QUOTATION: Sin

As a watchmaker with his glasses distinguishes the most minute wheels of a watch, so we, with the light of the Holy Ghost, distinguish all the details of our poor life. Then the smallest imperfections appear very great, the least sins inspire us with horror. That is the reason why the most Holy Virgin never sinned. The Holy Ghost made her understand the hideousness of sin; she shuddered with terror at the least fault.

--St. Jean Vianney, the Cure of Ars

QUOTATION: Sense of Sin

The devil presents minor sins as insignificant in our eyes, because otherwise he would not be able lead us into major ones.

--St. Mark the Ascetic

QUOTATION: Sin

The rabbis and priests and ministers stopped talking about sin. The jurists picked it up and turned sin into a crime, and finally psychiatrists converted it into a complex. The result is that no one is a sinner.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: The Sense of Sin

A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. We lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about. And when men attempt to be Christians without the preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one always inexplicably angry. Most of us have at times felt a secret sympathy with the dying farmer who replied to the Vicar’s dissertation on repentance by asking ‘What harm have I ever done to Him?’ There is the real rub. The worst we have done to God is to leave him alone—why can’t He return the compliment? Why not live and let live? What call has He, of all beings, to be ‘angry’? It’s easy for him to be good!

Now at the moment when a man feels real guilt—moments too rare in our lives—all these blasphemies vanish away. Much, we may feel, can be excused to human infirmities, but not this—this incredibly mean and ugly action which none of our friends would have done, which even such a thorough-going little rotter as X would have been ashamed of, which we would not for the world allow to be published. At such a moment, we really do know that our character, as revealed in this action, is, and ought to be, hateful to all good men, and, if there are powers above men, to them. A God who did not regard this with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God—it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abolished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath happens to stink.

When we merely say that we are bad, the ‘wrath’ of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary of God’s goodness. To keep ever before us the insight derived from such a moment as I have been describing, to learn to detect the same real inexcusable corruption under more and more of its complex disguises, is therefore indispensable to a real understanding the Christian faith. This is not, of course, a new doctrine. I am attempting nothing very splendid in this chapter. I am merely trying to get to my reader (and, still more, myself) over a pons asinorum—to take the first step out of fools’ paradise and utter illusion.
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--C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

QUOTATION: Sin

There is only one thing more dangerous than sin--the murder of a man’s sense of sin.

– John Paul II

QUOTATION: Sin

A single venial sin is more displeasing to God than all the good works we can perform.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, Uniformity with God’s Will

QUOTATION: The Sense of Sin

The sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin.

--Bl. Pope Pius XII.

QUOTATION: The Restoration of the Sense of Sin

The restoration of a proper sense of sin is the first way of facing the grave spiritual crisis looming over man today. But the sense of sin can only be restored through a clear reminder of the unchangeable principles of reason and faith which the moral teaching of the Church has always upheld.

--Pope John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia