Hi Karen,

Sex outside the sacrament of marriage is always a sin. If it is between single people, then it is fornication. If a married person has sex with anyone besides his or her spouse, then it's both fornication and adultery. Both fornication and adultery are objectively mortal sins. Hypothetically speaking, there could be mitigating circumstances. Ignorance of the subject could lesson the culpability or, I suppose, if a man and woman were stranded on a desert Island with no hope of rescue and no priest to witness their wedding it might be acceptable for them to join with each other with the intent of being husband and wife for life but both scenarios are very unlikely.

As for my first example, unless someone has been completely un catechized in the faith, they know sex before marriage is sin, so the possibility of ignorance is rare. As for my second example, well, I think we can agree it's not an everyday situation.

The good news is that all sins are forgivable except for one. That sin Jesus calls "blasphemy of against Holy Spirit".

That really means that the only sin God won't forgive is the sin we refuse to repent of.

Finally, sexual sins are serious. They are based on self-indulgence and demean the purpose of marital love.

That said: they are sins of weakness and not malice. We are all to some extent self serving, self indulgent, fallen human beings. We all hungry for food so we eat, but some of us over eat or eat the wrong foods simply to satisfy our taste buds.

A sex drive is a real hunger but our sexuality is gift from God intended for marriage.

John

Hi Karen,

It's a grave sin, meaning that if you do it knowing it's a sin, and do it deliberately and freely (e.g. not spontaneously in the passion of the moment, or not coerced or compelled in some way), then it cuts you off from the life of God and leaves you condemned. It is forgivable, if you repent and confess it to a priest in the sacrament of Confession. God will see you because God is omniscient: He knows everything. He is also omnipresent: He is present everywhere. There is nothing hidden from God.

Eric

Hi Karen,

Thanks for the question.

• How will God see you?

As one of His hurting children.

God has a plan to reveal Himself to us through sex. The only way in which sex fulfills its true nature in men and women is in the total self-giving of themselves in marriage. God intended a man and a woman to be joined together as one; this union is sacred to Him. It is a sacrament. The man and the woman, themselves, marry each other. In earlier times, in the Church, a couple could give themselves in marriage privately, though it was not common, but abuses (she claimed marriage, he denied, for instance) hurt people and made the Church require witnesses for the marriage to be valid.

Yes, fornication and adultery are serious sins. In the Bible, they are images of our rejection of God, just as engagement and marriage is an image of our relationship with God. Nevertheless, no one can judge the guilt of another and sexual sins are the most understandable, the ones with the strongest drive behind them. Also, many people are conditioned into sexually perverse behavior through no fault of their own, and battling this conditioning is heroic. Sexual behavior is also one place where one's deep psychology expresses itself. This is a Psychology that is concerned with the unconscious or subconscious, rather than just human emotion and behavior, which means there may be much less guilt in the objectively disordered behavior.

The final result is, as with any sin, our attitude should be one of compassion. Christ revealed Himself, as He did, to no other, except Mary, when He told the woman at the well He was the Messiah - and she was living with her 6th man. He honored her sincerity and her need. Mary Magdalene and Augustine were great sinners of the flesh who were converted by love. Paul, on the other hand, sinned out of pride and it took lightning bolts and visions to convert him.

We should always entrust ourselves to the Lord's love in humility, and not condemn others, even as we accept and teach the Lord's will about sexual behavior.

Mary Ann
[Additional Added Reference: Why Premarital Sex is Stupid.]