The Sixth Commandment and the prohibition on “impure” acts

The Sixth Commandment and the prohibition on “impure” acts govern how the young Frank is taught to understand sexual desire: as a moral danger that can imperil his soul. In the passages associated with the commandment, religious teaching makes private conduct feel answerable to a watching sacred authority, while Frank’s recurring attempts at confession reveal the strain between that doctrine and his inability to live by it.

The commandment and its teaching

Frank encounters the rule in schoolyard instruction. Mr. O’Dea explains the Sixth Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,” broadly, as encompassing impure thoughts, words, and deeds. The formulation extends a commandment associated with adultery to what boys call self-abuse, placing both thought and solitary conduct under the same moral prohibition.

A Redemptorist priest reinforces the lesson by presenting impurity as an offense with consequences beyond the individual. He tells the boys that the Virgin Mary turns away and weeps over their conduct, and links each transgression to Christ’s suffering. The teaching thus makes the adolescent body a religious concern: private desire is described as harm to sacred figures and as a danger to the soul, rather than merely as a breach of conduct.

Fear, desire, and self-surveillance

The rule enters Frank’s imagination even when he is asleep. He wonders whether a dream involving American girls shown on a cinema screen can be sinful, since the desire and his response occur in sleep; he distinguishes this from conduct undertaken while awake. That distinction does not settle the matter for him. The question itself shows how far the prohibition reaches: it prompts him to examine not only deliberate actions but also the uncertain boundary between involuntary experience and moral responsibility.

The priest’s warning supplies a severe frame for that examination. Frank fears damnation and imagines devils pursuing him in hell, and he responds by praying to the Virgin Mary, expressing remorse, and promising to stop. But the promises recur without ending the behavior. The account presents religious guilt as a repeated cycle rather than a single lesson successfully learned: prohibition gives rise to fear, fear to pledges and prayer, and continued difficulty to renewed guilt.

Confession and the search for absolution

Frank’s response also takes him from church to church. He reports that priests reject his repentance as inadequate because he has not abandoned the conduct; consequently, he looks for a more accommodating confessor. Paddy Clohessy directs him to an elderly Dominican priest who is hard of hearing. Frank attends confession with him every few weeks, and sometimes the priest falls asleep. On those occasions Frank does not wake him and later receives Communion without having been assigned penance or given absolution, reasoning that the failure is not his and that attending confession may still leave him in a state of grace.

The arrangement ends when the confessional panel slides open and a different, younger priest appears. Frank realizes that this priest will hear him clearly, and begins his confession by stating that he has sinned and that a fortnight has passed since the last one. The interruption matters because it exposes the precariousness of the workaround: access to absolution has depended partly on a confessor who could not hear him, and the new priest restores the possibility of being fully heard.

The rule beyond the church

The Sixth Commandment continues to shape Frank’s thoughts while he works as a telegram boy. On country routes, he notices animals in the fields and contrasts their sexual behavior with the prohibition imposed on human beings: animals are not burdened by the category of sin. He considers the possibility of acting alone outdoors but checks himself because a farmer might appear and judge him for breaking the commandment. The imagined observer carries the religious rule into ordinary rural space, where fear of being seen becomes another form of self-restraint.

Across these episodes, the commandment operates as both doctrine and an internalized gaze. School instruction defines the prohibited conduct; sermons attach it to sacred suffering and damnation; confession offers a route toward relief, though Frank doubts whether he can meet its demands. Even away from church, the possibility of discovery shapes his behavior. The result is not a simple story of obedience: the rule remains powerful precisely because desire, repeated failure, fear, and the pursuit of absolution keep bringing Frank back to it.