Sin

Whatever happened to sin? As a child, I attended "instruction," the Catholic Church's equivalent to Sunday school. The dialogue dealt heavily with guilt, and talked a lot about sin. In fact, there were so many sins that they had to be divided into two categories: mortal and venial. Mortal sins would send you straight to Hell, unless you told God how sorry you were before you died, and then you could be sent to the mysterious Purgatory for an unspecified length of time to somehow serve some kind of punishment before you could go to Heaven. Venial sins, as I remember, could be forgiven by the priest in Confession, if you mouthed a reasonable number of prayers and acted penitent.

My favorite venial sin was "having impure thoughts." When I reached puberty I began to understand what that meant. It involved members of the opposite sex and physical contact therewith. Fortunately, it was at about that time that I joined the church choir and it interfered with my "instruction." Also fortunate was the fact that there were no teen-age girls in the choir, so my impure thoughts were limited to school and the solitude of my bedroom.

Today, if you believe the TV evangelists, the most serious sin is failure to tithe. They are saying that your road to Heaven is paved with 10% of your worldly goods. They are also opposed to drugs, alcohol, gambling and adultery, but there is no mention of impure thoughts. Do you suppose the Catholic Church has also bade farewell to the Big Brother concept of impure thoughts?