The word 'venial' is correct and usable in written English.
It means "able to be forgiven or pardoned" or "minor or forgivable offense." You can use 'venial' when describing a sin or mistake that is not deemed serious enough to incur damnation or severe punishment. It can also be used to describe a minor or forgivable mistake or fault in a non-religious context. Example: Although lying is generally considered a sinful act, a white lie to spare someone's feelings may be seen as venial in the eyes of society.
"Unless Micheletti does something incredibly outrageous or stupid, I still think he has won this," says Peter Hakim, of Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington, DC. "Honduras may have committed a venial sin, but it's not Serbia or Darfur.
But his mistakes are venial, outweighed by his vivid, visceral prose.
By Russian standards, this was a venial venal sin, if sin at all.
The stories enacted vary with the village, but common scenes include offerings to the gods, criticism of venial Buddhist priests, exposure of corruption by gentry and officials, flirtation, and a funeral service that brings absolution.
Actual sin is subdivided, on the basis of its gravity, into mortal and venial.
While a venial sin weakens the sinner's union with God, it is not a deliberate turning from him and so does not wholly block the inflow of sanctifying grace.
Christian eschatology, which came to conceive of both an immediate judgment and a final judgment, developed the idea of a purgatory, where the dead expiated their venial sins in readiness for the final judgment.
A venial sin usually involves a less important matter and is committed with less self-awareness of wrongdoing.
For journalists, the most seductive aspect of the McCain candidacy may be not the constant access — or even the fact that, unlike most politicians, he actually seems to enjoy our company — but the startling, preëmptive willingness to plead guilty to almost any and all sins, personal or political, venial or mortal.
Lapses that are venial in the filming of the amusing yet somewhat clichéd origin story of Petit's artistic calling and historic quest prove numbing in what ought to be the exaltation and sublimity of the already vaunted sequence in which the movie culminates: the walk itself.
The rest is a jungle of inchoate data that seems deliberately to eschew, like other collective research projects, such human qualities as reason (the reader has to do most of the work of ordering the material) and feeling (if Mr. Harrington sometimes has too much, it is a venial sin compared to the bleakness of this prose).
