A viewer asks me to discuss the nature of Mortal Sin, and the importance of attending church.
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I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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So this video comes from a longtime supporter of this channel.
He's actually requested some videos before.
And it's going to be a, well, not a three-part video.
It's actually going to be broken down into three videos.
The topic of this one is church attendance, mortal sin, and the resolution of faith and reason.
So let's start off by reading the question, and then we're going to jump into it.
Number one.
Pertaining to our Catholic faith, can you explain to me why I must go to church in order to be a good Catholic?
I understand the concept that we need to go to church not for God, but for ourselves.
God doesn't need us at the church as much as we need God at the church.
But I'm still confused as to why if I don't go, that is somehow a mortal sin.
Why must I partake in the liturgy of the Eucharist, especially if I cannot receive due to being in fairly frequent mortal sin?
Now, let's put it simply.
Your father, your heavenly father, asks that you devote one hour a week to him.
Two hours with driving time.
He asks that you come for dinner, for the supper of the lamb, once a week.
That's what he's asking of you.
Ultimately, you go to church because that is what is requested and expected of you.
Now that said, you do it because that's the rule.
That said, there's bloody good reasons for this.
When you go to church, when you surround yourself with the Gregorian chant, when you experience the ineffable, it reminds you, if nothing else.
It's like going to your parents' house for dinner reminds you of what your family stands for.
Going to the church reminds you of what you stand for.
It gets you away from the profane and the secular, and it reminds you of what you're actually doing with yourself, with your life, with all of this.
There's many benefits to being there.
Community, a reminder of spirituality, all of it.
Numerous, numerous benefits.
But ultimately, you go because you are supposed to go.
But you know, what I'd like to dig into with this question is mortal sin.
Because, you know, I've been talking to you for a while, and you seem to think that you're in mortal sin quite frequently.
The last video you requested, You are tiring of going to reconciliation every single week to resolve these mortal sins, only to go perform them all over again.
And I think it's worth revisiting what a mortal sin actually is.
Mortal sin is when you commit something with full knowledge that it's wrong.
You fully understand that it is wrong and why it's wrong.
Number two, you do it with full intent and planning.
You think about it soberly and you willfully go out and do it nonetheless.
And finally, the sin is a grave matter.
Stealing a chocolate bar, even though you know you know it's wrong, and you know why stealing is wrong, I don't have to dig into that.
You plan it ahead of time, you know, and it's not like you're having a sudden sugar craving and you can't afford the chocolate bar.
No, you plan it ahead of time.
You organize the whole thing.
You're like Ocean's 11.
It's still not a mortal sin because it's not a grave matter.
It's a bloody chocolate bar for crying out loud.
Yes, you shouldn't steal it.
That's a really skezy thing to do.
That's a real low-life type of behavior, but you're not in mortal sin just yet.
And while I don't know precisely what you're referring to, I'm pretty sure you're not going out there and strangling nuns.
Quite frankly, brother, I don't buy that you're in mortal sin.
Now, from what I gather, your sins are lust, which may or may not be a grave matter.
Certainly cheating on your wife is a very grave matter, but I don't believe you're married, not as I understand it.
But are you doing these with full, sober will and intent?
Because let's be frank.
We are spirit, but we are also animal.
We are tempted not only by Satan and his demons whispering in our ear, we're also tempted by our own instincts.
If somebody walks by you on the street wearing an outfit of a subculture that you dislike for valid reasons, you may think some very angry, cruel thoughts.
Similarly, if a woman walks by you wearing high heels, a short skirt, and a low-cut top, you are going to think some lustful thoughts.
And yes, if you are thinking lustful thoughts, the full intention, all of that.
Yes, you've just committed Infidelity in your own mind.
But were you in your right mind?
Is a man confronting a woman in a short skirt and a low-cut top?
Is he in his right mind?
You walk outside the door, you turn on the TV, there's half-naked women all over the place.
There's this constant promotion of this very tempting but very unhealthy sexual culture all over the place.
You know, you have this badgering you constantly, day in and day out, and you have trouble with lustful thoughts.
Color me shocked.
Now, here's a personal anecdote, and this is interesting.
I actually did serve with women when I was in the armed forces.
I was in basic training with a small number of women.
Me and another one of the recruits, you know, we started talking, and we'd been in basic training for about three weeks.
And he said to me, Dude, I haven't jerked off since I've been here.
Are they putting something in our food?
And no, they aren't putting anything in the food.
But what happens is when you take a bunch of young men, you give them something to do, and you don't surround them with constant pornography, even though you have women also with them.
Heck, you have women getting changed.
You know, jumping out of their sleeping bag in their underwear, putting on their uniform.
You have that happening right in front of them, right next to them.
Those men do not have lustful thoughts because there's no time, there's no suggestion, there is none of that.
You don't have that extremely strong temptation.
Some ex-alcoholics can't hang out at bars.
Somebody with an eating disorder might need to avoid the candy bars.
But when it comes to sex in this culture, it is bloody near impossible to avoid it.
It's everywhere.
And you're having lustful thoughts?
Are you in your right mind?
There was a live stream I did with Sam So from the Roosh V Forum.
And I know, I know, brother, you did not like that live stream.
Sam So was trying to point out that the specific morality written in the Bible and elucidated by theologians over the centuries,
this specific practices were not written for today's time, where you have women under no authority of their fathers whatsoever volunteering themselves to be sluts.
That is a whole different temptation from the fornicating, which specifically means hiring a prostitute, which is spoken about so much by the Catholic Church.
And to equate going to a prostitute Being tempted by a woman that is easy and fun to get along with.
Those are two very different temptations entirely.
Now, taking advantage of a person that's self-destructing, whether you're taking advantage of a woman who wants to be a slut because somebody told her it was empowering, or if you're taking advantage of a fool who wants to get a payday loan every single week in some sort of usurious agreement.
taking advantage of people is not right.
But there's something very, very different between being tempted when you have an idiot friend that buys into a new hobby and you know he's not going to do it.
And it's like, and when he gets sick of it, yeah, I'll buy all your stuff off of you for 20 bucks.
You know, that's not a fair exchange, but the idiot kind of walked right into it.
And if you don't take advantage of that, somebody else will.
That's very, very different from going and preying on people who are desperate with usurious loans.
I think the difficulty that you had with understanding what Sam So was trying to get across.
And you're not the only one, by the way.
He has a very different approach to things than I do.
I think my approach is a little bit more conducive to getting things across to you.
He can be very, very blunt, very, very legalistic with all of it.
But I think what he was getting at involves what Aquinas said about reason and faith.
One of the great modern heresies, which was realized by the French Revolution, is the idea that reason and faith have nothing to do with one another.
That faith is, faith is, it's a personal thing, or faith is, it might be a useful social organization, or it might be necessary for mental health, but faith and reason are fundamentally different things.
Aquinas, and I mean, go read him.
I'm not going to delve into the entire proof.
I don't even understand the entire proof, quite frankly.
But Aquinas proved that faith and reason must be compatible.
The foundation of Christianity is that faith and reason are the same things.
These are not separate magisteria.
These are the same magisteria.
There's an excellent article by the Social Pathologist, which I'll link down below, which discusses all of this and how it applies to these right-wing movements that go completely off the rails.
But it also applies with the weakness we see in Christianity these days, the lack of virility, the lack of engagement with the real world.
Because what happened with the French Revolution is that we took religion and we took the secular world and we drove them apart.
And so now you get these guys in the secular world that are reasonable.
They're living in the world.
And when it comes to sex, they can look at women and understand what women want, what their attraction triggers are, the evil evolutionary psychology behind it.
They can understand all of this.
And, well, you get the social scene we have nowadays.
You get a lot of damaged people coming out the other end.
But then you have the religious people who have decided to abandon the secular, abandon the real world.
And so the religious person is obsessing, especially on faith, hope, and charity, the spiritual virtues, while ignoring the cardinal virtues.
So you have the spiritual person that is so utterly proud of themselves.
They think it makes them such a great Christian because they're doing a good job raising their wife's son.
Faith and reason, if they're in disagreement, either your reasoning is bad, it's based upon flawed premises or whatever, or your understanding of the faith is bad.
When faith and reason come into conflict, that's your error.
It's not the error of faith and truth.
And this is what I think Sam So was trying to get at: is that the Catholic Church, most churches, are taking an extremely hard line on the sex question right now, but by taking such a hard line, they get it completely backwards.
They wind up attacking men, telling men to be weak, to be effeminate, to be simps, to be proud of raising their wife's son, as opposed to being exploitative of women that are begging you to exploit them.
I mean, we know what the faith says about the ideal, but that ideal needs to be put into the context of what's actually going on out there.
If you stab somebody to death who is begging for mercy, if you do that at the bar or in an alley, that's a big, major problem.
If you do it after three days without sleep, while cold, wet, tired, and hungry, in the field of battle, if you're bayoneting a German that's crying for his mummy after you've just been shelled for three days straight, that's a different context.
One of the interesting things about approaching holiness is that your own shortcomings become more and more self-evident to you.
That as you become more holy, you realize what a terrible, terrible sinner you are.
Nobody has a better concept of their own sins than a saint.
And nobody is more self-righteous than the most depraved of sinners.
And so what I think is happening with you is that because you are genuine about all of this.
I mean, it's not for me to say the state of anybody else's soul.
But from what I observe, most people in the church are not particularly serious about it.
They don't want to change.
They don't want to improve.
They want to pretend that everything's okey-dokey, as Obama might say.
Bunch of okey-doke.
You want to get better.
And you know that you're flawed.
And you know that you're weak.
You know all of this.
Stop beating yourself up.
The foundational message of Christianity is that it's not rituals and words and all of this that are going to save you.
It's mercy that's going to save you.
All of those good works from the Pharisees were about as useful as a used diaper.
Stop beating yourself up.
Have faith in the Lord's mercy.
Remember there is a generalized confession at every Mass.
And go there and get some grace into you.
I really don't believe that you're in mortal sin.
Quite frankly, if you're worrying that you're in mortal sin, you probably aren't in mortal sin.
Go to confession every month or two.
It's not a bad idea.
But in the meantime, get that grace in you.
Go accept the Eucharist.
You have been invited to the Lamb's Supper.
And quite frankly, just from a practical standpoint, brother, we need soldiers.
We need men who are confident in their convictions.
We need men who are willing to get their hands dirty.
Quite frankly, get over yourself.
I seriously doubt you're a worse person than I am.
We need you, brother.
Stop worrying about all this bullshit so much.
Go to church.
Participate.
Forgive yourself, your lapses, and your weaknesses.
Practice getting better at them.
When you're really tempted, pray for a distraction.
But just because you're weak, just because you fall every once in a while, just because you stumble, don't give up.
