Charity, Mortal Sin, and Parish Life

1. Classical Teaching on Mortal Sin¹

“Mortal sin, looked at as an act, is a deliberate transgression of one of the grave precepts of God, which completely turns us from Him as our last end; because sinful man knows full well that on that transgression depend the loss of sanctifying grace and exclusion from everlasting happiness.”² This arresting text comes from the pen of the nineteenth-century Swiss Jesuit Maurice Meschler (1830–1912), whose book, The Gift of Pentecost: Meditations on the Holy Ghost, was first published in German in 1882.³ A French translation appeared in 1895, while the English one followed in 1903.⁴ The book originally appeared in Germany a year after the launch of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, and it remained in print for more than half a century.⁵ Herder produced a new edition in 1932!⁶ That is what we call a good press run. If one’s devout Catholic ancestors of the early twentieth century spoke German, French, or English, they likely would have come under the influence of this book, especially if they enjoyed contact with Jesuits. If, on the other hand, they spoke other European languages such as Italian or Spanish, they would have encountered similar expositions by other authors.⁷ Before the post-conciliar period, most even-barely-catechized Catholics had learned that mortal sin spells the loss of sanctifying grace and exclusion from everlasting happiness. All in all, our co-religionists of yesteryear understood what one’s being in or—heaven forfend—out of the “state of grace” meant.

Unless they had benefitted from occasional contact with theologians, our forebears probably were not familiar with classical accounts of damnation. Few everyday Catholics in the United States became agitated over the intricacies of predestination. Common religious instruction avoided this theological minefield and, instead, instilled in Catholics both young and old the importance of dying in the state of grace. Intellectually curious Catholics, on the other hand, may have been exposed to popularizations of predestination themes, such as explorations into the freedom of the damned. For example, “None of the damned will arise at the last day to say, ‘Lord you did not help me enough.’ They will all say, ‘That is what I willed.’ And they will go on maintaining that their choice was an excellent one. If a single one of the damned could say he was damned by God’s fault, God would not be God.”⁸ The diocesan priest, later Cardinal, Charles Journet, delivered these remarks in the mid-1950s at a retreat house outside of Geneva, Switzerland.⁹ The regular Church-going parishioner, however, would have been content to save his soul and to avoid going to hell. Speculations about the psychology of the damned would have escaped him. Priests instead told their parishioners about the importance of receiving the last sacraments or the last rites, as they then were known.

Today, this salutary and religious concern for dying in the state of grace no longer informs the spiritual sensibilities of the majority of Catholics. By and large, most people think that God will take care of them in the end. Mortal sin and its wage, on the other hand, apply only to the perpetrators of the Holocaust and of other large-scale misadventures, like marathon bombers and those who cover up child abuse. One could even appeal (wrongly) to Spe Salvi, no. 45, in order to support this outlook.¹⁰ For folks who dream of quasi-universal salvation, the thought that someone who is damned would have something to opine at the last judgment about human freedom sounds like a charming literary device lifted right out of Dante’s Inferno. In brief, people remain blasé about their moral conduct and its outcomes. When their choices concern the hot-button moral issues that the secular press announces daily will soon undergo reevaluation by the Church, Catholics grow emboldened in their moral indifferentism. Generalizations rarely do justice to complex circumstances such as the theological opinions of Catholics. However, only few Catholics probably would agree with Ralph Martin on the...