DO MANY VENIAL SINS MAKE A MORTAL SIN?

Mortal sin is a serious sin that makes you totally opposed to God. Venial sin is a lesser sin that you can commit without shutting God off.

Sin is in the will. If you commit a venial sin you will that all people in your situation should do the same even an infinite number. This makes the sin infinitely malicious. You are trying to do infinite damage.

According to Roman Catholic doctrine, no amount of venial sins ever add up to a mortal sin (Everyman’s Road to Heaven, Leo J. Trese, page 35). Anyone that teaches this doesn’t know what good and evil are or are they just being untruthful? Lots of little upsets can equal the amount of harm done in beating a person up. Beating people up is seen as a mortal sin. There must be a point at which committing any more venial sins crosses the border into mortal sin. When a host of venial sins do more damage than one mortal sin it is impossible for them not to be worse and add up to a mortal sin. The Book of Revelation has Christ complaining about a section of the Church being neither hot or cold which he will spit out of his mouth for tepidity (3:16). Yet Rome says that being lukewarm is the state of being in a lot of venial sin for if you were in mortal sin you would be cold and not hot at all even though Christ says he rejects the person who is lukewarm! Nothing in the passage indicates venial sin. Rather it indicates mortal sin. Notice too that he doesn’t indicate that this part of the visible Church ever really belonged to him.
 
If sin is bad for the sinner, it follows that venial sinners do so much damage to their hearts and characters over time that they could be worse off than somebody who committed a big mortal sin and who repented. Surely then the person has forsaken the ways of God in her or his heart? The Church used to teach that animals had no rights and forbade the torture of animals for what it did to the character of the torturer. In so doing, it is paying homage to the reasoning that venial sinners can ruin their own hearts and shut God out if they commit enough sins.
 
Some teach the following. “When your countless venial sins are interspersed with several acts of repentance the past is forgotten and forgiven. This forgiving gives help from God to avoid mortal sin. It prevents you from accumulating venial sins until you finish up as mortal.” But when you sin venially you are restoring the guilt of all your previous sins. You cannot really be sorry for offending God with the past venial sins anymore when you have committed another one of them.

Rome’s rejection of the truths about sinning venially to the degree that they make a mortal sin proves a few things and none of them good.

She is guilty of unjust discrimination for calling some viciousness venial and that is as just as bad as mortal sin. She is putting down the culprits and the victims. In degrading them she degrades her God. She is commanding irrationality.

Rome states that mortal sins may not tear you away from God just because that is what you want but because of what they are: very grave sins. That is why she lists some sins as mortal on the basis of what damage they have done and on your intention. You need to do intentional and serious damage. For example, adultery is a mortal sin while stealing a bag of sweets is not. If mortal sin were only the sin of wishing to cut God out of your life then she wouldn’t need a list. All she would have to do is say that the intention to reject God is the only mortal sin and drop the list. She does not sincerely believe that the break is caused by the nature of sin as well as the intention to break when she claims that venials cannot make up a mortal. How can she when venial sins can be committed to the state that the sum of the damage done makes it seriously sinful? Her doctrine infers that mortal sin is just like committing a venial sin but meaning God to receive infinite rejection from it. It follows that when

Rome tells you that to commit a certain act would be a mortal sin she wants you to renounce God wholly if you decide to commit it. In other words, you are commanded to intend adultery or murder to be mortal sins when you commit them but they are not mortal in themselves – intention has all to do with that.

This has made many haters of Catholicism say that when mortal sin merits death and brings death it follows that the Church is trying to use God to kill us and hurt us forever.

Rome says that small damage can be a mortal sin when intended to be but you cannot deliberately cause great damage without intentionally committing a mortal sin.

It is a sin to commit what you think may be a mortal sin. It is not caring if you sin this way or not. All must be mortal sinners. All are sinners according to Christian teaching.

What we have learned about venial sin means that all who sin may have mortally sinned in tipping the balance with too many venial sins for nobody is fully conscious of what damage they have wanted done. Assuming a person is not charged with mortal sin by their conscience, nobody knows what will be waiting if they die, whether it would be life in Heaven or torment in Hell.

The doctrine of mortal and venial sin implies that nobody should have peace of mind on earth.
 
WORKS CONSULTED
 
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS CATHOLICS ARE ASKING Tony Coffey, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 2006
 
FRIDAY PENANCE, John C Edwards SJ, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1985
 
CITY OF GOD, St Augustine, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1986

EVERYMAN’S ROAD TO HEAVEN, Leo J Trese, Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1961

APOLOGETICS AND CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Most Rev M Sheehan DD, M H Gill & Son, Dublin, 1954

RADIO REPLIES, VOL 1, Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota, 1938

THE SINNER’S GUIDE, Ven Louis of Granada, TAN, Illinois, 1983

CHRISTIANITY, David Albert Jones OP, Family Publications, Oxford, 1999

THE INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, John Calvin, Hodder and Stoughton, London 1986

BIBLE VERSION USED
The Amplified Bible