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Dear Father Angelo,

I confessed to the same priest for the last two years, to the point that he became my spiritual father. During this time, I confessed to him the same sin (solitary vice) over and over. He finally told me that I can communicate despite falling repetitively into this sin. Masturbation ruins my life to the point that I even talked to a therapist about this compelling, unstoppable need to masturbate despite the fact that I hate it. At some point, my spiritual father just ordered me to stop confessing this sin every time, and to communicate anyway. He says that I should communicate even in sin, as Christ says “take and drink, ALL OF YOU” and not “YOU can take it”. He says that everybody commits sin, and that Communion is not to be intended as a prize for the perfect ones only. He also thinks that solitary vice is not such a bad sin after all, that there are far more serious sins than that.
Should I do what he ordered? I tried to communicate right after falling into this sin, without confessing it first, and honestly it did not feel right. My heart tells me that I should confess right away.

I pray for you.

Priest’s answer

Dear reader,


1. Masturbation is objectively a serious sin.
Subjectively, the severity of this act should be evaluated only after taking into consideration that masturbation can occur as a challenging behavior in people who lack intellectual awareness, so that these individuals do not possess full control over their body and their will. Therefore, two conditions should be considered, along with the objective gravity, in order to decree that we are in the presence of a serious sin, which is responsible for losing the state of grace: the full knowledge of the intellect, and the deliberate consent of the will. 

2. I cannot judge your subjective responsibility over an email, even more outside the space and time of a sacramental confession. I will therefore limit myself to comment on the words your spiritual father told you. You write that his words do not satisfy you, and you are right, indeed! That being said, there might be real motivations, motivations your priest did not want to reveal to you, which in your case make less serious what is objectively severe.
Nevertheless, the motivations he mentioned are insufficient.

3. It is true that, when our Lord said: “Drink from it, all of you” (Mathew 26,27), he used the plural form. By doing so, he meant that in everything the Church does there is always a community of actions. The act of communicating is not a purely individualistic act but rather an action that is done in communion with Christ and his entire Church (all).
Yet, whenever some of us break his own relationship with Christ and the Church, this person must first reconcile with Christ and the Church. Our Lord said it very explicitly through the mouth of St. Paul: “Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord. A person should examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself ” (1st Corinthians 11, 27-30). At the time of the first christian community in Corinth some disorders occurred, at the point that the ecclesial communion was broken. This is exactly why God said, through St. Paul’s mouth, that it is necessary to examine ourselves and do what we have to do in order to reconcile first, and only after that we can eat the body and drink the blood of the Lord. If we don’t do that, the act of communicating would not really happen in a state of communion, and would therefore be only fictitious, since it would not subsist ‘de facto’.
As a result, a person who communicates without first reconciling with Christ and his Church would make a profane use of the sacrament of Communication, leading him to eat and drink judgment on himself.

4. This very important concept has been repeated over and over during the history of christianity.

In his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, St. John Paul II stated that “the integrity of the invisible bonds is a precise moral duty of the Christian who wants to fully participate in the Eucharist by receiving the body and blood of Christ”.


Again, St. Paul calls us to duty through the admonition: «A person should examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup» (1st Corinthians 11,28).


St. John Chrysostom exhorts the faithful with his stirring eloquence: “I too raise my voice, I beseech, beg and implore that no one draw near to this sacred table with a sullied and corrupt conscience. Such an act, in fact, can never be called ‘communion’, not even were we to touch the Lord’s body a thousand times, but ‘condemnation’, ‘torment’ and ‘increase of punishment’».


Similarly, the CCC (no. 1385) states: “Anyone conscious of a grave sin must receive the sacrament of Reconciliation before coming to communion”. 

The Church applied, apply, and will always applied the rule expressed by Council of Trent , which concretized the severe admonition of the apostle Paul: «a worthy Eucharist must be preceded by sacramental confession when one is aware of having committed a mortal sin» (EE 36).

5. Your priest told you that “we all sin”. Even if this applies to venial sins, however, it is not true that everyone commits or lives in mortal sin. And, even if so, when in mortal sin it is necessary to confess before taking the Holy Communion.

St Augustine investigated why Jesus instituted the sacrament of confession. Here his comment: “So, was there no point in the Lord saying, What you lose on earth shall be lost in heaven (Mt 18:18; 16:19)? So were the keys given to the Church of God for nothing? Are we to nullify the gospel, nullify the words of Christ? Am I to promise you what he refuses you? Wouldn’t I just be deceiving you?” (Sermon 392, 3). It is not enough to say “we all sin” to state that we do not need a confession. 

6. Finally, he said that “Communion is not the prize for the perfect etc.”.
It is indeed true that communion is not the prize for the perfect, otherwise none of us could take it.
However, in order to receive the Holy Communion, which is a sacrament that increases the life of grace, grace is supposed to be there (this is why in one eucharistic hymn we says that Jesus is “the vigour of the weak”).
If grace does not subsist, it is necessary to recover it.

Now, the sacrament Christ instituted to recover grace is not the Eucharist but the sacramental confession.

With this being said, it remains true that if one takes the Holy Communion in mortal sin, he commits sacrilege. It is only a Communion rite, not the true Communion.

7. Well, this is what I felt compelled to tell you. Perhaps your confessor had other reasons, so that it may be appropriate that you stick to what he says.
However, the reasons you provided me are not sufficient.

I wish you well, ensure you of my prayer too and bless you.

Father Angelo