Article 3
That every Christian is bound so to stand before God, so to think, and to hold before God such a resolve, that he would rather die than offend God by mortal sin.
AS the supreme Truth declares in the Gospel, the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord, the true God, with all one's heart, that is, incomparably more than oneself and all created things:1 for God most high and eternal is the supreme, infinite and incomparable good, or rather pure goodness, infinitely perfect, from whose lovableness, perfection, sweetness and glory all created things, each and all, even taken together, fall short infinitely, that is, incomparably and incomprehensibly more than a little grain of sand falls short of the greatness of the highest and vastest heaven. True charity, then, unites and conforms the will of the rational creature so strongly with its most worthy Creator that it makes the rational creature love and desire, esteem and prize, fear and worship the Creator more than any creature; and grieve more deeply over offending the Creator, and over losing His charity and grace and His gracious indwelling and presence, than over any earthly loss or temporal hardship, or any adversity, bodily infirmity or human shame. And whoever does not feel so in his heart, nor so stand before God, nor so intend and resolve, in act and in habit, and at the fitting time, is not in the state of salvation, but of eternal damnation.
Hence it is plain that a Sister who stands so that she would rather knowingly conceal some mortal sin in sacramental confession, and receive the sacrament of the Eucharist without confessing it wholly and fully, than for that sin be held back, kept away and turned away from holy communion and suffer human shame: it is plain, I say, that such a Sister, or such a Brother, is already actually in mortal sin and worthy of everlasting condemnation, and inwardly, in her soul, wholly deformed, perverse, unjust, disordered and deprived of divine love. She is therefore unworthy of the habit and the name of religion, and is not the bride of Christ but the devil's adulteress. And this too (as St. Augustine asserts) is true of every rational creature that is in mortal sin. Therefore Albert adds that the truly penitent and contrite man is ready to perform every satisfaction and penance, and does not think any temporal shame, mockery, rebuke or discipline enough for his sins, by which he has gravely and in many ways offended his Creator and deserved the death and shame of hell.
Moreover, as St. Thomas writes, a murderer, robber or thief sins mortally by not confessing his crime to the judge, even though he is to be put to death for it. How enormously, then, does a religious person sin who hides her sin in sacramental confession for fear of human shame or discipline, and moreover dares in such a state of her blinded and wretched heart to approach the table of her Savior, and to receive His body and blood so unworthily, not blushing before the Most High, nor fearing the terrible words of the Apostle, who threatens and affirms: Whoever eats this bread or drinks the chalice of the Lord unworthily will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord?2
Whatever, then, is contrary to divine charity or to saving wisdom, a religious person, and indeed every Christian, must always avoid with all diligence, and be incomparably more ashamed before the eyes of the most holy God of the foulness of his sin and of the vices of his heart than before men of his just and charitable rebuke, correction, humiliation and brief shame; and he must prefer to be duly chastised in this life before a few members of his household rather than be kept for God's dreadful judgment, and on the last day be put to shame and rejected before the whole world.
Footnotes
Chapter 4 of 8