Welcome to our daily Rosary meditation. Let's begin in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen. Let's call to mind all those we've promised to pray for.

We've been meditating in the Rosary on the Fifth Commandment,

thou shalt not kill. And today we take up a difficult topic,

the Church's teaching on suicide. If you'd like to meditate on another topic, just go

to School of Faith.com, click on listen to today's Rosary meditation and you can select another episode.

Now the Catholic Church always distinguishes

between how evil a sin is and how responsible somebody is for committing that sin.

You can do something really bad, really bad, but if you don't know that it's really bad, or maybe you're not

thinking straight or maybe you're mentally ill or maybe there's something else

going on that makes it impossible to control your actions,

like an addiction or something else.

Then as the catechism teaches, your responsibility and guilt for doing something really bad can be reduced or even totally

removed.

Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can

diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.

In fact, the Catechism teaches that we should not despair

of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives.

By ways known to him alone,

God can provide the opportunity for repentance and salvation. This is why the church prays for persons who have

taken their own lives. Now in the last century or so we have come to realize that many of the people who commit suicide

may not be fully responsible for their actions.

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