Lust and Its Effects
August 24, 2024
Allan Piu bella by Francesco Vinea
IN A Complete Catechism of the Catholic Religion (1912) by Fr. Joseph Deharbe, this interesting, brief description of lust is included and I think it explains a lot of things happening around us — except today we don’t have dueling.
How do we sin by Lust?
By indulging in immodest or impure thoughts, desires, words, or actions.
The ordinary effects of lust, or impurity, are: Aversion to prayer and to all that is good; excessive fondness for amusement and dissipation; neglect of the duties of our state of life; great desire of attracting notice; insensibility and cruelty; all sorts of shameless excesses and of unnatural crimes; seduction of innocence; false promises and oaths; theft, ruin of health and of domestic happiness; enmity, duels, suicide or self-murder; and likewise atheism, sacrilege, worship of the devil, madness, and despair. (See the Sixth Commandment of God.)
There’s nothing better than a pithy, well-worded description of one of the capital sins — sins which lead to other sins. It helps us know ourselves better. And life isn’t worth living without self-knowledge.
Lust is a form of slavery. “The whole history of mankind testifies to our weakness in this matter,” wrote W.F. Strojie. “Dalliance, urged on by pride and vanity, leads any into sexual slavery… [T]he devil lays his snares in attractive persons; or in any one of hundreds of worldly attractions, not in themselves, at least not at first, bad.”
The surest way to conquer lust is to catch it in its first moments and not later.
