Examination of Conscience for Catholic Men

Acedia (spiritual sloth)

Did you say prayer mattered today — and then default to your phone, the news feed, the score, the inbox — anything but five minutes of silence with the Lord? Did acedia rule you under the cover of busyness? Did the day fill up before you gave God the first of it?

CCC 2733, 2755

Cowardice — defending the faith

Was Christ mocked in your hearing this week — by a friend's joke, a coworker's contempt, a public figure's ridicule, your own family's casual blasphemy — and did you stay silent to keep the peace? Did you let "I don't want a fight" rule where Christ deserved a defender?

CCC 2087, 2088, 2089 · Lk 9:26

1st Commandment — sins against faith

Did you keep the faith of the Catechism this week — or did you soften it for company? When the conversation turned to Catholic teaching that's now culturally controversial — the Eucharist, contraception, the male priesthood, the dignity of unborn life, the indissolubility of marriage — did you nod along, smile vaguely, change the subject? Did you privately disbelieve any defined doctrine of the Church that you were too lazy to study?

CCC 2087, 2088, 2089

Sloth / acedia in prayer

Did prayer get pushed to "after" until "after" never came this week? Did you pick up the phone before you said the morning Offering? Did the Liturgy of the Hours, the Rosary, the Examen — any of it — get the leftovers of your day?

CCC 2733, 2755 · Mt 26:41

Full assent to Catholic doctrine

Did you fully assent to a defined Catholic doctrine this week that contradicts your former tradition — not just intellectually, but in your reflexes, in your prayer, in your conversation? Or did you hedge it for the sake of family peace?

CCC 88, 89, 891, 2089

Sacramental discipline

If you had grave sin on your soul, did you confess it at least once this year, as the Church binds (CIC 989; CCC 1457)? Did you receive Communion while conscious of grave sin, without first confessing (CCC 1385)?

CCC 1385, 1457

Anxiety and the need to control

Did you trust God with your fears for your husband and your children this week — or try to control what only He can hold, and call the worry "love"?

CCC 305, 2090 · Mt 6:34

1st Commandment — sins against faith

Did you, this week, soften a teaching of the Church to keep the peace — when a friend's cohabitation, a relative's same-sex partner, a coworker's contraception, a Catholic voting against the moral law, the Eucharist, or the Pope sat under challenge in front of you? Did you nod where you should have said, I love you, and the Church teaches otherwise? Did you stay silent when Christ was on trial across your table?

CCC 2087, 2088, 2089, 88 · Lk 9:26

1st Commandment — assent to the full Faith

Did you, in conversation with a former pastor or family member this week, hedge a Catholic doctrine — Mary, the Eucharist, the papacy, Confession — to spare yourself their disappointment?

CCC 88, 2089 · Lk 9:26

Sins against hope — despair / presumption

Have you oscillated this week between despair — I will never be free of this, why try — and presumption — God will forgive whatever, the next fall doesn't matter? Both are sins against hope, and both rob you of the fight. Did you treat the sacraments as no longer worth the trouble — or as a vending machine you can game? Name the one that ruled you more, and name when it ruled.

CCC 2091, 2092

1st Commandment — superstition

Did you consult astrology, tarot, mediums, "spiritual but not religious" practices this week? Did you treat the saints as good-luck charms instead of intercessors? Did you trust in superstitions — knock on wood, lucky numbers, fingers crossed — over Providence? Have you given any place in your home or your phone to occult content (horoscopes, manifestation, energy work)?

CCC 2110, 2111, 2117

Faith and reason — ignorance of the Faith

Did you study the Faith this week — at all? Did you read the Catechism, a Father, a saint, a magisterial document? Or did you remain proud of your own ignorance, content to repeat the parish-approved generalities of forty years ago, unwilling to be challenged by the depth of what the Church actually teaches?

CCC 88, 891, 2087, 2088

1st Commandment — sins against hope (despair, presumption)

Despair and presumption are the two sins against hope, and both are grave matter. Did despair tell you this week — I am too far gone, Christ cannot save me? Did presumption tell you — God's mercy is automatic, the next fall doesn't matter, I'll deal with it later? Both rob you of the fight. Both deny who Christ is. Name the one that ruled you, and let your confessor weigh it.

CCC 2090, 2091, 2092

Marian devotion

Have you accepted the Catholic understanding of Mary in your prayer, not just in your assent? Do you pray the Rosary regularly? Do you pray to her, or do you still feel the residue of Protestant suspicion that asks "isn't this idolatry?" What the Church holds about Mary rests on what it holds about Christ (CCC 487), and her dogmas bind a Catholic conscience; devotion to her is intrinsic to Christian worship and differs essentially from the adoration given to God alone (CCC 971). The Rosary — which the Church calls an epitome of the whole Gospel (CCC 971) — is freely taken up, not imposed.

CCC 971, 2673, 2674, 2675

Witness to the family of origin

Have you witnessed the Catholic Faith to the family you came from — gently, prayerfully, with charity? Or have you hidden your conversion to keep the peace? Christ said But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven (Mt 10:33, Douay-Rheims). What kind of denial has your silence been?

CCC 905, 2105

1st Commandment + duties of state — full incorporation in the Catholic Church

You came to this Faith from outside. Examine: what part of your former tradition — its songs, its informalities, its assumptions about Scripture, its suspicion of Mary, its Sunday rhythm — still rules in your home, in your prayer, in your reflexes? Have you fully entered the Catholic Church, or are you living half-in?

CCC 846, 847, 848, 2104, 2105

Theological virtue — faith

Examine your faith as the virtue infused at Baptism. Have you assented to all that the Church definitively teaches? Have you doubted any defined doctrine willfully (the sin against faith — voluntary doubt, CCC 2088)? Examine where you find the Church's teaching hard, and ask: do you submit, or do you negotiate?

• Voluntary doubt — refusing to consider Catholic teaching as true OR refusing to remove obstacles to belief
• Heresy — obstinate denial after Baptism of any defined truth of the Faith
• Apostasy — total repudiation of the Catholic Faith
• Schism — refusal of communion with the Pope or with members of the Church subject to him
• Indifferentism — treating all religions as equally valid

Describe these to your confessor — do not pronounce yourself a heretic, an apostate, or a schismatic; those are judgments the Church alone makes. And note: involuntary doubt — the difficulty you did not will and are wrestling honestly — is not itself a sin (CCC 2088). Name where the assent is willfully withheld, in the words of the Catechism, not your own minimizations.

CCC 2087, 2088, 2089 · Heb 11:6

Theological virtue — hope

Examine your hope. The two sins against hope are despair (ceasing to hope for your salvation, for God's help, or for the forgiveness of your sins) and presumption (either presuming to save yourself without grace, or presuming on God's mercy without conversion). Despair forgets the mercy of Christ; presumption forgets that his mercy still asks for your repentance. Each can be grave matter; whether a given movement of the soul was a mortal sin — with full knowledge and consent — is for your confessor to weigh. Where did despair speak this season? Where did presumption?

CCC 2090, 2091, 2092

Theological virtue — charity

Examine your charity. Did you love God above all this season — not in sentiment, but in priority of life? Did you love your neighbor as yourself — not the neighbor in theory, but the difficult one, the ungrateful one, the enemy?

• Indifference — neglecting to consider the divine love or denying its goodness
• Ingratitude — refusing to acknowledge or return charity to the Lord
• Lukewarmness — hesitation or negligence in responding to God's love
• Acedia (spiritual sloth) — refusal of the joy that comes from God
• Hatred of God — the deliberate, willed rejection of God, cursing him because he forbids and punishes sin (the gravest — a movement of the will, not a feeling of dryness or anger in prayer)

Name where the charity slipped, and toward whom — and let your confessor weigh it; a feeling of coldness or anger is not a sin until the will consents to it. The sin against charity is the sin against the very life of God in the soul.

CCC 2093, 2094 · 1 Jn 4:20

Prayer life inventory

Examine the prayer of your season. Was the rhythm there? Daily prayer (the Office, the Rosary, the Examen)? Sunday Mass — actually attentive, actually present? Confession monthly or more often? Adoration? Spontaneous prayer through the day? Or has your prayer been the dregs of your time — what was left over after the screens, after the work, after the entertainments — rather than what was given?

CCC 2697, 2698, 2725, 2742, 2755

Full incorporation

As a convert, examine where you are still living half-in. What part of your former tradition still rules in your home, in your prayer, in your reflexes — its songs, its informalities, its assumptions about Scripture, its suspicion of Mary, its assumption that the Catholic Faith is something added to a Christianity-already-known rather than the fullness of what was always there? Have you fully entered, or are you a Catholic with an asterisk?

CCC 846, 847, 848, 2104, 2105

Witness, family of origin, and the cost of conversion

Christ said I came not to send peace, but the sword (Mt 10:34, Douay-Rheims). Examine the witness you have given — and refused to give — to the family you came from. Have you been silent about your conversion to keep the peace? Have you allowed false characterizations of Catholic teaching to stand because correction would cost you? Have you accepted the cost of being a Catholic in a Protestant or unbelieving family — or have you charged that cost to your soul instead of your courage?

CCC 905, 2105 · Mt 10:34-39

2nd Commandment — the Holy Name

Did the Holy Name leave your mouth this week as anything other than a prayer? Jesus Christ as exasperation, God as exclamation, Christ as expletive, the Lord's Mother named in profanity? Did you laugh at someone else's blasphemy when silence would have testified?

CCC 2146, 2148, 2149

3rd Commandment — Sunday Mass obligation

Did you miss Mass on Sunday or a Holy Day of Obligation without grave reason? Did you arrive deliberately late — walking in after the Gospel — and tell yourself it still counted? The Church does not fix a minute past which the obligation is unmet (CIC 1247-1248); traditional moral theology treated missing a notable part as grave matter, and in any case deliberate lateness is a question of reverence. Examine it as that. Did you treat the obligation as optional rather than as the duty Christ commanded of every Catholic?

CCC 2168, 2174, 2181, 2185 · Ex 20:8-11

3rd Commandment — Sunday obligation

Did you keep the Lord's Day holy this week — not just by attending Mass, but by guarding the day from the pull of work, screens, errands, the noise that drowns out God? Did you make Sunday a day of rest, of family prayer, of presence — or did you treat it as Saturday's overflow?

CCC 2168, 2174, 2185 · Ex 20:8-11; Mk 2:27

Duty of state — spiritual headship

This week, did you lead family prayer — or did you let it default to your wife, or to no one?

CCC 2226, 2685

4th Commandment — honor of parents

Did you speak to your parents this week with the honor due to them — even your aging parents, even the parent you have grievances against, even the parent who is no longer easy? Did you visit, call, write? If they have died, did you pray for their souls?

CCC 2197, 2214, 2215, 2218

Domestic discipleship

Did you teach your children the Faith this week — not as background noise, but as the father charged with their souls? Did you read Scripture with them, name a saint, answer a question, correct an error?

CCC 2226, 2685 · Deut 6:6-9

Correction in love

When your child needed correction this week, did you correct in love — or did you correct in your own anger, your own frustration, your own reputation-protection? Or did you fail to correct at all because you were tired or distracted?

CCC 2223, 2227 · Heb 12:6

Guarding the home from corruption

What entered your home this week — through screens, through music, through guests, through your own example — that dishonored Christ? Did you let it pass because confronting it was hard?

CCC 2223, 2224

As a wife — love and respect

Did you respect your husband this week — or undercut him with criticism, comparison, contempt, or the silent treatment, to his face or to others? Did you nag, manipulate, or withhold affection as a weapon?

CCC 1646, 2364 · Eph 5:33

As a mother — patience and gentleness

Were you patient and gentle with your children this week, or harsh, controlling, anxious, or cold? Did you correct them in love — or in your own frustration and exhaustion?

CCC 2223

Duty of state + 4th Commandment — correction of children

When your child sinned this week, did you correct him in love — or did you correct him in your own anger, lashing where you should have led? Did you fail to correct at all because you were tired, distracted, or staring at a screen? Did you defer to your wife, abdicating the discipline Christ assigned to you and calling it "letting her handle it"? Was the correction for his soul — or for your reputation?

CCC 2223, 2227 · Heb 12:6

Duty of state — catechesis of children

Did you teach your children the Faith this week — pray with them by name before bed, name a saint at table, ask what they learned, correct an error, answer a hard question with the Catechism instead of "I don't know"? Or did you outsource their formation to a parish DRE, a school, an app, a YouTube priest, while their souls were yours to form?

CCC 2226, 2685 · Deut 6:6-9; Eph 6:4

Sacramental life of children

Did your children get to Confession this month? Were they at Mass on Sunday — actually attentive, formed in the postures and prayers, taught what was happening at the altar? Or did you let their sacramental life drift while their lives outside the parish became more shaped by the world than by the Church?

CCC 2226, 2685

Discipline and correction

Did you discipline your children this week with the love of God or against it? Was the correction proportionate to the offense? Did it form their conscience, or did it merely manage their behavior? Did you ever apologize to a child when you had been wrong?

CCC 2223, 2227 · Heb 12:6

Modeling the Faith

When did your children last see you praying, alone, without performance? When did they last hear you talk about Christ at the dinner table, unprompted? When did they last see you fast, give alms, examine your conscience, walk to confession?

CCC 2226, 2223

Time given to children

Did you give your children your time this week — not the exhausted leftover of a workday, but the engaged hour of fatherhood? Did you read to the youngest, throw the ball with the middle one, sit through the awkward conversation with the teenager? Or did the screen take what should have been theirs?

CCC 2223, 2228

Duty of state — guarding the home

What entered your home this month — that you knew dishonored Christ and you allowed anyway? Whose souls are you accountable for that you did not guard?

• Through SCREENS (TV, films, games, social media you scrolled in front of them)
• Through MUSIC (lyrics, playlists, what they played in your car)
• Through CONVERSATION (gossip at table, mockery of the faith, profanity)
• Through GUESTS (people you invited in whose presence dishonored what you stand for)
• Through YOUR OWN EXAMPLE (when you indulged what you forbid them)

And whose conscience are you forming with this house — Christ's, or the world's?

CCC 2223, 2229 · 1 Kings 3:13 (1 Sam 3:13)

Catechesis across the lifecycle

Each of your children is a soul God will hold you to account for at the judgment. Examine for each child by name: Is he/she catechized at his age? Does he/she know the prayers, the sacraments, the truths of the Faith? Have you taught — actually taught, not "exposed them to" — the Catholic life? Are you the priest of his/her formation, or have you outsourced to a parish program, a school, a YouTube priest?

CCC 2226, 2685 · Eph 6:4

Hard conversations not had

Examine the hard conversation you have NOT had with your child. The one about chastity. About vocation. About money. About suffering. About the question he/she asked at age 8 that you deflected. About the doubt you can see growing in him/her now. The Catholic father is the man who has these conversations. The post-Christian father lets them be raised by their phones. Which are you?

CCC 2222, 2226

The example you are leaving

Examine the man your children will remember. When they grow up and tell their own children about their father, what will they say? Did you go to Mass? Did you confess your sins? Did you lead family prayer? Did you discipline yourself before you disciplined them? Did you love their mother in front of them? Did you live what you taught? The example outlives the lecture.

CCC 2226, 2683

Wrath

Did your anger this week have a face? Whose — your spouse's, your child's, a coworker's, a stranger's on the news, your own in the mirror, God's? When did it land, and what did you do with it — speak, withdraw, ruminate, plan the cutting reply? Did you bring it to prayer before you brought it to anyone else?

CCC 2302, 2303

Gluttony / self-mastery

Did you indulge tonight where you should have mastered yourself — the third drink, the second helping, the screen until 1 AM, the thing you said you'd cut and didn't? Did the body command you, when you were called to command the body?

CCC 2290 · 1 Cor 9:27

5th Commandment — drunkenness and self-mastery

Did you cross the line into drunkenness this week — not the social glass, but the line where your judgment, your tongue, your dignity were no longer yours to govern? Complete drunkenness — where reason is wholly drowned — is grave matter; whether a given night was a mortal sin is for your confessor to weigh. Name it, and let him judge.

CCC 2290 · Eph 5:18

Substance / compulsion

Did you reach for the substance, the screen, the compulsion this week when temptation rose? Did you tell yourself "just this once" again? Did you attend your meetings, call your sponsor, work your steps, call your priest?

CCC 2290, 2291, 1496

5th Commandment — anger and hatred

Did anger rule you this week to the point of hatred — wishing harm on the man who wronged you, replaying the conversation in your head with the cutting reply, refusing the prayer of intercession for him because you wanted him punished? But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you. Did you?

CCC 2302, 2303 · Mt 5:44

5th Commandment — scandal

Did your example this week lead another into sin — your child, your subordinate, your friend, the stranger who watched you? Scandal is leading another into sin by your example. Christ said it would be better that a millstone be tied around your neck and you be cast into the sea. Did you take that warning seriously this week?

CCC 2284, 2285, 2287 · Mt 18:6

4th & 6th Commandments — love of wife

When your wife came home this week — tired, carrying the day, carrying the children — did you carry her burdens, or did you add to them? Did you greet her with your phone in your hand, your mood as the room's weather, your anger still simmering from the morning, your silence weaponized? Did she walk in to a husband, or to a man she had to manage?

CCC 2363 · Eph 5:25

6th Commandment — chastity

Did you, with deliberate consent, dwell on a woman who is not yours — in image, in fantasy, in prolonged glance, in the algorithm-fed scroll, in the second look that became a fifth? Did you let yourself be entertained by what Christ called adultery in the heart? Did you mistake dwelling for "just looking"?

CCC 2351, 2520 · Mt 5:28

6th Commandment — mastery of self

When the compulsion came this week, what did you reach for first? The image, the bottle, the next hit — or grace?

CCC 2351, 2352, 1496

Accountability

Did you reach for accountability this week — your sponsor, your accountability brother, your confessor, your wife — when the temptation came? Or did you hide the fall, defaulting to the shame loop that protects the sin from the light?

CCC 2351, 2352 · Jas 5:16

Daily presence with wife

Were you present with your wife this week — eyes up from the phone, full attention when she spoke, the small acts of tenderness you stopped doing once the courtship ended? Or did you give her the leftovers of your attention while you gave the world your best?

CCC 1644, 1645 · 1 Pet 3:7

6th Commandment — fidelity in marriage

Were you faithful to your wife this week — not only in body but in the eyes, the mind, the heart? Did you cherish her the way Christ cherishes the Church, or did you store up resentments and grievances that you have not brought to her in love?

CCC 2364, 2365, 1646 · Eph 5:25

Resentment of wife

Did resentment of your wife rule any part of this week? The grievance carried silently, the comparison to who she was a decade ago, the imagined other woman who would understand you better, the contempt buried under politeness?

CCC 1644, 1645, 2362

Purity of heart and eyes

Did you guard your heart and your eyes this week — in what you read, watched, and scrolled — or feed discontent, envy, romantic fantasy, or impurity? Did you compare your husband or your marriage to a fiction?

CCC 2517, 2520 · Mt 5:8

Marital chastity

Have you and your husband honored the dignity of the marital act — open to life, free of contraception, free of using the marriage bed as a reward or a weapon? Have you brought your whole self to your marriage, or withheld it in resentment?

CCC 2366, 2370

6th Commandment — fidelity of heart

Did you compare your wife — to another woman, to who she was ten years ago, to who you imagined she'd become — and let that comparison harden your heart toward her?

CCC 1646, 2364, 2365

6th Commandment — guarding eyes and heart

Did you guard your eyes this week — at work, in traffic, on screens, at the gym, in the line at the store? Did you guard your heart from the slow drift of comparison, complaint, contempt for your wife? Did you fast from what feeds disordered desire, or did you indulge it and call the indulgence "harmless"?

CCC 2520, 2521, 2532 · Mt 5:28; Job 31:1

Marital chastity — contraception

Have you and your wife violated the dignity of the marital act — through contraception (the deliberate sterilization of an act ordered to life), through the use of pornography or fantasy in the act itself, or through withholding the marriage debt out of coldness, punishment, or selfishness? (The periodic continence of natural family planning, undertaken for just and generous reasons, is licit — CCC 2370; this asks instead about the marriage bed used as a weapon.) Marital chastity is the discipline of the marital bed.

CCC 2370, 2399

Pornography use

Did you use pornography this week — by phone, by laptop, by memory, by deliberate replaying of an old image? Pornography is always grave matter (CCC 2354) and adultery in the heart (Mt 5:28). If you are married, it is also a betrayal of your spouse. Name the occasions, the duration, the patterns — and let your confessor weigh their gravity. Bring it to confession.

CCC 2354

Chastity in singleness

Did you live the discipline of chastity this week as a single man — guarded eyes, mastered desire, refused the casual hookup or the dating-app encounter that would dishonor the woman and yourself? Chastity in singleness is not waiting for marriage; it is the active virtue that makes marriage possible.

CCC 2348, 2349, 2350, 2520

Duty of state + 6th Commandment — abdication of headship

Did you let your wife carry the spiritual life of this household this month — was she the one who pushed for Mass, who reminded the children to pray, who lit the Advent candles, who knelt by the bed with the youngest, who carried the silence before God while you carried the remote? Did you abdicate the headship Christ gave you (Eph 5:23) and call the abdication "partnership" because it lets you off the hook? Would your wife — if asked privately — name you as her spiritual leader, or as a man she has had to drag to the sacraments?

CCC 2204, 2205, 2206, 2225 · Eph 5:23-32

Marital love over the years

Examine your marriage as a covenant before God across the years, not just this week. Where did you carry your wife through illness, exhaustion, sorrow? Where did you fail her, neglect her, take her for granted? Has the courtship in your behavior continued, or has it died? Would your wife — if asked privately — say she is loved the way Christ loves the Church?

CCC 1641, 1642, 1644, 2364, 2365 · Eph 5:25-33

Marriage tribunal / annulment honesty

If your current marriage involves a previous bond — examine the honesty of your tribunal proceedings, the genuineness of your amendment, the integrity of your present life. The Church's process is not a procedural workaround; it is a search for truth about whether a sacramental bond ever existed. Have you engaged it as such, or as a means to an end?

CCC 2382, 2384, 2386

The decade pattern

Step back from the week or month and examine the year or the decade of your compulsion. What has it cost you in marriage, in fatherhood, in friendship, in vocation, in your relationship with God? What is the pattern that keeps repeating? When have you genuinely and deliberately chosen freedom — and what supports made that possible? When have you slipped back — and what triggered it? Bring the pattern to confession. The Lord wants the ten years, not just the week.

CCC 1854, 1855, 2351, 2352, 1496

7th & 8th Commandments — justice and truth in dealings

Did you take credit this week for work that wasn't yours — or withhold credit due to someone under you?

CCC 2434, 2484

7th Commandment — theft and restitution

Did you take or keep what is not yours — something lent to you that you never gave back, something found and kept, time or money taken from an employer, a customer cheated, taxes evaded? Did you willfully damage what belongs to another? If you have taken, have you given it back, or made it good? Restitution — giving back what you took, or its equivalent — is required in justice (CCC 2412); repairing the harm you did belongs to repentance (CCC 1459). If you cannot restore it, or cannot remember to whom, say so to your confessor and let him judge. For the scrupulous, one narrow relief: there is no theft where the owner's consent could reasonably be presumed, or in obvious and urgent necessity when taking was the only way to meet an immediate, essential need — food, shelter, clothing (CCC 2408). It does not cover what is owed to an employer, to a customer, or in tax (CCC 2409).

CCC 2408, 2409, 2412, 1459 · Ex 20:15

7th Commandment — just dealings

In every transaction this week — wages paid, hours billed, expenses claimed, work assigned — were you scrupulously fair? Did you pay every man what was owed, without delay, without subtraction?

CCC 2434, 2436 · Jas 5:4

7th Commandment — just dealings

In every transaction this week — wages paid, hours billed, expenses claimed, work assigned, work received — were you scrupulously fair? Did you pay every man what was owed (Jas 5:4), without delay, without subtraction? Did you treat the lowest person on your team — the one nobody else would notice — the way Christ treats you?

CCC 2434, 2435, 2436 · Jas 5:4; Mt 25:40

Justice in employment

Did you treat every person under your authority this week as a son of God? Did you pay the wages owed (the hire of the labourers ... which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth)? Did you respect the dignity of those whose work makes your work possible?

CCC 2434, 2435, 2436 · Jas 5:4

Authority before God

Examine your authority as something you will give an account of. Every person under you is a son of God before he is your subordinate. Have you treated each one with the dignity of that fact? Have you been just in your decisions — promoting on merit, paying on fairness, correcting in love, firing only when truly necessary? Have you used your authority to bless, or to extract?

CCC 1929, 1930, 1931, 2434, 2436

8th Commandment — gossip and detraction

Did your tongue cut someone this week without authority and without cause? Detraction is revealing a real fault to those who don't need to know it. Calumny is revealing a false fault. Both wound justice and charity, and can be grave matter depending on the harm done and the truth deformed. Whose name did you damage in conversation this week — and to whom did you say it, and why? Bring it to your confessor and let him weigh it.

CCC 2477, 2478, 2479

Detraction in the workplace

Did you speak ill of a colleague, a competitor, a subordinate, this week — beyond what charity required, beyond what truth required? Did you damage someone's reputation through implication, omission, or selective truth?

CCC 2477, 2478, 2479

Charity toward other women

Did you gossip about, judge, or tear down another woman this week? Did you envy another woman's marriage, children, home, or looks, instead of thanking God for your own portion?

CCC 2477, 2539

8th Commandment — lying and the truth-tongue

Did your tongue tell the truth this week, or the polite lie? The lie to the boss, the lie to the wife, the half-truth to the friend, the "I'm fine" when you weren't, the social-media presentation of a life that isn't yours? Did the man your tongue described match the man your actions revealed?

CCC 2483, 2484, 2485

Truth in business

Did you tell the customer the whole truth this week, or the version that closed the sale? Did you pad the report to look better? Did you take credit for work that wasn't yours? Did you fail to give credit due to a subordinate?

CCC 2475, 2476, 2477, 2484

Integrity of speech and contract

Examine the integrity of your word in business this season. But let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil. Did you keep contracts? Did you honor handshakes? Did you tell the customer the truth? Did your reputation in the trade match the man you are before God?

CCC 2410, 2411, 2477, 2484 · Mt 5:37

9th Commandment — lust of the heart

Did you guard your heart this week — at the gym, on the screen, in traffic, at the office? Did you cultivate the second look that became a fifth? Did you fantasize about someone who is not yours? Christ said that to look lustfully is already adultery in the heart (Mt 5:28) — the thought consented to is real sin, and it is not the same wound as the deed.

CCC 2520, 2521, 2532 · Mt 5:28; Job 31:1

Avarice / detachment

Did money rule your peace this week? Did the bank balance govern your prayer? Did you reach for an unnecessary purchase to soothe a wound that only the sacraments can heal? Did you give to the Church and to the poor in proportion to what you have been given — the Catechism binds the faithful to provide for the material needs of the Church, each according to his abilities (CCC 2043), not to a fixed tenth. Did you give until it cost you something?

CCC 2536, 2547, 2552 · Mt 6:24

Envy

Did you covet what belonged to another this week — their work, their marriage, their children, their health, their reputation, their ease? Did the success of another diminish you? Did the gratitude you owed God for your own portion get crowded out by the resentment of someone else's?

CCC 2538, 2539, 2540

9th & 10th Commandments — envy + detraction

Did you covet a position above you, or position yourself in conversation to undercut a peer — through implication, omission, or selective truth?

CCC 2538, 2539, 2540, 2477

10th Commandment — covetousness

Did you covet the goods of another this week? The bigger house, the better car, the more lucrative job, the easier life of the man who does not seem to deserve it? Did the comparing eye rob you of the peace of your own portion?

CCC 2535, 2536, 2538, 2540

Capital sin — avarice / covetousness

Examine where money, possessions, status, and security ruled you this season. Did you give to the Church, to the poor, to your family, to those who asked of you in genuine need? Or did you hoard, calculate, withhold? Did you trust in the bank balance more than in Providence? Did you compare your portion with another's and find God's gift to you somehow ungenerous? No man can serve two masters.

CCC 2535, 2536, 2540, 2547, 2552 · Mt 6:24