EVIL AND SIN

When our first parents fell, their human nature was so broken that it was modified.  I was a broken human nature that they had and which we all inherited.  It was a human nature that was incapable of willing good and, therefore, finds itself continuously willing evil.   

When the will, broken by original sin, actually chooses what is evil, then we have a sin.  Evil is a more general term while sin is more specific.  Sin is a personal and voluntary act by which man misdirects his love, fundamental to the life of a soul, from a worthy object to an unworthy object.  Through sin, the will expresses its disorder. 

Evil, aside from including sins, includes also involuntary acts like death, sickness, famine, earthquakes and storms.  The involuntary evils, like sickness or earthquakes, are meant by God to contain the evil of men.  Even the destruction of the ecology is an evil due to the sins of men; and any attempt to save it must take evil into consideration.  Evils sent by God to contain the sins of men are called chastisements; and is meant to correct pride and punish wrong-doing. 

Sin in a human being is disorder or perversity, that is, an aversion to the more preferable Creator and a conversion to the inferior creatures.

Since we have seen how Adam and Eve fell, how a man sins and how he falls into evil times, all we have to do is do the opposite to go back to God.  We must first be obedient to undo the disobedience of our first parents.  Then we must remove the evil in us by a life of fasting (fasting from sin by curing the abuses of the vices)  and then restore goodness in our souls by, first, acts of mercy and then acts of charity.

St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier said:  It is human to fall but angelic to rise again.  St. Augustine described the way of life of the Catholic Church as the Angelic Life.  It is the way of life that makes us rise from the fall. 

(10-06-10)