New (Maybe Forgotten) Sins for the Confessional

19th Sunday of the Year

The Catechism of the Catholic Church lists several sins of the tongue that deserve more attention than they usually receive. These sins, each in its own way, are offenses against truth.

• False witness and perjury are statements made in public, usually in a legal proceeding, that stand contrary to the truth.

• Rash judgment is to assume the moral fault of a neighbor without sufficient foundation.

• Detraction is telling someone who does not need to know about the fault of another person.

• Calumny is to tell a lie that directly or indirectly harms the reputation of another person.

• Flattery and adulation become sinful when language is used to encourage the sinful behavior of another person.

• Boasting and bragging are exaggerations of the truth; irony becomes malicious when used to insult the reputation of another person.

• Finally, a good old-fashioned lie is the fabrication of a falsehood with the intention to deceive another person.

These sins get serious pretty quickly, but we usually do not give them the attention they deserve. Maybe one reason we fail to focus on sins of the tongue is because we live in a culture that makes these kinds of moral failings commonplace, almost essential, to daily life—how are you supposed to get through the workday without a little gossip, a little reputation-harming banter around the water cooler (or the Zoom chat box?)?

But there is also the fact that many of us have been poorly formed in the teaching of the Church.

St. Thomas teaches that all things being equal, sins of the spirit are more serious, graver, than sins of the flesh (ST I-II, q. 73, a. 5). He gives us a few reasons why, and two of these are very important: (1) a carnal sin is a turning toward the flesh, while spiritual sin is a turning away from God, to whom the spirit in each of us belongs, and a direct turning away from God is worse than the turning toward the flesh; (2) a sin of the flesh is first a sin against one’s own body, while the first victim of a spiritual sin is God or neighbor—and it is a more serious moral failing to injure God or neighbor than to injure yourself.

Sins of the flesh command most of our attention these days, probably because our culture obsesses over the flesh, but you need to remember that your spirit is the highest and most noble part of who you are. A sin of the spirit like lying or detraction (when free from bodily compulsion) is a direct turning away from God. When you commit a sin like calumny or boasting, you take the best and most noble part of who you are and use it to abuse the truth—and the truth, ultimately, is Christ. Maybe now you can see why these kinds of sins matter a great deal.

I wanted to talk for a few minutes about sins of the tongue because I find it interesting that nowhere in the Catechism will you find the Church condemning murmuring. The dictionary says that murmuring is a soft, indistinct sound made by a person or group of people speaking quietly or at a distance, so murmuring is definitely something you do with your tongue. Meanwhile, the Greek word for murmuring (egongyzon) appears 8 times in the New Testament and is almost always condemned. Christ condemns the murmuring of the Jews in today’s Gospel; a little later, Christ will condemn the murmuring of his disciples. St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians condemns the murmuring that courses through the whole history of Israel (most especially during those 40 years lost in the desert) and instructs the Christian faithful not to grumble among themselves. The way that Paul uses the original Greek captures the full range of meaning for the word: murmuring is to speak privately and in a low voice, and to share with another person your sullen and private discontent, and to express indignant complaint toward authority.

It is a shame that the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not directly condemn murmuring because we certainly live in an age of softly spoken criticisms, shared private discontent, and disrespectful grumbling against authority. Maybe you don’t mind your murmuring because murmuring gets no ink in the Catechism, but for me the fact that Christ and Paul both condemn the practice is good enough. I think that what we often do is function a lot like the pharisees and scribes in the Gospels and use our concern for the truth as a justification for our murmuring: we tell ourselves that we need to grumble and complain and share our discontent with others and talk in low voices about whatever offends us because love for the truth demands these kinds of actions.

When you think about what murmuring is and remember what St. Thomas teaches about sins of the spirit, you can come to a deeper appreciation of how perverse, disordered, our use of the tongue has become in the Church today: we use our love for the truth as a justification for deliberately turning the spirit away from God. In the Gospel today, the Jews are literally standing in front of God as Christ teaches them, and they use their love for the truth as a justification to turn from Christ (who is standing right in front of them!) and hold a private conversation filled with complaints and criticisms. The Jews in the Gospel today are basically one laptop and a blogpost away from living comfortably in the Church in the year 2024.

The tension in the Gospel today is real. Christ is trying to get everyone to pay attention to his teaching about eternal life and his divine origin. He talks to the crowds about a paradox that ought to command the attention of anyone who wants to live in a relationship with God: no one comes to Christ except through the working of the Father, but no one comes to the Father except through the working of the Son. Who comes first in the order of divine experience, the Father or the Son? If I want eternal life, who do I need first, Christ or the Father? But instead of standing there awestruck wondering if God is literally appearing before them, the Jews hang out in the back of the classroom having a private conversation about whether the teacher knows what he’s talking about or not.

We just finished the big buildup toward the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, and it looks like as many as 60,000 people headed out to Indiana for a week of worship and formation. The National Eucharistic Congress was something like the high-water mark for our multi-year National Eucharistic Revival in the United States, and now is probably a good time to start asking ourselves what we want a eucharistically revived Church to look like. The website for the National Eucharistic Revival lists 4 goals that you would expect to find: more people going to Mass and adoration, more conversion, more devotion, more evangelization.

I would add a fifth goal to the list: less murmuring from anyone who goes to Mass. When you come to Mass, you are like someone in the crowds in today’s Gospel, standing in front of God, who is trying to teach you and feed you. And if you hang in there for the whole liturgy, you will receive overwhelming graces and experience a foretaste of eternal life. Most incredibly, these realities take place no matter what is going on in Rome, or the Archdiocese, or in your parish, no matter the language or style of the liturgy, no matter whether you think a pope or bishop or priest or the person sitting in the pew next to you has any clue what they are doing.

We are hardwired for murmuring. We want to talk about what we do not like, express discontent about whatever we think is wrong, and grumble against authority whenever we decide our leaders do not know what they are doing. Murmuring makes a lot of sense to me—nothing is more natural than for us to use language to talk to other people about what upsets us. But here is what matters most: what is supernatural ought to command our attention the most, and we cannot use the best, most noble part of who we are to turn away from God while claiming to care about the truth. And no matter what is going on in your life or in the life of the Church or in the life of the world, if you really believe in the reality of the Eucharist, then you know that when you come to Mass you are standing in front of God and experiencing a foretaste of eternal life.

What else is really worth talking about?

Homily preached on Sunday, August 11th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary