Venial

As in,

It was all Stuart could do to accept and forgive little Margaret Garber’s “sin” of smacking Bobby Daykins without laughing out loud in the confessional.

“Margaret I’m giving you four Our Fathers,” he said, in dismissing her, “but before you leave you should also know that your venial sin was in swinging at him. If you’d missed him, instead of causing him to bleed, it still would have been wrong.”

“Cha!” he heard her protest.

“Now, now, let’s be contrite,” he cautioned her.

“So just trying to hit the little pervert was wrong,” she asked, “is that what you’re saying?”

At this point Stuart briefly reflected upon how, in his days as a young confessor, the notion of turning the sacrament into an appeals court proceeding had never occurred to him.

“Young lady, that’s quite enough,” he said in an even firmer tone.

He heard a sigh and then what sounded like a defiant whisper.

“Margaret, you’ve got to actually be sorry for God to be able to forgive you, you know that don’t you?”

“Okay,” she said, finally. “I’ll be sorry.”