Since my experience is probably typical of many Catholics, it might be a useful exercise to begin this paper by sharing with you my own personal journey through various understandings or paradigms of sin. I believe it has been a journey of healing, because my earlier understanding of sin was very crippling and has probably left me scarred for life.

DISOBEDIENCE is the word which captures my initial paradigm of sin. While this model presumed an internal dimension to disobedience, the external dimension loomed far more important. Psychologically ‘disobedience to authority’ was the dominant notion. This was emphasized by the fact that the gravity of the sin was often determined by the commanding or prohibiting authority. Certain actions were commanded or forbidden under pain of mortal sin. Other actions, admittedly, were regarded as mortal sins because the ‘matter’ was grave in itself. Yet even here the determination of grave matter was sometimes a matter of decision by authority—no light matter in the area of sexual sin, for instance! In my teens I once had to write out 100 times: ‘Tintinabulum vox Dei est’. That says it all! The ‘disobedience’ paradigm, in the form I absorbed it, was individualistic, act-centred and voluntarist. It offered no help in developing a capacity for moral decision-making or conscience-formation.