one’s judgments about particular situations in light of universal and objective — that is, God-given — truth and goodness.

Carl E. Olson is the editor of Ignatius Insight (www.ignatiusinsight.com). He and his family live in Eugene, Ore.

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4 min read

Sin

The Value of Conscience

Elizabeth Scalia

July 31, 2019 10:48 am July 31, 2019

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4 min read

The memory still stings: there I was, age 7, the veteran of a splendidly moving and memorable first holy Communion and graced with an oddball love of the Sacrament of…

The memory still stings: there I was, age 7, the veteran of a splendidly moving and memorable first holy Communion and graced with an oddball love of the Sacrament of Confession in all of its velvet-curtained-sliding-screen ambiance, planning to steal a toy “ladies fan” from a candy store, simply to see if I could.

The fan was red, and I had always been — and still am — a sucker for all things red. It was airy, lacy and flamboyant, and I had the 10 cents the thing cost in my pocket.

But the toy display was on the other side of the cashier, and the devil was on my shoulder: “Take it,” he whispered. “I bet you could slip it into your pocket and no one would know.”

Petty theft, which I had never before aspired to, became suddenly a tantalizing challenge. And the fan was red. I took it. I cleverly slipped the thing into my sleeve and casually walked out the door. It was so easy. And so completely unsatisfying.

By the time I’d walked home, fanning myself all the way in a manner I was sure duplicated the graceful lines of a señorita, I had begun to feel a peculiar emptiness that was new, and throughout the day that feeling grew, until it threatened to become a black hole into which I could disappear. By eventide, I had thrown the fan away from me in disgust. It wasn’t mine; it was ill-gotten booty. I had sinned, and it was not good.

The next day was Saturday — confession day in our neighborhood, for in 1965 it was a rare Catholic who would receive Communion without first reconciling themselves to God. I frankly couldn’t wait to get the theft off my chest — and out of my heart and soul — and had barely gotten the “bless me father” off my tongue before the full story came pouring out. The priest, spending another glorious Saturday within a small, airless box and — at that hour — listening mostly to the piping sins of children, had given a grumpy acknowledgement that my sin was a biggie. “Stealing is mentioned in the Ten Commandments; it especially offends God,” he said, and I thought, “I know, I know, it’s been eating at me.”

Thank God for penance. A Rosary decade on my knees felt sufficiently arduous, and I emerged from church feeling like I’d done my piece. And yet . . . it couldn’t be that easy, could it? Where was the justice? The man at the candy store was still out his 10 cents.

Walking home, I fingered the quarter in my pocket, given me by my grandmother and designated for an orange drink I craved. My sense of justice wrestled with my thirst. I did dearly love my orange drink. But, finally, conscience won out; stepping into the candy store, I approached the counter, meaning to confess my crime, pay the dime and be done. But I couldn’t. Serving justice on a coward’s tray, I waited until the man’s attention was diverted, and quietly slid the quarter on his counter and quickly left the store.

It was not a perfectly balanced redemption; it left me cleansed, but out 15 cents. But I had not yet explored the vagaries of fairness. I was ignorant of all but the most elementary theology, and it would be many years before I could distinguish between the unsophisticated notion of “Catholic guilt” and the heavy grace of “a properly formed conscience,” but I felt better. My Catholic grounding had informed my sense of both justice and mercy. I had confessed regret to my God and made a generous, if anonymous, restitution, and the gaping mouth of emptiness so eager to swallow me had been resolutely snapped shut. The red fan was never again a pleasurable toy, but it became a favorite possession, a reminder that whenever God is pushed aside, only emptiness awaits.

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1 min read

Suffering

Can Suffering Help Make Up For Sin?

Father Reginald Martin

July 26, 2019 7:41 am July 26, 2019

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The Sacrament of Baptism frees us from sin and makes us a new creation (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1213). It does not, however, take away our free…

The Sacrament of Baptism frees us from sin and makes us a new creation (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1213). It does not, however, take away our free will, and experience shows us we are sadly prone to fall into sin after our initial conversion. God’s mercy provides a number of remedies for such subsequent sin, principally the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

The Sacrament of Reconciliation restores the union with God that is weakened by sin, but we may still suffer a lingering need for spiritual purification. Our theology teaches us we may accomplish this purification here on earth or, after our death, in purgatory.

We call this purification “atonement,” and we accomplish it in various ways. The Catechism identifies traditional forms of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, as well as “revision of life, examination of conscience, spiritual direction, acceptance of suffering, endurance of persecution for the sake of righteousness” (No. 1435). The text also recommends frequent reception of the Eucharist (No. 1436).

The value of atonement is its power to unite our pain with the suffering of Christ. The cross “reconciles man with God … and it heals” (No. 1990). To seek signs of the cross in our life enables us to embrace Christ’s love more intimately.

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6 min read

Sin

What Does It Mean To Be Truly Free?

Msgr. Michael Heintz

July 10, 2019 2:02 pm July 10, 2019

6 min read

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6 min read

We are all born into captivity. And we don’t even know it. We are not nearly as “free” as we like to think we are. Each of us is born…

We are all born into captivity. And we don’t even know it. We are not nearly as “free” as we like to think we are. Each of us is born enslaved to ourselves and thus have become complicit in the rebellion of the fallen angels against their Creator and ours. It’s a subtle and insidious enslavement; none of us rolls out of bed in the morning consciously thinking, “I am the center of the universe,” and yet almost all of our desires, choices and actions are governed by this diabolical assertion. And the assertion, like all things diabolical, is a lie.

Far from being always so obvious to us, original sin is very much like a virus that affects our entire operating system, lurking behind the screen of our life and manifesting itself in our serial sins as well as greater offenses — it distorts the way we see ourselves, the world and God. As postmodern persons, we are remarkably self-conscious and yet bereft of genuine self-awareness. We don’t really see ourselves because we are, ourselves, “in the way.” The “ego,” what Thomas Merton called the “false self” — the “me” that is at the center of this lie — occludes our vision so that we don’t see even ourselves as we should. Our vision of others also is skewed, and so we end up looking at others either as objects in the way of the exercise of our will (competitors) or as instruments we can use to achieve our own ends. In some ways, the art of Christian living is learning to stay out of the way.

Far too often we imagine that God’s grace works something like this: our unruly desires and passions lead us into any number of sins, in thought, word, action and omission. God’s grace enters in and acts as a governor, limiting our choices — clamping down, as it were, on that freedom and thus keeping us on the “straight and narrow.” However, rather than imagining grace as a kind of power that limits us by external constraint, perhaps we might re-conceive divine grace more helpfully.

In baptism, we were plunged into the dying and rising of the Lord Jesus Christ and configured to Him. We share, by His gift, in His risen life, the life of the world to come, the new life made possible by His own paschal victory and now extended to us by the sacraments. Perhaps rather than seeing grace as an external constraint, we might rather view it as it really is: the fruit of the new life given to us in Christ. To be “in Christ” (one of St. Paul’s favorite expressions) is to share in His new life — His victory and triumph over sin. Grace, far from acting as a kind of inhibitor, actually liberates us and makes us free, genuinely free. When Gabriel greeted Our Lady with the strange Greek epithet kecharitomene, usually rendered “full of grace,” he was observing her unique status among all the daughters of Eve (as well as among all the sons of Adam): Mary is most graced. And yet we must not read that to mean that she was somehow less free. Mary is actually the freest human person who ever lived, and that is precisely because she is most graced. Grace does not inhibit or create curbs for freedom, it liberates it.

Filial Love

The saints are those who have entered into this genuine freedom in Christ. They are not constrained or cramped by grace. Quite the contrary, they are men and women who have moved from servile to filial love — their relationship with the Lord is not one dominated by rules and regulations, but rather is informed by the New Law, the law of love. It is this love that is the motivating factor of moral action in their lives. It would never dawn on them to think, “What’s the minimum I need to do not to be damned?” Rather, they are moved and drawn by love, a love for Christ that first comes from Him — a divine love, the agape of the Gospels — and this is what forms their life. The “operating system” in the life of the saints is no longer sin, but it is this love and the grace and freedom it brings.

Holy Trinity. Shutterstock

In his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, St. John Paul II recognizes that the relation of truth and freedom has been constant in the Church’s teaching: “Only the freedom which submits to the Truth leads the human person to his true good. The good of the person is to be in the Truth and to do the Truth” (No. 86). This flows from Jesus’ own words: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32).

In a culture that exalts in independence and autonomy, and in which the uninhibited exercise of freedom is the golden ring for which all unreflectively strive, the Gospel invites us to discover freedom precisely in relationship: We are most free when we live in relation with God in Christ. The Christian faith holds that the Holy Trinity — God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit — is the fullness of what it means “to be,” and thus “to be” in the fullest sense is “to be” precisely “in relation.” For us who by grace are offered a created share in that Uncreated Life (what Tradition would call deification or divinization), true freedom is discovered only as life in Christ, the supreme grace, by whose Spirit we have been liberated from the grip of sin and death, and through whom we have a unique and privileged access to the Father — to live as truly free sons and daughters in the Eternal Son made man.

Msgr. Michael Heintz, Ph.D., a priest of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, is academic dean at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

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1 min read

Sin

Misusing “Oh, my God!”

Msgr. Charles E. Pope

June 3, 2019 10:19 am June 3, 2019

1 min read

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1 min read

While the phrase “Oh, my God” could be a prayer, it is not usually meant in this way. More commonly it uses the Divine name as a mere expression of…

While the phrase “Oh, my God” could be a prayer, it is not usually meant in this way. More commonly it uses the Divine name as a mere expression of surprise or exasperation. This is not a reverent or prayerful use of God’s name in most circumstances. The word “vain” means empty. And, therefore, the context you cite would usually seem to qualify as using God’s name in vain.

However, in assigning culpability (blameworthiness), it is good to remember that some have developed a bad habit of using this expression. As such, they usually commit the sin in weakness rather than malice, not intending to show disrespect to God.

It should further be recalled that the Second Commandment, “You shall not use the name of the Lord in vain,” has for its first meaning that we should never use God’s name to swear falsely or curse others. Irreverence of God’s name through casual use, such as you cite, is an extended meaning of the commandment. Thus we see that violations of the Second Commandment do admit to some degree of seriousness. It is far more serious a sin to use God’s name to swear falsely than to inadvertently use it to express surprise.

Still, one ought to avoid such vain or empty uses. One way to help break a bad habit that may have developed is for the one who says, “Oh, my God!” to correct themselves aloud by saying, “Oh, I mean to say, ‘May the name of the Lord be praised!’” This makes reparation and also helps break the habit.

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