How preoccupation with sexual sin can stunt holiness

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | May 01, 2026

In the rising tide of sexual immorality—or in judging the pitiful state of the world—devout Catholics tend to remember the famous statement by Our Lady of Fatima that “More souls go to hell for sins of the flesh than for any other reason” (July 13, 1917). Ever since that time, we have been citing this statement as an indication that more souls go to hell for sexual sins than for any other cause. But this is not necessarily what Our Lady meant, and we will certainly not achieve Heaven simply by avoiding these sins ourselves.

It is perhaps more likely that Mary had in mind the declaration of the Holy Spirit through St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:

Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. [Gal 5:19-21]

But there are a great many self-identified Christians who, in the midst of their sexual purity, indulge in the non-sexual sins in this list. (Most of us have done so.) Moreover, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul further warns his readers: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (3:5). For Paul, in effect, it seems that the sins of the flesh are all of those sins that arise from our wayward passions—that is, the sins that are triggered by unregenerate desires of every kind, which have not been conquered and transformed through our participation in the grace of God. In this sense, we might say that “sins of the flesh” are not simply sexual sins but rather all the sins we commit when we are not living in the Spirit, in accordance with the grace of Jesus Christ.

To further enumerate such sins, we might recall Our Lord’s own words as recorded by St. Mark:

What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man. [Mk 7:20-23]

In this context, the fact that pride is in some sense a spiritual sin, closely involved with our own understanding of ourselves, does not make it fundamentally different from the sins that are prompted primarily by our bodily passions. Clearly, we can experience also “passions of soul”, particularly the assertion of our own superiority or even primacy, which we fault others for their failure to recognize and honor. Pride, in a sense, is the ultimate foolishness, the seal on our inability or refusal to make sound decisions in accordance with both the worth and the limitations of our being.

Emphasizing what we habitually miss

What I am suggesting here is that even we devout Catholics can go down a rabbit hole when interpreting Our Lady of Fatima’s warning about the sins which most often send us to hell—and that this rabbit hole is one among many that we ought to know only too well by now. In this particular case, if we do not find sins of impurity in our selected rabbit hole, we may miss the point of Mary’s Portuguese apparitions. But what if we find sins of self-righteousness or lack of generosity or attachment to our own wills? After all, the sins most likely to send each one of us to Hell are not the sins we did not commit, but all the other kinds of sins that we have more or less willingly refused to avoid, including sins of complacent omission.

We may often find ourselves very glad that we are not like others—extortioners, or unjust, or adulterers. And we may well pay attention to God twice a week or more, and give tithes of all that that we get (like the Pharisee in Lk 18:11-12)—but this alone will avail us nothing.

One problem is that no matter how much we give, it is not much compared with what we have received. Every saint dies knowing how little he has returned to God in response to all God’s gifts. What this means—what it can only mean—is that condemnation comes not through our littleness but through our sense of superiority and our invidious comparisons. Notice again that we are not even to be proud because we have done what He has commanded (Lk 17:9), even if others have not. Moreover, we must expect Our Father in Heaven to reward us exactly as He rewarded His only begotten Son.

Only when we empty ourselves to do His whole will, does He fill us with the grace of His own life. This is the Divine economy; this is what we call the economy of salvation; and this is how a good Christian invests: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16:25).

How do we know, then, when we are on the right path? How, in effect, can we direct our lives properly into union with God? For most of us, I suspect, this is a process that results in a spiritual pattern. The objective data of Revelation provides us with a mechanism—Church, Sacraments, Scripture, prayer, charity—which sets us on the right path. We must figure out, partly through seeking good advice and partly through particular prayer for that purpose, how we can best nurture our relationship with God through regular spiritual practices. And very often this will mean adopting some practices that we do not currently enjoy, and so do not wish to undertake.

But an even harder task for us is to recognize and spiritually correct the vices into which we have fallen—particularly the pride into which we have fallen—choosing instead to develop the corresponding virtues. We must discern how much time we can profitably spend in prayer, and in what types or combinations of prayer. We must discern how to either enter upon a vocation or perfect ourselves within the vocation we already have. And we must not congratulate ourselves for avoiding a particular kind of vice, especially any vice which does not tempt us, for we now face the task of cultivating every one of the virtues, rather than feeling righteous about the attitudes and commitments which our personalities easily and almost automatically adopt.

There are two great pitfalls here. One is to regard ourselves as good servants because we have done everything we have been expressly commanded to do. The other is to confuse genuine virtue or holiness with what we might call our own personal spiritual passions. Both lead us to commend ourselves and deprecate others. And this means that both reject grace, and so prevent our union with God.