If We Don’t Know It’s Sin, Does It Hurt Us?

Patti Maguire Armstrong

It seems that people are less likely to recognize sin these days. So given that committing a sin requires a person to know it is a sin and freely choose it, does that mean there are less guilty people now? I posed this question to two priests: Monsignor Thomas Richter, Parochial Vicar of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Bismarck, ND, and Monsignor. John Esseff of the Diocese of Scranton, PA who has been a priest for sixty-one years.

Can there be more sin but fewer sinners?

According to Msgr. Richter, we must make a distinction between objective evil and whether one is culpable for the objective evil they are doing. “The truth is in us but it can be covered up,” he said. “If a person is raised in ignorance and he thinks a sin is not bad, then he is not culpable.”  He added that the culture could also influence a person in this manner.

But sin is still sin regardless of a person’s culpability. “If it is an objective evil, regardless of whether a person is culpable, it is still evil and evil always harms,” Richter said. He compared sin to cigarettes in that even before people knew they were bad, smoking still caused cancer.  “They caused the bad effect regardless of what the person smoking them believed,” he said. “The same is true on the spiritual level; sin causes damage.”

Richter pointed out that there is also a difference between a person who does not know the difference between right and wrong and one that lost his sense of right and wrong through a pattern of bad choices. “When I know it is evil and consent to it, I open myself up to it more,” he said.

Only God can judge the level of someone’s guilt, but as humans Richter said that God has planted this law in every human conscience and every human heart. “The Lord speaks to each heart,” he said. “The more we sin, what can happen is that our heart gets hard to the point that our knowledge decreases.” He explained that a person ends up making choices out of hardness of heart, not out of unintended ignorance but as a consequence of sin that was made with knowledge and in freedom.

“Sin darkens the will and knowledge.” Richter said. “That’s the consequence of sin. It’s a choice for some but for others, it becomes a tremendous disorder.”  While sin moves us away from God, he said that grace has the opposite effect. “As a person grows in holiness, he will grow in the awareness of moral culpability that he wasn’t aware of before. That happens to every guy who grows up and looks back on his life. If he acted at 40 the way he acted at 20, he would be committing the same evil but would be more culpable.”

“Sin is choosing nothing over everything.

“Through God, we receive his free gift of grace,” said Esseff. “To sin is to reject this gift.”

According to him, as baptized Christians, Christ lives in us and we are in him.  “Do we really recognize the truth of the presence of Christ within us?” he asked. “Once I recognize that, then 24/7 I can be Christ to the world and see with the eyes of Christ, and love with the heart of Christ and work with the hands of Christ.”

Esseff said that not recognizing the power that we have to transform the world and to instead choose negativity is the real horror of sin. In the end, he said, it means we choose darkness over light.

According to Esseff, sin is the worst evil in the world.  “When I choose sin, I choose the opposite of what God wants,” he said. “And until we know the value of Christ’s presence in us, we cannot fully grasp the horror of sin. We are not just hurting others, but destroying Christ within ourselves.

“For instance, the abortion doctor is not only killing the baby in the womb but he is killing Christ within himself,” Esseff explained. “He is called to be Christ but instead he is killing Christ.”  According to him, although sin is destroying Christ in our world, there is a remedy. “Every single Catholic has Christ in them and if they would just let him through it would change the world,” he said.

“Sin is a spiritual AIDS and there is no cure except for Jesus,” Esseff said. “He has come to unite us with God and the greater the sin, the greater his Divine Mercy.” The good news, Esseff said, is that the love of God is greater than the greatest misery. “Misery is finite, but God’s mercy is infinite,” he said.

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7 thoughts on “If We Don’t Know It’s Sin, Does It Hurt Us?”

  1. Pingback: Pastoral Sharings: "Epiphany of the Lord" | St. John

  2. Patti,
    The problem as St. Alphonsus pointed out in his Theologia Moralis is that the natural law is only obvious even to saints on the more simple moral questions. Alphonsus points out that saints have fought each other on more complex questions. Both the Dominicans and Franciscans condemned the Chinese ancestral rites while the Jesuits saw them as positive like a Catholic maybe praying to any ancestors that made it to Heaven. Early in that fracas, several Popes were against the ancestral rites and later, much later, a Pope reversed them.
    The Dominicans fought with the Franciscans on fees charged by Franciscan pawn shops as being usury but a contemporary Ecumenical Council came along and affirmed the Franciscans.
    There is a continuum from simple to complex and the complex questions are the problems. Saint Pius V thought killing heretics was good and he actively had some killed by the secular arm…Aquinas supported that intellectually…Saint John Paul II apologized for that whole period and its 5000 victims.

    1. Patti Maguire Armstrong

      You make some very interesting observations. There has been disagreement between groups at times, but of course Catholic teaching handed down on high and throughout history has always been consistent. No doubt we are also judged by our own consciences when they are well formed and when our desire is for our will to be aligned with God’s.

    2. Varies with the issue. Abortion was consistently opposed to the max but other areas…not so much. Read ” The Church That Can and Cannot Change ” by John Noonan Jr. ( a Federal Judge) who does micro detail on slavery for example. Lateran III gave slavery as a reward to princes ( canon 27) over certain miscreants of the time while some papal bulls opposed it but often in a restricted manner as in the Canary Island case where the Pope opposed enslaving baptised natives not unbaptised natives. Aquinas notes that canon law affirmed the slavery status of a child born to a slave mother…ie in his supplement to the Summa Theologica/ Matrimony/ marriage of a slave. Catholic moral history is far more truthful than Catholic apologetics in many cases. Apologetics writers on slavery follow the flattery look back ( that we always opposed slavery )… while good historians paint a much different picture. It’s as simple as googling Romanus Pontifex by Pope Nicholas V on line where in the middle of the fourth large paragraph, he gives Portugal’s Prince the right to perpetually enslave all natives of the New World who resist the gospel….in 1454. The 1537 bull against that slavery by Pope Paul III was actually against four Popes who supported Romanus Pontifex after Nicholas I died. When Pope Leo XIII later flattered the Church history on slavery….he was unaware of all these dark nuances and unforetunately apologetics people online copy his rendition and that of another 19th century Pope which was unresearched as well. Apologetics is fine when it is treating non historical issues….proofs of God’s existence. When it goes into morals, it fails through the desire to flatter by avoiding the micro detail of historians.

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  4. “Misery is finite, but God’s mercy is infinite,” he said.

    Charlie Chaplin’s last words, as a priest stood by asking God to ‘ have mercy on his
    soul ‘, were – ‘” Why not ? It belongs to Him.”

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