Is Masturbation a Sin in the Catholic church.?

Question

A priest told me that any form of masturbation is a sin, but many people have told me thats its not.I have not mastubated since but the urges are becoming unsupportable. Any information will help. THANKS!!!

Answer 1

Is it a sin according to the Catholic church where they add to God's word with man made commands like telling a Priest that he can't get married when the Bible says just the opposite?

1 Timothy 3:2 It is necessary, therefore, for a bishop to be irreproachable, the husband of one wife, temperate, sober-minded, well-behaved, hospitable, skillful at teaching;

1 Timothy 3:12 Let deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children well, and their own houses.

Well, here is the history of how masturbation which is not mentioned in the Bible became a sin according to the Catholic church.

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~austbua/masturbation-sin.htm

How on earth did the Church come to regard masturbation as ‘seriously sinful’ when the Bible is totally silent on the matter?

Bruce Puddle - Contributing Author

The answer is scary!

To understand how this ‘masturbation is sinful’ idea came to be part of Christianity even up to today, you have to understand some history. So read on. This is fascinating and scary stuff.

Around the time of Jesus some religious ideas, most likely originally from India, were arriving with traders and beginning to become popular in the countries around Israel, especially among the huge numbers of Greek-speaking people. The most important groups who adopted these ideas were the Stoic philosophers and a religious sect called the Gnostics.

One of their main teachings was that God had created only the spiritual world; the entire natural physical world, including human beings and their bodies, were created by Satan. They began to teach that the human body and its functions, especially its ‘sexual functions’ were totally evil, and tolerated only because there was no other way to produce children. For the first time masturbation was said to be evil, for two reasons: it ‘wasted one’s life force’, which they believed was limited in supply; and it was pleasurable.

This was not what the Jews believed. Their Bible said that God had created everything, which of course included our sexual abilities. What’s more, Genesis 1v31 says, "God saw all that he had made and behold it was very good." So the Jews believed that sex was God’s idea and that within the sacred bond of marriage, where it found its fullest expression, it was to be celebrated and enjoyed.

As for masturbation, this was never mentioned, nor was it ever listed as a sin in the horrendously detailed lists of sins in books like Leviticus. The Jews clearly regarded masturbation as a natural fact of life and not even worth a mention.

Not only did the Jewish Bible never mention masturbation, neither did Jesus or any of the Apostles. There were of course warnings against the misuse of God’s gift of sexuality, but masturbation was never included or named as one of these ‘misuses’.

But in the world of the early Christians the Gnostics were growing fast and spreading their ideas with great zeal. So much so that by the end of the first century AD (80 to 100 years after the birth of Jesus) the Christians were actually being ‘outdone’ as far as strictness and attitudes toward sex went. They were at times even accused of being a sex-cult and of holding orgies at their communion love feasts. This was made still worse by the fact that early Christians treated women much more equally than did the communities in which they lived. Non-Christian men were really unnerved. The last thing they wanted was some religion that encouraged women to think they were equal to men!

So what happened? You’ve guessed it. Gradually over the next twenty to fifty years the new generation of church leaders, called by historians the ‘Church Fathers’, began to twist scripture in order to justify an about-face on the vital issues of sex and the role and place of women. This was done so that Christians would be seen to be as pure as Gnostics, and so that they would no longer offend their communities as regards the place of women.

By 300 AD the turn-around was almost complete. The official church teaching was that you could not be truly close to God if you had any kind of sex life. They even said that sex within marriage was a sin and that God turned his face away when a married couple had sex, even when the purpose was to produce a baby.

As part of those awful Christian teachings, masturbation began for the first time to be considered a great sin. And things were about to get even worse! A very famous church theologian, Thomas Aquinas, wrote in 1200 AD that masturbation was a worse sin than – now get this – sex with your mother (or if you were a girl sex with your father), worse than rape and worse than adultery. True! Why? Because in the other forms of sex there was at least a chance of a baby being born, while the masturbator committed the awful sin of ‘wasting seed’.

By the 1600’s both the Roman Catholic church and the newly arrived Protestants were so obsessed with the supposed sin of masturbation that it was not uncommon for boys to be sent to bed wearing a steel box (like a cricketer’s ‘box’) with spikes inside it to discourage erections and prevent the boy from masturbating. I bet it worked a treat!

For the girls the treatment was nothing short of horrific. Girls and young women were regularly subjected to having their clitoris burnt off with a red hot iron! Why? In 1882 a French doctor wrote, "Repeated cauterizing of the clitoris with red-hot irons destroys its sensitivity, children then become less excitable and less likely to touch themselves." The last western woman to have her clitoris removed to encourage moral purity was operated on in the USA in 1946!

This then is the frightening history of how God’s specially designed and universal gift of sexual release got onto the Church’s list of sins. Remember, it never came from the Bible; it never came from God.

It happened because Christian leaders of by-gone centuries failed to be critical enough of their own ‘traditions’. They did exactly what Jesus had severely criticized the Pharisees for, making up rules that the Bible hadn’t set down, and then having the nerve to tell their people "this is what God says" when God had said no such thing.

This history also explains why even today some Christians still loudly proclaim masturbation to be sinful, and give the impression that they regard sexual sins as the very worst sins of all. They don’t realize that what they are declaring as truth is nothing other than an ancient pagan heresy.

Further Information
This page is a very brief summary by Bruce Puddle, a former NZ Baptist Minister and is based on his book called "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made" which looks in detail at this particular question and has heaps more really interesting and helpful information.

Answer 2

How can I get a simple common sense message through that masturbation is safe, fun, legal, hurts nobody, has medical benefits and is practiced by 80 to 90% of the population when the audience still believes in fairy stories about a God?. Get your head around the fact that God, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are all fiction, science is the only truth, you are going to die and masturbating is nice.

Answer 3

Judeo-Christian tradition has taught for thousands of years:
1. Single people should be celibate.
2. Married people should be faithful to each other (adultery is wrong).

The Catholic Church recognizes the power of sex when it teaches, "Sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his body and soul."

Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person. A chaste person's body and spirit lives in unity and opposes any behavior that would impair that unity.

Masturbation is contrary to the human dignity of the person and anyone about whom the person has lustful thoughts, and the dignity of human sexuality.

With love in Christ.

Answer 4

I think god has better things to do with his time than to worry if one species decides that it wants to masturbate

We are, after all, just ONE of the life forms on this planet out of thousands. It is only Christian arrogance that they believe that any creator would actually care that one of his many creations is doing what he made possible to do in the first place.

Besides, I'm sure child molestation is a sin as well, but the Catholic Church doesn't seem interested in putting a stop to priests who do it. In fact, they spend hundreds of thousands of YOUR dollars per year protecting them. Why waste time with such a hypocritical system of belief?

Answer 5

well it is in my church, The LDS church. We are taught that sin starts with even the thought, say what??! Christ taught the same thing in the bible. As a man thinketh so is he. Wet dreams is the natural way a man is suppose to ejaculate without self gratification.

Answer 6

Masturbation should be treated with the same lack of dignity or reverence that you would treat a pile of crap. It is a procedure that the evil one would have anyone engage in to thwart the process of holiness in one's life by means of keeping oneself pure in this avenue of living through the same role or process that abstinence would assume in one's life.
How many forms of masturbation can there be, anyway?

Answer 7

yes it is a sin, a mortal sin which means serious matter.
your relationship with God feels like it gets cut off. You know the feeling you get after your done, that let down
you cannot receive the Eucharist.
Must go to confession to get the grace back into your soul and restore that intimate relationship to God. I know its tough especially when the world facilitates this disorder of the will.

Answer 8

I'm not a Catholic, but all I can tell you is if you don't masturbate you're going to lose your freakin' marbles. Every single guy on the planet masturbates, and the ones that don't are either lying or complete wackos.

Just do it and don't feel guilty about it. Enjoy it even. Some rules were meant to be broken and this is DEFINITELY one of them.

Answer 9

Hey..dude...
I can not understand why you got some thumbs down for your very innocent question. Goes without saying that even the mention of the word "masturbation" gets those so called religious folks offended.

I can't recall any of the commandments saying "Thou shall not Masturbate" ...however, I do remember one that forbids lying.

So for those of you who blatently lie and say that you do not masturbate....go wash your mouth with soap!

Every one masturbates...It's better than sex!

Answer 10

I'm pretty sure it's a sin if you do it in the church.
What you do in the privacy of your own bedroom is a different tale.....


I do not believe it is a sin to masturbate. Maybe, if more Catholics did that, there wouldn't be so much scandal??