Looking back at the weekly messages of Father Paul Counce, first published in The Carpenter, our weekly Parish Bulletin
Published: July 26, 2020
As you might suspect, priests get asked a lot of questions. Some are easy to answer, some not, and it usually depends on the individual priest and his personal experience and powers of memory!
For instance, it’s been years since I was in graduate school, but since I deal with the Church’s canon law every day in my “other job” as judicial vicar, usually I can answer most canonical questions pretty easily. Though it’s been a while since I was in a classroom for them, I can manage to “keep” up with scripture study and a lot of practical “pastoral theology,” so queries about the Bible and “what to do” questions about Parish life aren’t too hard. But it’s been so long since I studied philosophy, systematic theology, moral theology, and so forth, I usually have to give very general answers to questions of that sort these days.
Would you like to know a little secret I have to answering most any question, though? It applies to both kinds of question: ones that I’m sure I can answer correctly and ones that I’m not so sure about. I always try to ask myself “What’s best here?” and work from there.
People constantly inquire about the sinfulness of various things. Reading the signs of the times today, it’s pretty safe to suppose we’ve all thought a great deal about the sin of racial prejudice, or about sins of hatred or falsehood arising from lack of civil political discourse. I sure have gotten questions about these. And they are fundamentally questions of morality: when are thoughts, words and actions a sin? And how serious a sin at that?
So, what’s best? Most questions of morality derive from our understanding of perfection, but then take into account things like an action’s seriousness, the circumstances, and our awareness of the wrongness of purposeful imperfection. It would be best to be a perfect disciple: perfectly nonviolent, perfectly honest, perfectly generous, perfectly pure, and so forth. This means that acting contrary to God’s will, or harming others, or stealing, or lying, or being lustful, and so forth has to be wrong in some way. Why? Because it’s never the best.
But nobody’s perfect. So the real challenge is to be the best we can possibly be: purposefully act like God wants us to, whenever we can. Try your best not to harm others, respect their property, don’t be deceitful, avoid impurity, give of yourself sacrificially, and so forth. True there are some things which are always so disordered, lacking any redeeming qualities, that could never be done without grave wrong – known as mortal sin. (Abortion, and terrorism and all similar deliberate murder of innocent persons, are the classic examples here, but so are other things like adultery and abuse.) Mortal sin, remember, is a human choice to separate from God and His will. But most imperfect things are mitigated by circumstance and intention: perhaps they are not important, or they are not done with evil intent, perhaps they may merely be an imperfect use of a good thing, or they are not accompanied by a deliberate will to separate self from God. Then what’s committed is venial sin.
Getting back to the questions at hand: sins of racism are real. Even if no external word or other action ever arises from it, Christ made it clear that we sin in our thoughts (see Mt 5:28). Sins such as hatred, especially prompting ridicule (calumny) or falsehoods (lying) within political speech and actions, are hardly rare these days either. Some is mortally sinful, to be sure, since it can be so serious and deliberately-chosen. And yet sometimes the circumstances and misplaced intentions are not of such gravity or malice: even if highly disagreeable, this kind of sin is only venial and does not separate us from God.
Notice that I’m not pretending any kind of sin is okay. Its various kinds just need to be kept in perspective, by applying traditional Church principles of moral theology. (If you want to check it out, I recommend a careful reading of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, arts. 1854-1864.)
As I hinted in my homily last weekend, occasionally many people are their own worst enemies, thinking they’re much worse than they really are when they ought to be trusting much more in the lenient, tolerant, generous – and yes, infinite! – mercy of God. The Lord wants us to strive for the best, but knows it doesn’t happen. He recognizes that when we fall short we can still be holy and graced people, and that’s something each of us ought to realize. People who have confidence in God, as He desires, lead lives far more pleasing to Him than those who obsessively think they are unworthy of His mercy, or worse, think He is to be feared.
Yours in Him,
Very Rev. Paul D. Counce
