THEOLOGY

1) Human Acts - Acts which man does as man = acts proper to man as man
- Acts of which he is properly master = because he does them with full
knowledge and of his own will = actions performed by man knowingly
and freely = will properly enlightened by knowledge supplied by
-

the intellect
Therefore, Human acts are those acts which proceed from a
deliberate freewill

2) Acts of man - those acts which man performs without being master of them
through his intellect and will = therefore, they are not voluntary
EXAMPLES OF ACTS OF MAN
o The natural acts of vegetative and sense faculties
- digestion, beating of heart, growth, corporal reactions, visual or auditive
perceptions.
- but these acts may become human acts when they are performed with
malice, or when we are directed by the will, when we look at something or
arouse ourselves
o Acts of persons without the proper use of reason children or insane persons
o Acts of people asleep or under the influence of hypnosis, alcohol or other
drugs.
- however, there may still be some degree of control by the will
- but there is indirect responsibility if the cause of the loss of control is
voluntary
o Primo-primi acts
quick and nearly automatic reactions

 reflex and nearly instantaneous reactions without time for the intellect
or will to intervene
o

Acts performed under serious physical or in some cases moral violence

3) Be aware of the different moral issues

o Making moral choices in our modern world can be confusing and difficult.
With so many temptations and influences pulling us in all directions, and the
pressures of life driving us toward the seemingly easy path, it is comforting
to know that Jesus Christ, through His Church, has blessed us with clear
moral framework to guide us toward a happy, fulfilling life.Christ gave us the
ability to be freed from the negative effects of immorality and unhappiness,
because true freedom allows us to live fully. The Church never forces anyone
to believe what she teaches. Faith itself must be free (CCC 160). But to help
guide us to choose what is best for ourselves, according to the way He made
us, He gave us the Church and all her moral teachings. Below are the moral
issues
-

we should be aware of specially nowadays:

Abortion
Euthanasia
Contraception and Infertility
Homosexuality
Stem Cell Research and Cloning
Pornography

LIST THE MODIFIERS OF GUMAN ACTS

1) Ignorance - Defined as lacking of a required knowledge which human being should
have of his moral duties.
- Invincible Ignorance that ignorance which a man is not able to
dispel by such ordinary diligence and reasonable efforts.

Vincible Ignorance - the knowledge CAN be acquired by ordinary

effort, but was not acquired because of negligence or intentionally

not acquired.
Affected/Pretended Ignorance occurs when a person positively wants

to be ignorant in order to plead innocent to a charge of guilt.

2) Fear is a disturbance of the mind caused by the thought of a threatening evil.
- It is the apprehension by the mind of an impending evil.
- It is an unpleasant feeling of anxiety or apprehension caused by the
presence or anticipation of danger.
3) Violence or compulsion - is the application of external force on a person by another
for the purpose of compelling him to do something against his will.
- It consists in the actual application of physical force to extort
something from a person.
4) Habit is a constant and easy way of doing things acquired by the repetition of the
same act.
-

It is an established action or pattern of behavior that is repeated so

often that it becomes typical of somebody, although he or she may

be unaware of it.
Synonymous to

addiction,

dependency,

fixation,

obsession,

weakness, custom, routine, practice, tradition, convention, pattern.

Define
1) Nature of sins - Sin is nothing else than a morally bad act (St. Thomas, "De malo",
7:3), an act not in accord with reason informed by the Divine law. God has
endowed us with reason and free-will, and a sense of responsibility; He has made
us subject to His law, which is known to us by the dictates of conscience, and our
acts must conform with these dictates, otherwise we sin (Romans 14:23). In every
sinful act two things must be considered, the substance of the act and the want of
rectitude or conformity (St. Thomas, I-II:72:1). The act is something positive. The
sinner intends here and now to act in some determined matter, inordinately

electing that particular good in defiance of God's law and the dictates of right
reason. The deformity is not directly intended, nor is it involved in the act so far as
this is physical, but in the act as coming from the will which has power over its acts
and is capable of choosing this or that particular good contained within the scope
of its adequate object, i.e. universal good (St. Thomas, "De malo", Q. 3, a. 2, ad
2um). God, the first cause of all reality, is the cause of the physical act as such, the
free-will of the deformity (St. Thomas I-II:89:2; "De malo", 3:2). The evil act
adequately considered has for its cause the free-will defectively electing some
mutable good in place of the eternal good, God, and thus deviating from its true
last end.
2) Concept of sin of the sacred scripture - As regards the principle from which it
proceeds sin is original or actual. The will of Adam acting as head of the human
race for the conservation or loss of original justice is the cause and source of
original sin. Actual sin is committed by a free personal act of the individual will. It is
divided into sins of commission and omission. A sin of commission is a positive act
contrary to some prohibitory precept; a sin of omission is a failure to do what is
commanded. A sin of omission, however, requires a positive act whereby one wills
to omit the fulfilling of a precept, or at least wills something incompatible with its
fulfillment (I-II:72:5). As regards their malice, sins are distinguished into sins of
ignorance, passion or infirmity, and malice; as regards the activities involved, into
sins of thought, word, or deed (cordis, oris, operis); as regards their gravity, into
mortal and venial. This last named division is indeed the most important of all and
it calls for special treatment. But before taking up the details, it will be useful to
indicate some further distinctions which occur in theology or in general usage.
- Material and formal sin

This distinction is based upon the difference between the objective

elements

(object

itself,

circumstances)

and

the

subjective

(advertence to the sinfulness of the act). An action which, as a matter

of fact, is contrary to the Divine law but is not known to be such by
the agent constitutes a material sin; whereas formal sin is committed
when the agent freely transgresses the law as shown him by his
conscience, whether such law really exists or is only thought to exist
by him who acts. Thus, a person who takes the property of another
while believing it to be his own commits a material sin; but the sin
would be formal if he took the property in the belief that it belonged
to another, whether his belief were correct or not.
- Internal sins
That sin may be committed not only by outward deeds but also by
the inner activity of the mind apart from any external manifestation,
is plain from the precept of the Decalogue: "Thou shalt not covet",
and from Christ's rebuke of the scribes and pharisees whom he likens
to "whited sepulchres... full of all filthiness" (Matthew 23:27). Hence
the Council of Trent (Sess. XIV, c. v), in declaring that all mortal sins
must be confessed, makes special mention of those that are most
secret and that violate only the last two precepts of the Decalogue,
adding that they "sometimes more grievously wound the soul and are
more dangerous than sins which are openly committed". Three kinds
of internal sin are usually distinguished:
delectatio morosa, i.e. the pleasure taken in a sinful thought
or imagination even without desiring it;

 gaudium, i.e. dwelling with complacency on sins already

committed; and
desiderium, i.e. the desire for what is sinful.
-

An efficacious desire, i.e. one that includes the deliberate intention to

realize or gratify the desire, has the same malice, mortal or venial, as
the action which it has in view. An inefficacious desire is one that
carries a condition, in such a way that the will is prepared to perform
the action in case the condition were verified. When the condition is
such as to eliminate all sinfulness from the action, the desire involves

no sin.
3) Social concepts of sin - social sin means in the first place to recognize that, by
virtue of human solidarity which is as mysterious and intangible as it is real and
concrete, each individual's sin in some way affects others. This is the other aspect
of that solidarity which on the religious level is developed in the profound and
magnificent mystery of the communion of saints, thanks to which it has been
possible to say that "every soul that rises above itself, raises up the world." To this
law of ascent there unfortunately corresponds the law of descent. Consequently
one can speak of a communion of sin, whereby a soul that lowers itself through sin
drags down with itself the church and, in some way, the whole world. In other
words, there is no sin, not even the most intimate and secret one, the most strictly
individual one, that exclusively concerns the person committing it. With greater or
lesser violence, with greater or lesser harm, every sin has repercussions on the
entire ecclesial body and the whole human family. According to this first meaning
of the term, every sin can undoubtedly be considered as social sin.
4) Church teachings on sins:

Distinction of Sin- Mortal sin by a baptised person removes the person from the
State of Grace and therefore denies them the reward of Heaven. A baptised person
who dies with mortal sin on their soul will go to Hell.
-

Venial sin, on the other hand, while it requires us to do satisfaction for

our sin and is deserving of punishment, does not bring us eternal

punishment.
For a sin to be a mortal sin, three things are required:

the matter must be "grave";

the sin must be committed with full knowledge; and

the sin must be committed deliberately.

Thus, the sin must be a serious sin. There is no doubt that matters
such as murder, theft, sexual sins (such as adultery, premarital sex
and contraception), bearing false witness, etc. are taken sufficiently
seriously

by

the

Church

to

constitute

grave

matter.

Anyone

committing these sins, knowing full well that they are grave matters
and nevertheless deliberately commits the sin, commits a mortal sin.
5) Conversion as reconciliation - "Repent and believe in the Gospel" (Mk 1:15). This
first conversion is for those who do not know Christ. By faith and Baptism, a person
first gains forgiveness of sins and new life.The "second conversion" (of Christians)
is the uninterrupted task of the Church (who "clasps sinners to her bosom"). This
conversion is beyond merely human endeavor and must come from a contrite
heart which responds to God's mercy.

Jesus' primary call is to an interior conversion which gives fruitfulness

to the exterior works of penance. Conversion comes about by an
examination of conscience, admission of faults, spiritual direction,
acceptance of suffering, and of persecution and concern for the poor.

Kinds of Law
1) Natural law - "The natural law is engraved in the soul of every man, because
human reason tells him to do good and avoid evil. It has force because it is the
voice of a higher reason to which our spirit must submit" (Pope Leo XIII).
2) Divine Law - Divine law is any law that comes directly from the will of God, in
contrast to man-made law. Like natural law (which may be seen as a manifestation
of divine law) it is independent of the will of man, who cannot change it. However it
may be revealed or not, so it may change in human perception in time through
new revelation. Divine law is commonly equated with eternal law, meaning that if
God is infinite, then his law must also be infinite and eternal.
3) Moral law - The moral law is God's fatherly instruction, showing the rules that lead
to heaven and the evils which lead away from God.
Moral laws as revealed law - Human law
1) Civil law - Civil law (or civilian law, Roman law) is a legal system originating
in Europe, intellectualized within the framework of late Roman law, and whose
most prevalent feature is that its core principles are codified into a referable
system which serves as the primary source of law. This can be contrasted with
common law systems whose intellectual framework comes from judge-made

decisional law which gives precedential authority to prior court decisions on the
principle that it is unfair to treat similar facts differently on different occasions.
2) Church law - the body of laws and regulations made by ecclesiastical authority
(Church leadership), for the government of a Christian organization or church
and its members. It is the internal ecclesiastical law governing the Catholic
Church (both Latin Church and Eastern Catholic Churches), the Eastern and
Oriental Orthodox churches, and the Anglican Communion of churches.[1] The
way that such church law is legislated, interpreted and at times adjudicated
varies widely among these three bodies of churches. In all three traditions, a
canon was originally a rule adopted by a church council; these canons formed
the foundation of canon law.

Conscience
1) Concept of conscience - Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the
human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to
perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he
says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and
right. It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes
the prescriptions of the divine law: Conscience is a law of the mind; yet
[Christians] would not grant that it is nothing more; I mean that it was not a
dictate, nor conveyed the notion of responsibility, of duty, of a threat and a
promise. . . . [Conscience] is a messenger of Him, who, both in nature and in
grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his
representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.
2) Moral conscience - Moral conscience, present at the heart of the person, enjoins
him at the appropriate moment to do good and to avoid evil. It also judges
particular choices, approving those that are good and denouncing those that are
evil.49 It bears witness to the authority of truth in reference to the supreme
Good

to

which

the

human

person

is

drawn,

and

it

welcomes

the

commandments. When he listens to his conscience, the prudent man can hear
God speaking.
3) Category of conscience - Conscience includes 1) the perception of the principles
of morality (synderesis); 2) their application in the given circumstances by
practical discernment of reasons and goods; and 3) finally judgment about
concrete acts yet to be performed or already performed (CCC 1780)

4) Formation & Devt. Of conscience - Now we deal with shaping, educating, and
forming the conscience. Forming our conscience is a continuous conversion to
what is true and to what is good (VS 63b) [5]. Recall the three components of
conscience. First, we must learn the basic moral principles as known through
the natural moral law, through Divine Revelation and by the teachings of the
Magisterium. Part III of the CCC is very useful here. Second, we must learn how
to do moral reasoning, how the moral principles apply to various situations in
life. We must understand why a good moral principle is objective, consistent,
with universal application. We see how they apply even to hard cases. Third,
when making moral judgments about this particular human act, we are to use
good reasoning in conformity with the truth and in pursuit of the good. All three
components of the conscience require education, training, practice, and
experience.