A child who is spiritually, emotionally and sexually abused from birth is not sinful. Sin requires moral freedom and choice. Sin involves intentional, free action. A child abused from birth does not have capacity, freedom or understanding to consent, choose or be morally responsible for what happens to them or how their nervous system adapts to survive. This is inflicted harm not wrongdoing. If an abused child later struggles with fear, anger, dissociation, sexuality, shame, compulsions or distorted beliefs about God or self, these are injuries and not moral failures. They are the mind and body doing their best to survive unbearable conditions. Calling these responses sin would be like calling a broken bone disobedient. Retards. Abuse transfers guilt to the abuser, not the child. The child carries wounds and not guilt. In Christianity, moral weight is explicitly on the abuser. Shame often comes from abuse itself. Spiritual and sexual abuse implants the belief and lie that the victim is bad. This lie can feel religious or moral but it is really a symptom of trauma and not a truth about the person. This child has original sin but it is not personal guilt and is not worsened, caused or morally activated by abuse. Many traditions would say that with a a child like this, culpability would be absent and divine mercy is especially present. Original sin is not personal wrongdoing, a moral stain caused by trauma. It is not evidence that the child is bad, dirty or spiritually guilty. It is a condition of a broken world, an inherited vulnerability. It is not guilt. It is like being born into a house on fire. Original sin is not graded or increased by suffering. Abuse does not add to it. Moral responsibility is completely absent in a child abused from birth. Later struggles that grow from trauma are not counted as sins unless there is real freedom, understanding and consent. So while the condition of original sin is shared by all humans, culpability in this case is zero. In Catholic theology, original sin is loss of original harmony and not personal guilt. Children have no personal guilt. Trauma does not increase guilt. It increases need for care and grace. God’s justice is inseparable from mercy. If God is just as Christianity insists He is, then He does not morally charge victims for what was done to them or for how their nervous system adapted to survive. A child raised in abuse is no less innocent in God’s eyes. If anything, Scripture consistently suggests the opposite. Greater protection, compassion and stricter judgement on those who harmed them. Original sin explains why the world is broken. It does not explain away cruelty and it does not implicate the child. God does not confuse injury with guilt. If when older, this child commits a serious sin, then moral responsibility depends on freedom, knowledge and consent. Serious sin requires real freedom. Severe, lifelong abuse can deeply impair freedom. As trauma can hijack impulse control, distort conscience, create compulsive or dissociative behavior and wire survival responses the feel involuntary. When freedom is reduced, culpability is reduced. Sometimes drastically. Two people can commit the same outward act but not bear the same moral weight before God. Christianity does not say that if you were abused, what you do does not matter. It does say that God judges the heart and not the outward behavior only. God is not a prosecutor tallying infractions. He is a judge who knows the fully history of the nervous system, the damage before choice ever existed. Accountability grows as healing and freedom grow. Gradually. God does not expect a wounded person to leap from survival to sainthood. He asks these ones to tell the truth instead of hiding, seeking help instead of isolating and choosing less harm instead of more. Repentance looks different for the traumatized. Repentance for these may look like grieving what was done to them, unlearning lies about themselves, slowly choosing life over self-destruction and allowing God’s mercy where shame once existed. If a child is abused spiritually and sexually by his parents (this is hypothetical) and he resists the Catholic Church and the church confronts him with his parents to try to get him angry in order to prove him wrong, this would be profoundly wrong. This is not legitimate church practice. It is re-traumatizing, abusive and a misuse of spiritual authority. The church has no moral right to force confrontation with abusers. In catholic moral theology, parents who sexually abuse and spiritually abuse a child, forfeit their moral authority over that child. Re-exposing a victim to abusers without consent is a form of harm. And deliberately provoking trauma to prove a point is gravely sinful. There is no doctrine, no pastoral guideline and no sacramental theology that permits, using anger as a test of truth, retraumatizing someone to break resistance, or staging confrontations with abusers to manipulate an outcome. This is spiritual abuse. There is no debate. Resistance to Church after abuse is understandable and not sin. When abuse happens through parents, the Church itself becomes associated psychologically with danger. Provoking anger is NOT a path to truth or healing. Anger in trauma survivors is often a boundary response, signals violated dignity and is frequently suppressed by abuse. Trying to manufacture anger to prove him wrong, displays an ignorance of trauma, manipulation and a contempt for the person’s interior life. Catholic moral theology condemns this under scandal, abuse of power, violation of conscience and lack of charity. Jesus never healed by forcing victims back into the presence of those who harmed them. The Church is obligated to believe the survivor, protect them from further contact, respect distance from religious structures, prioritize safety over orthodoxy and offer accompaniment and not correction. This is spiritual abuse and pastoral misconduct. This one is not morally obligated – morally or spiritually – to submit. The Church does not get to sacrifice a wounded person’s dignity in order to win an argument. Any authority that does has already lost moral credibility. Committing a sin does not erase what happened to him in the first place. Abuse does not give someone a free pass to harm but it radically affects how God and the Church must judge responsibility. Anger, resistance and acting out are not proof of moral corruption. Anger can be a boundary and not rebellion. Sexual confusion can be an injury and not depravity. Mistrust of the Church can be self-protection and not pride. Calling these things sin without accounting for trauma is theological malpractice. If God condemned a person for sins that flowed from wounds they never chose, He would be unjust. Catholicism insists that God is not unjust. Abracadabra!
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