Colloquy. Ask to understand all things now as you shall realize them at the judgment.
CONSIDERATION
On Purity of Conscience
The main purpose of the first part of the Spiritual Exercises, or what St. Ignatius calls the first week, is to purify the soul from all stains of sin, and to strengthen it against all temptations to sin in future. Of course mortal sin is the principal evil to be destroyed, it is the greatest evil in the world. Since the religious life is essentially the way of perfection, it presupposes the destruction of mortal sin; being the way of the counsels, it supposes the observance of the Commandments.
Yet it is quite proper that religious in their yearly retreats should review the Exercises of the first week, the meditations regarding mortal sins and the fear of the Lord, not so much to obtain pardon of sins committed, as to strengthen their resolutions and to take precaution against committing sins in the future. In fact, as a rule, religious do not commit mortal sins; and, although they must be constantly on their guard against temptations,—because, while the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak,—yet it is a consoling truth that they rarely fall so low. A religious that frequently commits mortal sins lives far below the normal standard of his state of life. He is indeed greatly to be pitied, and is in serious danger of becoming a reprobate. Of course no one should ever be discouraged, but such a person should arouse himself to fervent prayer and vigorous exertions; he is walking on the brink of the precipice.
Whoever has come to the present part of the Spiritual Exercises is supposed to have conceived an intense horror of mortal sin. But we ought not to be satisfied with attaining this first degree of purity of conscience; we ought to strive seriously to attain the second degree, or to confirm ourselves in the same; that is, we ought also carefully to avoid the commission of all deliberate venial sins. We must distinguish between two kinds of venial sins, the deliberate and the indeliberate. Both kinds suppose that, while committing them, we are aware that we are doing something which God forbids, or omitting what He commands; else we do not really displease Him. But the sin is deliberate when we fully notice the evil, and do it nevertheless with full consent of our free will; else it may be called indeliberate. Indeliberate sins will escape from time to time even very virtuous persons, owing to our unruly passions and the weakness of the human will in consequence of Adam’s sin and of evil habits.
Each of such faults, singly considered, could be avoided; for whatever cannot be avoided at all cannot be laid to our blame; but all cannot be avoided together. Thus a beginner may be able to pronounce correctly every word on a page of his reader, but will not proceed far without making some mistakes.
So we cannot avoid all indeliberate venial sins a long time together, unless God give us an extraordinary grace to do so.
But with the ordinary grace of God a virtuous person may avoid all deliberate venial sins. For this purpose we must first of all convince ourselves of the great evil contained in every wilful offense of God; for by such offense a poor mortal puts his will above the will of his Creator and Lord. This evil is so great that no creature, nor even all creatures united, could by their own power fully atone for it.
This becomes more evident when we consider some examples of the severe punishments inflicted by the Lord on those guilty of such offences. Thus when King David had committed an act of vanity by ordering an enumeration of all his subjects to see how great a monarch he had become, which seems to have been only a venial sin, the Lord sent to him the prophet Gad, to give him the choice between three punishments, namely three years of famine, three months of flight before his enemies or three days of pestilence on his people. He chose the pestilence, and it carried off seventy thousand men (I Paral. xxi).
Moses for a venial fault was refused the honor of leading the Chosen People into the promised land, which would have been a fitting crown of all his labors. His sister Mary, for some murmuring against her brother, was stricken with a leprosy and humiliated before all the people. In fact, leprosy is a striking figure of the effect of venial sin on the soul; for it disfigures the soul without depriving it of life. If a visible leprosy were usually the effect of wilful venial sin, men would be as anxious to avoid such an evil as they are now to escape that bodily plague.