What Are the Catholic Commandments in Order?

In the Catholic enumeration the Ten Commandments run: first, I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me. Second, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Third, remember to keep holy the Lord's Day. Fourth, honour your father and your mother. Fifth, you shall not kill. Sixth, you shall not commit adultery. Seventh, you shall not steal. Eighth, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. Ninth, you shall not covet your neighbour's wife. Tenth, you shall not covet your neighbour's goods (CCC 2066).

The Church groups them in two tables: the first three order a person's relationship to God — worship, reverence, and time set aside for him — and the remaining seven order relationships among people, protecting life, marriage, property, truth and the integrity of desire. Jesus summarised the whole of it in two commandments: love God, and love your neighbour as yourself (CCC 2055).

The confusion is real but the underlying text is identical — the difference is only in how the one continuous passage in Exodus and Deuteronomy is divided into ten. The Catholic and Lutheran tradition, following Saint Augustine, treats the opening prohibition of false gods and images as a single first commandment, and then splits the final prohibition of coveting into two: coveting a neighbour's wife (ninth) and coveting his goods (tenth) (CCC 2066).

Many Reformed, Anglican and Orthodox Christians instead count the prohibition of graven images as a separate second commandment, and keep coveting as one. Both arrive at ten; both use the same words of Scripture. The Church regards this as a matter of enumeration, not doctrine — nothing in the moral law changes depending on where the numbers fall. Recognising that up front matters, because the different count is often mistaken for a Catholic attempt to hide a commandment, which it is not.

The commandments are given twice in the Old Testament: to Moses on Mount Sinai in Exodus 20:2–17, and repeated by Moses to the people in Deuteronomy 5:6–21. Catholic catechesis draws the wording from both. Because the Decalogue is presented as spoken directly by God and written by his own hand, the Church treats it as holding a unique and permanent place within the moral law (CCC 2056–2058).

The line forbidding graven images is not omitted in Catholic teaching — it is understood as part of the first commandment, which forbids idolatry: giving to any created thing the worship owed to God alone (CCC 2129–2132). This is why Catholics distinguish sacred images, which honour Christ and the saints and lead the mind to them, from idols, which would replace God. Scripture itself commanded images in worship — the cherubim over the Ark, the bronze serpent — so the prohibition targets false worship, not religious art.

Yes, fully. The Church teaches that the Ten Commandments state fundamental duties that flow from the very nature of the human person, and so they oblige always and everywhere; they are unchangeable (CCC 2072). Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it, and he made its demands more radical, not less — reaching past the outward act to the heart, so that anger falls under the fifth commandment and lust under the sixth (CCC 2054).

What the Gospel adds is not permission to ignore the commandments but the grace to keep them. Catholics hold that the moral law shows the shape of a life turned towards God, while the grace of Christ, received through the sacraments and prayer, supplies the strength to actually live it (CCC 2074). The commandments diagnose; grace heals. Both together, not either alone, describe the Christian moral life.