The topic for today's four-minutes is "Whatever Happened to Sin?" Now, not to worry. There's lots of sin around. It's alive and well. It continues to challenge our hearts and our daily lives. But, for those of us who were born in the 1920's or the 1930's or the 1940's or the 1950's or the early part of the 1960's, something definitely has happened.

Once upon a time, most of us Catholics carried around with us, somewhere in our heads, a "sin list." And there were five things about the sin list. The sins were very specific. The list was very clear. The list was very long. And the list was always growing. And, finally, most of the items on the list were mortal sins.... mortal sins that represented something that caused a complete divorce between us and God, between us and the Church, between us and the right to go to Communion, and between us and, even, everlasting life. And mortal sins were familiar and they were common. I read a journalist this week who wrote, "The ordinary good person had many opportunities, perhaps a dozen or more every day, to commit sins that demanded forgiveness in the confessional."

What has happened in the thirty-five years since Vatican II is our focus has changed. It's moved off, correctly, ...off of rules, regulations and laws. (And there's a place for those, but that's not where the focus is.) The focus has moved to where it belongs, to the Gospel message of Jesus and to Jesus' view and idea of what God is like. And, on top of that, we've had thirty-five years of listening to the Gospel in our own language and of participating in liturgy after liturgy that forcefully announces the unconditional love of God for all of us.

So the big change is this. Once upon a time, we at least had the feeling that serious sin was easy to come by or to fall into, and God's forgiveness was very difficult to obtain. And we've realized that it's the exact reverse that is closer to the truth. We thought that mortal sin was something you caught, almost unintentionally, like acne or like the flu, and we've come closer to the truth that even the Baltimore Catechism kept underlining, that for anything that we could call "mortal," it involved at least....at least three things: #1, that it was around a substantial, significant issue, called a "grave matter," #2, that we personally recognized, affirmed, accepted that it was seriously wrong, and finally, that we freely, intentionally, and deliberately chose it. Now, for the ordinary believer, that's something that is extraordinarily uncommon.

And, for our daily shortcomings and faults and failings, God's forgiveness is readily available and ways to receive and celebrate that forgiveness are available, as simple as a heartfelt prayer of sorrow and contrition, as simple as the prayer of absolution at the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass, as simple as listening with faith to the Gospel, (You notice, at the end of the Gospel, the priest kisses the Book and says, "By the words of this holy Gospel, may our sins be blotted out and forgiven.") ... or, by going to Communion, which is not only nourishing, but healing.

Well, some other things have happened to sin too. One is that it is nowhere near as private as it once was. But that's another topic, so that's for next week: "Whatever Happened To Sin, Part Two."