Then there are the sacraments to repair every breach and to heal every wound.  Penance will cleanse you, communion will adorn and equip you anew.  Confession will give you a better knowledge of yourself every time you go; the Food of God will strengthen every fibre of your soul and steel you against the seductions that otherwise would make you a ready victim.  Don’t go once a year, go ten, twenty times and more, if necessary, go until you feel that you own yourself, that you can command and be obeyed.  Then you will not have to be told to stop; you will be safe.

CHAPTER LXXXIV.  THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.

The Seventh Commandment is protective of the right of property which is vested in every human being enjoying the use of reason.  Property means that which belongs to one, that which is one’s own, to have and to hold, or to dispose of, at one’s pleasure, or to reclaim in the event of actual dispossession.  The right of property embraces all things to which may be affixed the seal of ownership; and it holds good until the owner relinquishes his claim, or forfeits or loses his title without offense to justice.  This natural faculty to possess excludes every alien right, and supposes in all others the duty and obligation to respect it.  The respect that goes as far as not relieving the owner of his goods is not enough; it must safeguard him against all damage and injury to said goods; otherwise his right is non-existent.

All violations of this right come under the general head of stealing.  People call it theft, when it is effected with secrecy and slyness; robbery, when there is a suggestion of force or violence.  The swindler is he who appropriates another’s goods by methods of gross deception or false pretenses while the embezzler transfers to himself the funds entrusted to his care.  Petty thieving is called pilfering or filching; stealing on a large scale usually has less dishonorable qualificatives.  Boodling and lobbying are called politics; watering stock, squeezing out legitimate competition, is called financiering; wholesale confiscation and unjust conquest is called statesmanship.  Give it whatever name you like, it is all stealing; whether the culprit be liberally rewarded or liberally punished, he nevertheless stands amenable to God’s justice which is outraged wherever human justice suffers.

Of course the sin of theft has its degrees of gravity, malice and guilt, to determine which, that is, to fix exactly the value of stolen goods sufficient to constitute a grievous fault, is not the simplest and easiest of moral problems.  The extent of delinquency may be dependent upon various causes and complex conditions.  On the one hand, the victim must be considered in himself, and the amount of injury sustained by him; on the other, justice is offended generally in all cases of theft, and because justice is the corner stone of society, it must be protected at all hazards.  It is only by weighing judiciously all these different circumstances that we can come to enunciate an approximate general rule that will serve as a guide in the ordinary contingencies of life.