I'd also like to ask for prayers for her, as she has been fighting severe scruples for months now. I'm serious -- she needs lots of prayers. She is assailed with doubt and conviction that she's in mortal sin within minutes of emerging from the confessional. She is trying to go to a good confessor and heed his advice, etc. but so far there's been no improvement.

I wondered if I should mention it or not -- but then I realized that it's obvious she's dealing with the cross of scruples by reading the post above (which *she* wanted me to post...)

I'd also like to ask for prayers for her, as she has been fighting severe scruples for months now. I'm serious -- she needs lots of prayers. She is assailed with doubt and conviction that she's in mortal sin within minutes of emerging from the confessional. She is trying to go to a good confessor and heed his advice, etc. but so far there's been no improvement.

The following may not apply to the Catholic in question, but it is based on certain cases that I have observed throughout the years:

Scruples tend to be egocentric, that is, focused on the judgment that the soul passes upon its own state from its own point of view: some scrupulous souls go so far as to doubt their Father Confessor's judgment and counsel. They become their own judges and executioners, which is a great detriment to progress in the interior life because the progress to Christian perfection is to be gauged by how detached the soul is from itself. The natural development of the interior life is the life of mystical union that the Saints enjoyed, and whereby they exercised charity together with all the infused and acquired virtues to a heroic degree. This union entails a series of purgations that cleanse and rehabilitate the soul from the wounds of sin, but also detach it from itself and (if the path is courageously and generously followed) from all created things, especially the soul's own notions and concepts. This is why the great Saints and mystics had ecstasies: they were so detached from self and things, and clung to God alone in the trans-luminous obscurity of tried and tested faith that God gave them the extraordinary graces that shewed outwardly the perfection of their interior lives.

Having written that, I shall make the following points:

1) Scrupulous souls tend to be the purest, most earnest, most interior souls that I have met, and the "egocentricity" above-mentioned must be contextualized by either: a horrible terror of sin and defects that attacks innocent souls for their greater good, that they may eschew that which will stain their innocency; or, an ardent charity that compels the penitent to make reparation for past misdeeds and to anxiously make sure that they do not revert to their former ways.

2) There is, moreover, the state of the present day world to be considered. In an age where most people are so inebriated with naturalistic, pragmatic, atheistic (or misotheistic) errors that they have lost all concept of sin, and even of religion, the very existence of scruples in interior souls is a miracle, and even a sign of predestination (when accompanied by the earnest cultivation of the interior life, works of charity and penance, faithful fulfillment of the duties of state, &c.); or at least, that's what I'm tempted to believe. As St. Alphonsus wrote somewhere, "Would that all souls were scrupulous!"

I personally wish I could be scrupulous, but I know evil and sin too much to doubt when I have committed a misdeed or not. The presence of scruples may be indicative of experiential ignorance of the malice and absurdity of mortal sin (that is, Baptismal innocence unstained by mortal sin, or longtime grace of penitents completely rehabilitated from their coinquinations). Again, this is a very, very great grace. I wish I had that!

3) From the above points, one may say that:

a) Interior souls who are assailed by scruples are the object of special predilection of God's love, because they suffer for the charity and zeal they have for Him, but they do so in an errant way.

b) God allows certain interior souls to suffer through scruples in order to preserve them from sin or the proximate occasions thereof, and in certain cases the concomitant obfuscation and suffering may prove to be part of the purification of the senses and soul that necessarily precedes the entrance into the illuminative way or the unitive way of the interior life (think of the Confiteor before the Priest ascends unto the Altar, or the Lavabo before he nears the Sacred Canon, etc.), which is a very great grace to which so very few souls ever attain.

c) Certain interior souls are given to suffer through great scruples and mental afflictions and involuntary aridity in order to detach them from self all the more and purify their charity, making them more capable of being docile to the inspirations of the Holy Ghost and the influence of His Seven Gifts. The more docile one is to the Holy Ghost, the more one progresses toward perfection, and ultimately to mystical union.

To conclude, in these present tumultuous times, these interior souls in question are perhaps called to a life of reparation, to make penance for hardened sinners who have no idea what sin is, by offering up these very scruples for them. Praying for others, that is, making one's fellow neighbors and the Holy Souls in Purgatory the object of their prayers and sacrifices, has proven to alleviate scruples in some cases. It is very agreeable to what Our Lady of the Rosary at Fatima requested from us out of her maternal love and solicitude for us.

Ultimately, the solution for scruples is filial abandonment to Divine Providence: a selfless and generous conformity to the will of God. This will make these souls realize that God is only the terrifying Judge of the Dies irae when there is a complete turning away of the soul at the moment of death (which implies such a state during life). How can a soul be so turned away from the world to the service of Our Lord and yet at the same time in the state of mortal sin? Such a thing is akin to positing a triangle with four corners. The two states of sanctifying grace and mortal sin are not only diametrically opposed, but mutually exclusive. A soul abandoned in childlike confidence to the inscrutable designs of Divine Providence can never succuмb to sin without being undoubtedly and absolutely conscious of it: the scrupulous interior soul must let go of its own judgments and notions, and trust that God knows what He is working in the soul He loves with so much love.

The True Devotion as preached by St. Louis Marie is especially efficacious in this regard, because through Mary the soul is completely abandoned to Jesus. Interior souls who earnestly and persevering cultivate the True Devotion should attain to the infused contemplation of the mysteries of the faith more easily because they are emptied utterly of self and given over absolutely to Jesus through Mary.

I hope these remarks may be of some help. But don't cite me as an authority (please!).

Please assure Dulcamara of my prayers, and pass these notes along if you think they are helpful.

The saints suffered from scruples.  One of them said that the only thing that saved her was obedience to her confessor.