If thy lips cause thee to sin: More on premarital kissing.

n Face­book, Joanne McPort­land quips that pre­mar­i­tal kiss­ing “is only a mor­tal sin if you like it.” Guess it’s off to Con­fes­sion for me, then. But what stands at the back of this sud­den fren­zy of scrupu­los­i­ty about kiss­ing before mar­riage is the idea that what con­sti­tutes a par­tic­u­lar occa­sion of sin for you some­how binds all Catholics.

And yet, if some­one is addict­ed to pornog­ra­phy, the mere pos­ses­sion of a com­put­er might be an occa­sion of sin. But for anoth­er, who is not addict­ed to pornog­ra­phy, there is no occa­sion for sin. It is the moral law against pornog­ra­phy that is bind­ing, not inci­den­tals that might be an occa­sion of sin for one but not anoth­er.

So it is with kiss­ing before mar­riage. Kiss­ing is not a sin; not even French kiss­ing is. For­ni­ca­tion is. If you, per­son­al­ly, find that the for­mer is too great a temp­ta­tion for the latter—that once you start kiss­ing, you won’t stop, and there will be copulation—then per­haps it is wise for you (you) to refrain. If your lips cause you to sin, cut them off.

But what’s wis­dom for you does not bind the whole Church. My occa­sions of sin are not yours. Those mat­ters are as indi­vid­ual as peo­ple are.

John Jansen, on my Face­book post on this top­ic, wrote the fol­low­ing.

Before my wife and I got mar­ried, I asked my then-spir­i­tu­al director—one of the holi­est, down-to-earth, intel­li­gent, and good-humored priests I’ve ever known—about what is “allowed” before mar­riage, and he said this.

“You’re only allowed to do what you would feel com­fort­able doing if your moth­er were in the room watch­ing you.”

Boom. His advice was clear and cor­rect and told me exact­ly what I need­ed to hear.

And that might have been a very sound rule of thumb indeed—for John Jansen. Pat­ti Sheffield made that very point:

There is plen­ty of room in Church teach­ing for pas­toral direc­tives to dif­fer from one anoth­er. A spir­i­tu­al direc­tor knows a per­son well enough to offer the sound­est advice for that par­tic­u­lar per­son. That does not make the advice bind­ing on oth­ers or the entire Church, of course.

My occa­sions are not yours. I can’t find Mr. Jansen’s pre­scrip­tive any­where in Church teach­ing. He point­ed me to the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church, §2337, which sim­ply defines chasti­ty in the most broad and abstract way:

Chasti­ty means the suc­cess­ful inte­gra­tion of sex­u­al­i­ty with­in the per­son and thus the inner uni­ty of man in his bod­i­ly and spir­i­tu­al being. Sex­u­al­i­ty, in which man’s belong­ing to the bod­i­ly and bio­log­i­cal world is expressed, becomes per­son­al and tru­ly human when it is inte­grat­ed into the rela­tion­ship of one per­son to anoth­er, in the com­plete and life­long mutu­al gift of a man and a woman.

For­tu­nate­ly, the Cat­e­chism helps us by list­ing (2351–2356) spe­cif­ic “offens­es against chasti­ty.”

• lust
• mas­tur­ba­tion
• for­ni­ca­tion
• pornog­ra­phy
• pros­ti­tu­tion
• rape

There is noth­ing there about kiss­ing, and if one were to argue that it falls under the cat­e­go­ry of “lust,” then that would only return us to the very point I have been mak­ing here. The things that cause me to lust are not nec­es­sar­i­ly those that will cause you to lust. Of course we are all oblig­at­ed to turn away from occa­sions of lust, but these are not the same set of things for all peo­ple.

My occa­sions are not your occa­sions.

This is why the Church, in its wis­dom, tells us what is sin­ful, but does not give us a list of all the things to avoid in order not to fall into sin. The Church does not say, “Do not buy com­put­ers, lest you be ensnared by online pornog­ra­phy and sin against chasti­ty.”

Nor does the Church say, “Do not kiss the per­son who is not yet your spouse, lest you be ensnared by pas­sion and for­ni­cate.” It does not tell us what types of kiss­es to avoid.

This cer­tain­ly does not mean that any­thing goes, and as long as I avoid inter­course I may do what­ev­er I please with whomev­er I am dat­ing. The right ques­tion is not “How far may I go?”

But the oppo­site error of “How far may I go?” is scrupu­los­i­ty. You kiss some­one; it feels good; you note that you are attract­ed; sud­den­ly you are struck with a guilty con­science. “The scrupu­lous per­son,” says Mark Low­ery at Catholic Answers, “is anx­ious that he has com­mit­ted a sin when in fact he has not.”

Two peo­ple may decide, for any num­ber of rea­sons, not to kiss before they mar­ry. This is a per­son­al deci­sion, and is per­fect­ly fine. But what is not fine is to take your own per­son­al deci­sion and man­date it for oth­ers, when the Church has not done so. To do so is to be a cause of scrupu­los­i­ty in your broth­er.