Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2008

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I can only comment on what I was raised with.  Haven't kept touch since
I gained my majority.  But "misdemeanor" is a legal term, isn't it?  The
nuns seemed to me to consider any sexual offense as "mortal", while
minor stealing and lying were "venial".  Maybe Church courts have been
able to express in the Canons exactly which sins are felonies and which
misdemeanors.

http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_df75se.htm  (Persona Humana,
December '75)
From Chapter VII:
[13] St. Paul will be even more explicit when he shows that if unmarried
people or widows cannot live chastely they have no other alternative
than the stable union of marriage: ". . .it is better to marry than to
be aflame with passion."

From Chapter IX:
. . .Whatever the force of certain arguments of a biological and
philosophical nature, which have sometimes been used by theologians, in
fact both the Magisterium of the Church--in the course of a constant
tradition-- and the moral sense of the faithful have declared without
hesitation that masturbation is an intrinsically and seriously
disordered act.   [19]    For it lacks the sexual relationship called
for by the moral order, namely the relationship which realizes "the full
sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true
love. . .Even if it cannot be proved that Scripture condemns this sin by
name, the tradition of the Church has rightly understood it to be
condemned in the New Testament when the latter speaks of "impurity,"
"unchasteness" and other vices contrary to chastity and continence.

I guess you takes your chances, like Don Juan.