I know a woman who frequently goes to confession, yet doesn’t seem to make any progress in virtue, remaining an habitual and vicious gossip. What elements are necessary for a valid confession?
Although I answered in an earlier column the question about what true sorrow and the resolution not to sin again imply in confession your question involves another important aspect of moral life: the influence of habits on the morality of our actions.
It is important to deal with it now since there are many people battling to overcome entrenched habits and they may find what I have to say helpful.
We know that we form habits easily by repeating acts of any sort.
For example, in driving a car, learning a language, playing a musical instrument or engaging in some sport, the more often we do it the better we get at it. We form habits that facilitate actions.
Similarly in the moral sphere, we form habits by repeating acts of any type.
If our acts are morally disordered, like drinking alcohol to excess, indulging in impurity, using bad language, telling lies or gossiping, the more we do these things the more we develop a habit of doing them. T
his bad habit, which facilitates immoral acts, is called a vice.
On the other hand, when our actions are directed to our true last end and hence are morally good, like praying, being kind and generous or fulfilling our duties, again the more we do them the easier they become. We form good habits, called virtues, which facilitate good acts.
How do virtues and vices influence the morality of our acts?
Let us begin with virtues. Obviously, the more virtues we have and the stronger they are, the easier it is to do good acts, acts which help us to live a life that is pleasing to God and to grow in holiness.
So we should do all the good acts we can, since they will form virtues and make successive good acts that much easier.
Those acts are pleasing to God and they store up treasure in heaven.
They speed up our journey to eternal life and they give us joy here on earth.
Turning to bad habits or vices, the more vices we have the easier it is to commit sin and the harder it is to do the will of God.
But there is another aspect to bad habits that is very important.
Let us consider two stages. In the first, the person willingly carries out the sins and does little or nothing to avoid them.
He or she is fully responsible for those actions and for the vices they gradually form.
Consider, for example, a person who habitually uses bad language or who engages in sexual activity outside of marriage and makes no effort to avoid it.
Those actions and the bad habits they form are fully voluntary.
Because the person is committing the sins deliberately, they have a greater malice and can be punished more severely by God. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “Sin committed through malice, by deliberate choice of evil, is the gravest” (CCC 1860).
If, at a later stage, that person comes to realise how bad those actions are and sincerely repents of them and strives to overcome the habit, inevitably he or she will still fall into some of the bad actions, because of the entrenched habit.
But those sins will have less culpability, less guilt before God, precisely because of the habit.
Rather than being sins of malice, they will be more what are called “sins of weakness”, sins committed with a will that desires to please God but is weakened by some factor like an entrenched habit.
The culpability or guilt before God of sins of weakness is less than in sins of malice.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives as an example the sin of masturbation: “To form an equitable judgment about the subjects’ moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety, or other psychological or social factors that can lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability” (CCC 2352).
The same can be said of any bad habit.
As long as we are sorry for our bad actions and are sincerely struggling to overcome the habit, there is a reduced culpability for those actions.
We may have to struggle all our life to overcome the habit, but as long as we are struggling the sins have less culpability.