Apart from God, man will only find unhappiness and death; sin is a vain attempt to store water in a broken cistern. "Help me to repeat it in the ear of this one, and that one..., and everyone: the sinner, who has faith, even if he achieves all the blessings of the earth, is necessarily unhappy and wretched." It is true that the motive that should lead us to hate sin, even venial sin, the one that should move everyone, is supernatural: that God hates it with all His infinity, with supreme, eternal, and necessary hatred, as an evil opposed to the infinite good...; but the first consideration, which I have pointed out to you, can lead us to this last one: the solitude that sin leaves in the soul should also move us to turn away from it. Not without reason has it been said that very often "the road to Hell is already a hell."
Sin hardens the soul to the things of God. In the Gospel of the Mass, Jesus says, quoting the Prophet Isaiah: You will hear with your ears without understanding; you will look with your eyes without seeing; for this people's heart is dulled, they are hard of hearing, they have closed their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, nor hear with their ears, nor understand with their heart... It is enough to take a look around us to see, with sorrow, how these words of the Lord are also a reality in many who have lost the sense of sin and are, as it were, deadened to supernatural realities.
Mortal sin radically separates man from God, because it deprives the soul of sanctifying grace; all merits acquired through good works performed are lost, and it leaves the soul incapacitated from acquiring new ones; it remains, in a certain way, subject to the slavery of the devil; it diminishes the natural inclination to virtue, in such a way that each time it becomes more difficult to perform good deeds; at times it also has effects on the body: lack of peace, bad mood, sloth, a weak will for work...; a disorder is provoked in the powers and affections; it causes harm to the whole Church and to all people, and a separation from them, even if externally it goes unnoticed: in the same way that every righteous person who strives to love God elevates the world and every human being, every sin "drags down with itself the Church and, in a certain way, the whole world. In other words, there is no sin, even the most intimate and secret one, that exclusively affects the person who commits it. Every sin echoes, with greater or lesser intensity, with greater or lesser harm, throughout the entire ecclesial body and the entire human family."
Every sin is intimately and mysteriously linked to the Passion of Christ. Our sins were present and were the cause of so much pain; now, as far as it is in our power, they crucify the Son of God anew. "How He loves us, and how many sacrifices, how many sufferings He went through to save us, from the manger to the cross! What do the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, the stations of the Stations of the Cross, the Cross, the nails, the spear, and the wounds tell us? For us, for each one of us He suffered all this, solely to open up access to the Father for us (Eph 2:18), to obtain for us the forgiveness of sins and the right to possess eternal life. In return, we sin and despise all His sacrifices. This was His sharpest pain during the agony in Gethsemane: He foresaw with divine clarity how we were going to respond to Him."
With divine help and mercy, because no one is confirmed in grace, the Christian who follows Christ closely does not habitually fall into grave faults. But the awareness of our own weakness must lead us to carefully avoid occasions of sin, even the most remote ones; to practice mortification of the senses; not to trust in our own experience, in years perhaps of dedication, or in a refined formation... And we must ask the Lord to hate all sin and every deliberate fault, for delicacy of conscience to detect even minor faults, and to desire to purify the soul in frequent Confession, so as not to lose the sense of sin—that tremendous reality that seems foreign to a large part of the society to which we belong, because it has turned its back on God.
We say to Jesus: "Help us to overcome our indifference and our torpor! Give us the sense of sin. Create in us, Lord, a pure heart, and renew a steadfast spirit within our conscience."
HCD