Fr. Shane Johnson

God can bring good out of any evil... always. So what good does he want to bring out of this particular suffering?

Definitely: Growth in humility. Bringing it up with your girlfriend is already a step in that direction.

Probably: Strengthening the relationship by learning to deal with deep issues together. For that to happen, she needs to understand the compulsive or semi-compulsive nature of your habit, and that it's not a rejection of her love, but something that you're no longer in control of.

Hopefully: Making your prayer more real and more personal. Prayer is only "real" if it's about a deeply felt need that drives us to our knees... sounds like this is yours. (Even if it's just a "need" to adore or to glorify God, there is always that element to prayer.)

Also hopefully: Learning about the way spiritual growth and healing happens. It doesn't happen at the quick pace we would sometimes like. It isn't automatic. Frequent confession is critical in uprooting deep habits, but conversion doesn't happen overnight.

Masturbation can only harm your relationship by harming your ability to love her, so stay alert to the ways that can happen. They can be subtle (a sort of unnoticed self-absorption) or obvious (consumption of pornographic images). You've probably already heard all the basic advice for trying to break the habit, but let me just add this: Since a compulsive habit of masturbation often arises in the context of self-doubt, you may need to discover in her love the fact that you're lovable the way that God made you... 

May God bless you both!

- Father Shane

How hard it is to call our sins by their name! But once we do so, they really do begin to control us less.

So yes, you do need to say the "m" word or some euphemism that makes it perfectly clear to the priest what you're talking about. "I sinned against chastity" could mean anything from adultery (or its far worse forms) to looking at indecent pictures, so to be really perfectly honest with God about what happened, you really do need to put a name on it.

In the case of more serious things like masturbation (or whatever "m" word you're thinking of), it's also necessary to say (more or less) how many times you've committed it since the last Confession. But you don't have to go into greater details. I don't know how specific you want me to be about "being specific," but it's perhaps also worth mentioning that if, for instance, you're involved in something with another person, that you mention the gender of the person (but please not a name or anything that could identify them to the priest) as well as any aggravating factors. No need to go into what those factors are, I suppose, but just think in terms of anything that makes the sin more serious.

Anyway, the key is that the victory that you and God win over sin is somehow bound up with being able to call your sins by their name. As a side note, it can also help the priest give you better advice on how to overcome your sins if you're as honest as possible about their nature and what it is that keeps drawing you to them like a moth to a flame.

God bless you in your struggle to defeat sin and temptation!

- Father Shane

A couple thoughts about that from the YouCat, first:

In other words, sex is for you and your spouse... together... no other way.

So to answer your question about the "urges" first, the answer is that the urge to masturbation is one of a whole category of urges that promise happiness but never deliver: urges to rage and to revenge, urges to pig out on food, even urges in the sexual realm. How do we "explain" those? Original sin, period. No deeper explanation required.

But the question about sinfulness is more complicated. In itself, masturbation is a sin. But adolescence hits different people different ways. Some people never get started with masturbation in adolescence; others develop a deep habit/addiction while still too young to realize what it is they're doing.

As the Catechism says in #2352, being so young and having great difficulty in controlling urges once they become deeply ingrainedTo form an equitable judgment about the subjects' moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability." Okay, that was theologically complex. The idea is that a priest in Confession is going to be best able to help determine whether it's a mortal sin, a venial sin, or hardly sinful... in different cases. A priest's advice is also going to be helpful for breaking the habit.

More reading:

God bless you!

- Father Shane

The basic doctrine is here. A couple other things I've written are this and this. I have another question in the inbox that I'm hoping to answer shortly that takes the discussion a bit deeper, so watch for that answer shortly.

God bless you!

- Father Shane

An interesting argument! I don't think I had heard it before.

It's a scientific question more than an ethical one, really, since there is a deep biological question that we have to answer first: What is the role of a cell with regards to an entire organism? 

In multicellular beings, the cell is not the whole organism and (usually) can't survive on its own. It exists to serve the organism in some capacity and depends on the other cells in the organism in order to carry out its own vital functions. So a single cell can be lost or die, and it's not necessarily a tragedy to the whole. That's why your skin and hair are made up of dead cells, and why if a living cell is dislodged and swept away in some natural process (shedding a tear, blowing your nose) it's simply a fact of life and not an ethical dilemma.

So what is a gamete? Just another cell? Well, sort of. It only contains half of your genome, and its only "purpose" (a tricky term in the philosophy of biology; replace it with "function" if you prefer) is to create a new organism. But that it itself really isn't a new organism is shown by its lifespan: After an ovary releases an ovum, the ovum will only survive for roughly 4-7 days (depending on who you ask) if it's not fertilized. Similarly, a spermatozoon will only survive for around 48 hours after release. And both are strictly limited to surviving within a human body.

It's a little different from the case in which fertilization occurs, right? The zygote's life can last for 80+ years, and it will be able to survive outside a human body (or strictly controlled lab conditions) within 26 weeks or so.

So the solution is to say that a gamete is a living cell (with a very short lifespan and a single "purpose") with potential to become a human being if fertilization occurs. 

A gamete which dies before fertilization was never a human being -- it could have fused with another gamete to form one -- whereas a zygote already is a human being, albeit an itsy-bitsy one.

Willingly killing a gamete isn't necessarily immoral (the Church condemns masturbation not because it's "killing gametes" but for other reasons that I'll discuss in another answer shortly) but willingly killing a zygote/blastocyst/embryo (i.e., "abortion") is.

For the record, medieval scientists and theologians thought that a spermatozoon already was a zygote (though they didn't use the term) -- a fully-characterized human being -- and that the mother's body was a sort of "fertile ground" in which the human being produced by the father could develop. But thanks be to God we've gotten past that...

Just for the record, too, the ever-more-common terminology of "owner" of body parts is a little strange, don't you think? If you "own" your genitals, do you therefore "own" your arm or eye or brain? And if so, what is the "you" that's doing the owning, if it's none of your body parts? 

Maybe it would be better to say that a human person is his/her body (and his/her soul). Otherwise we wouldn't say "ouch, you hurt me" when we're pinched, right?

God bless you!

- Father Shane

Well, yes. But don't panic. Here's an explanation I wrote a little while ago. (The Catechism discusses it in #2352, by the way. But note how it ends.)

Another helpful explanation here, btw.

God bless you!

- Father Shane