Comments on: Vatican’t

By: Pat Cahalan

Pat Cahalan — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 17:57:12 +0000

@ Eric the Read:

Just catching up on this thread, there is something that needs to be pointed out:

Different does not imply ordering. You can have a disordered set, with discrete subsets, wherein the subsets are defined by something other than “less” or “more”. There are very broad classifications of “severity” of sin in the Catholic church, but it’s not like there’s a well ordered ordinal scale of one to ten, with five being five times as bad as one and half as bad as ten.

Even if “different” does imply “ordering”, it doesn’t necessarily include the property of magnitude; given a set {a, b, c}, it may be that the only thing we can say about a, b, and c is that a is “less” than b and b is “less” than c… we may not be able to say anything about how large the differences are between a and b vs b and c.

From a proper canon law standpoint (at least in the Catholic church), excommunication is just a formality. Whenever you sin, you’re in effect excommunicating yourself, and you’re supposed to refrain from all of the sacraments (other than reconciliation) until you’ve repented and done your penance. Judging from the population in the physical church during Saturday confessional vs Sunday mass, I’d hazard a guess that fully 98% of the self-identified Catholics in the U.S. are actually not in a formal state of grace, as far as the church is officially concerned. A formal excommunication is basically just a public writ confirming that someone has excommunicated themselves

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By: papageno

papageno — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:15:54 +0000

Eric the Read:
So, the list of “previously secret sins” is not a ranking of “badness”. Desecrating a Eucharist isn’t “worse” than genocide. It’s not “better”, either. Desecrating a consecrated Host is a foundational sin– it strikes at the heart of what it means to be a Catholic. So it requires more steps not because it’s so bad, only a pontifical commission can absolve it, but because you’ve basically acted against the basic nature of Catholicism.

So committing murder is not against the nature of Catholicism and therefore does not deserve automatic excommunication.
Which means that the consacrated wafer is more important than a human life.

How does this not imply a ranking of the sins?

By: Francois

Francois — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:33:08 +0000

Well I think they start releasing “secret sins”, they are starting to make up stuff.
So if they don’t like you doing something this week next week it will be a deadly sin.

By: Eric the Read

Eric the Read — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:19:13 +0000

So, the list of “previously secret sins” is not a ranking of “badness”. Desecrating a Eucharist isn’t “worse” than genocide. It’s not “better”, either. Desecrating a consecrated Host is a foundational sin– it strikes at the heart of what it means to be a Catholic. So it requires more steps not because it’s so bad, only a pontifical commission can absolve it, but because you’ve basically acted against the basic nature of Catholicism.

I believe– though I’m not 100% sure, the details here can get awfully nice– that it’s either caused by, or related to, the automatic excommunication such acts incur. Basically, once you’ve excommunicated yourself, you’ve put yourself outside the Church’s authority, so it takes a few more steps to bring you back in the fold, so to speak.

Regardless, it is explicitly *not* a judgement of value re: the sins themselves.

By: TheBlackCat

TheBlackCat — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:11:31 +0000

Oops, wrong thread.

By: TheBlackCat

TheBlackCat — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:11:12 +0000

What is the difference between a disease and a disorder? I usually see disorder in reference to diseases that are caused by the body (although they can have an external trigger, like some autoimmune disorders). That doesn’t mean they are not major diseases with real effects on a person.