to where the borderline is from venial to mortal sin manifests little love for Our Lord. There are plenty of people who want to avoid mortal sin because they don’t want to go to Hell. I would like for my spiritual daughter to want to avoid all sin because it hurts Our Lord. God wants excellence. He does not want you to drift along with the crowd, or to compare yourself with the worst and say you are OK. No, He wants you to excel in chastity and modesty. This requires intentionality on your part. I want you to be chaste, not just to avoid sins of impurity. Many Catholics, sadly, do not have the love of chastity. Their mentality is often: if it weren’t sinful and going to lead to Hell, I would do it. That clearly is not love for chastity. It is a slave’s fear of Hell. Coming to a direct answer to the question you asked, your outfit that day was objectively speaking gravely contrary to the moral law. The reason for this is that a man who has not mastered his passions – and most do not – will have immediately seen you as an object for pleasure and would have indulged in gazing at you, committing impurity in his heart (cf. Mat 5:28) – as you noticed they did –, whereas a virtuous man will have had to turn away in order not to look at you that way. You fell into the exact scenario Pope Pius XII evoked when he said: “How many young girls there are who do not see any wrongdoing in following certain shameless styles like so many sheep. They certainly would blush if they could guess the impression they make and the feelings they evoke in those who see them.16 If you had been fully aware of this and conscious that your immodesty could cause mortal sin in men who would see you, you would certainly have committed a mortal sin by wearing it, even if you were hoping that would not happen. What this teaches you is that sometimes apparently “innocent” actions can have grave consequences, for mortal sin can be committed in thought alone. Sometimes you hear people say that it’s just a matter of not looking at someone with lust, as if one could hit a switch and all would be fixed. Such nonsense ignores the reality of concupiscence that flows from Original Sin and that is present in every man you will ever meet. In all my study of theology I have yet to find reference to any but one Immaculate Conception… It is true that there is a very small percentage of very virtuous men who have trained themselves for a very long time in self-mastery, who could possibly have been able to look at you that night and speak to you with tranquility, but only because of a great mastery over themselves, and even then there is a risk (remember David). It is a torture 49
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