Rigid Christianity?

The Church is adamant that there are mitigating conditions that must be accounted for when considering sinfulness. According to the Catechism:

For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: “Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.”¹³¹

1858 Grave matter is specified by the Ten Commandments, corresponding to the answer of Jesus to the rich young man: “Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and your mother.”¹³²The gravity of sins is more or less great: murder is graver than theft. One must also take into account who is wronged: violence against parents is in itself graver than violence against a stranger.

1859 Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice. Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart¹³³ do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin.

1860 Unintentional ignorance can diminish or even remove the imputability of a grave offense. But no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are written in the conscience of every man. The promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense, as can external pressures or pathological disorders. Sin committed through malice, by deliberate choice of evil, is the gravest.

1861 Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself. It results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying grace, that is, of the state of grace. If it is not redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back. However, although we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God.

In my experience, some Catholics can tend to underemphasize the ways we in which we are subject to Original Sin and treat every sort of misstep as an instance of mortal sin. This can breed a dogged search for error not only in oneself, but in others. For example, I recently read a comment thread in a Traditionalist Catholic Facebook group. The question was why people at Tridentine Masses seem to think it’s acceptable to wear anything besides a shirt, jacket, and tie or a prairie skirt. The typical justifications were trotted out: one does not go to meet a king in anything less than one’s best, one ought to show proper modesty (of course, the term remained undefined), etc. Some people stepped in saying that some simply don’t own suits (one person spoke about how his or her community is mostly filled with farmers who “clean up” as best they can). There was talk of lunchtime liturgies and how many do not have time to change. Others retorted that anyone can buy a cheap suit, that ultimately God will be the judge (with the implication being that He will judge those who are not besuited quite negatively).

There are all sorts of problems here: why do (for men anyway) a shirt, blazer, and tie define “modesty” and “uprightness” (these are only a fairly-recent style)? Why should secular finery define what is “modest”? Why should people be commanded to buy certain clothing when they may be perfectly loving, good Christians who do wear “their best” on Sundays (some people were denouncing even polo shirts! And God help someone if they argued that jeans were okay).

The main issue here, however, is the sort of witch-hunt mentality I mentioned above. All circumstances were ignored and it seemed that the only way to please God was to be acting in precisely the way prescribed by these people. Salvation, in an insidious way, was seemingly defined by one’s works, that is, what one wears on any given Sunday (even when one is taking the time to make it to a Tridentine Mass!). This mindset has many versions (more on that below in the section on scrupulosity), but I’d just like to make something clear here: that, within a certain way of thinking, it becomes very easy to treat sin as something added onto us, rather than something linked to the Fall, something we need God’s grace to combat. Quickly, authentic praxis becomes a matter of particular devotions that (even if only implicitly) seem to be able to allow us to overcome sin. But we know this is not true—God delivers us from sin, and even then, not in this life.