Mortal Sin in the Priest
Fourth Meditation
Effects of Mortal Sin in the Priest
I. When mortal sin has been committed, there opens up between God and myself an abyss that no created being can bridge. I trashed the title-deed sealed with the Blood of Christ, a deed conferring not so much a title of friendship as that of a child of God; and I became God's enemy, the slave marked out for all the fulminations of His Justice. Yes, this remains my lot and portion instead of the inheritance of a son, instead of the eternally blissful Life of God, the patrimony of His children.
Lost in the total shipwreck of my fall are the treasures of merits and good works which I had been amassing patiently, hour after hour, in my painful endeavour to redeem my fallen nature, and bring it to its charted course. My past life has left me empty-handed; my present is tormented with remorse, and is exposed, like a rudderless boat, to the waves of passion that sin has roused and lashed to increasing fury; and in the future, there awaits me the penalty imposed by the divine Sanctions: eternal death, banishment from my Heavenly Father.
Before sinning, why not weigh up carefully in my mind whether the pleasure or advantages of sin outbalance such tremendous losses?
II. From the tree of evil there is another fruit that only the hand of the priest plucks, a fruit reeking with poison, a poison more indigestible and destructive.
When a mortal sin has been committed - for example, dallying with a lustful thought or with a desire deliberately conceived by the mind and embraced by the will, be it ever so brief or denied fulfilment - how difficult it is, in practice, for the poor priest not to fall the same or the following day into the most dangerous of all sins, profanation of the Sacraments!
If you sinned during the afternoon or evening for instance, when the morning comes and the hour approaches to say Mass, are you sure to confess beforehand? How many hindrances will arise from laziness, bashfulness, or even the wiles of Satan, to make you fritter the time away hesitant, afraid to take the step, all the while adding to your own confusion of mind and smothering your weak will in a thousand excuses that end, in spite of the obligation sub gravi to make your confession if there is any reasonable opportunity of doing so, by driving you unconfessed to the sacristy, and from there, after vesting, to the Altar for an unworthy celebration of the Mass! And oh! if once you trample upon the Body and Blood of Christ by a sacrilegious Mass, what will your conscience not be capable of perpetrating!
III. That same day, perhaps after the Holy Sacrifice you have just profaned, you may be required to sit in the tribunal of Penance or to administer Anointing of the Sick, and each one of those acts to which you are committed by reason of your ministry will be for you, unworthy minister, a dreadful profanation.
And in the second round of your calamitous procedure the hour to say Mass will arrive again, and you will do so less reluctantly than in the first, and you will find it very much harder to seek out a confessor for the remedy; and as the days go by you will feel an increasing horror for the Sacrament of Penance; and if from some motive of human respect you eventually feel bound to make your confession, a false shame will grip your heart, will choke the words of sincerity in your throat, and you will continue sinning and profaning all that is most holy week after week, and perhaps month after month, and year after year. And then, who will assess the heavy load of crime that weighs on your soul? Who will reduce to figures the multitude of your iniquities?
Soon, very soon, the blackest soul in your parish, in the town, will be you!
IV. And you will lose everything into the bargain: refinement of thought and feeling, leaving you impotent for an understanding and vital possession of the eternal truths; and your faith, gradually consuming, like a burning coal exposed to a strong wind, and driven further and further away from your conscious mind and buried beneath the grime and dust of sin, will not give forth light or warmth, and . . . God forbid - as happens often enough - that it should die out altogether and for ever! Yes, this is the path trodden by those of Christ's ministers who proved apostates and traitors to their God and His ministry.
Renegades, apostates, not so much by their errors defended with regrettable talent and propagated with cynical daring, as by those silent infidelities and apostasies whose only mouthpiece was the stench of their scandalous and abject lives. Ministers of Christ disbelieving in Christ! This infernal paradox is the abyss into which more than one priest has been hurtled by mortal sin!
V. But let us suppose that, by the mercy and forbearance of God, you are not falling so low and you still keep undiminished your faith in the very Christ whom you subject to daily profanation. That faith of yours will be so lifeless and so reticent that the clamour and tumult of your passions and your drunken cravings to give them satisfaction will drown the shouts of a supernaturally enlightened conscience, and the habit of unheeding those shouts will harden your noblest faculties; the searing effect of each new fall unrepented of will form a crust of insensibility around your moral conscience (cfr. 1 Tim. iv); you will have departed from God so far, so far, that His powerful call to repentance will fall on deaf ears.
And your life will come to a close, and your last hour will hover around you, and in you will be fulfilled the terrible curse of the Eternal Wisdom:
"Since my call is unheard, since my hand beckons in vain, since my counsel is despised and all my reproof goes for nothing it will be mine to laugh, to mock at your discomfiture, when perils close about you." (Prov. i, 24-26)Resolutions
You shall seek me and shall not find me and where I am you cannot come.- (John vii, 34)
1. Not to facilitate a lapse on the score of its being easily atoned for and pardoned; for I have just seen how sin inoculates with a poison that, by a process as swift as inexorable, can reduce me to the lowest degree of spiritual vitality, to final impenitance, and eternal death.
2. O Lord, I shall fear Thy hidden judgements which, for one single mortal sin, could leave me abandoned and permit me to fall into the dark abyss of impotency for
good and of terrible power for evil.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.
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Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!
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