Confession

This is about the sacrament, and its requisite virtue of penance. This is not bout rumors and gossips of attention-hungry celebrities.  Sad to say, the word appears to be more associated with the latter than with the former.

The sacrament and the virtue appear to be falling into oblivion. Aggravating this is the anomaly that while the number of penitents is dwindling, the number of communicants is increasing.

The situation should move all of us to drastic action. Priests should talk more about these topics to clarify and encourage people. Everybody else should really try to develop the appropriate knowledge, attitudes and habits.

Of course, priests should not only talk about them. Now, they have to give a more overt example. They-we-have to the first to go to confession. We should also make ourselves more available for this sacrament.

One aspect of the problem is precisely the lack of priests or, worse, their unwillingness to administer this sacrament. Of course, that in itself is reflective of a still deeper problem that's crying for urgent relief.

A priest should have a clear sense of priority, and realize that hearing confessions is one of his first priorities. He should hang out a lot in the confessional.

If he were to choose, for example, between being a parish office manager and a confessor, he should choose the latter, because the former can be well done by a layman, while as a confessor, he is unsubstitutable.

As a confessor and spiritual adviser, a priest is at once a father, judge, doctor and pastor. In Christ, he forgives sins, tells us what is wrong, heals us of our illnesses, and leads us to our true destination. He handles the most intimate part of a person.

We have to remember that the sacrament is such a precious treasure in Christian life that neglecting it constitutes a big, culpable waste!

The sacrament is nothing less than a tribunal of divine justice and mercy. Something in it makes us closest to God. That's because mercy is God's most radical form of love for us, and asking for mercy is the most extreme form of our love for God.

The Gospel speaks eloquently of this. Christ on the Cross, about to die, asked his Father to forgive "them for they know not what they do." His whole redemptive work culminated in forgiving sinful mankind.

And the sinner of a woman who gate-crashed into Simon's party for Jesus was considered as loving Jesus more than did Simon, because of her many sins for which she repented and asked for mercy. (Lk 7,36-48)

In short, God is happiest when we ask for forgiveness. "There shall be joy in heaven upon one sinner that does penance, more than upon ninety-nine just who does need penance," Jesus said. (Lk 15,7)

One reason we see a lot of religious indifference and even hostility nowadays not only against God but also against one another is the neglect of the sacrament of confession and its virtue of penance.

How can one feel close to God when he feels no contrition for his sin?

This, of course, presumes that one still has some sense of sin, because in actuality many have reduced sin to what is only externally offensive, not necessarily to God.

Confession reconciles man with God, recovers lost grace or increases grace if one still is in that state. It also builds up fraternity in the Church, since sin is not only an offense against God, but works to weaken Christ's body, the Church.

Confession heals our individual conscience of its many defects, and makes it at once more sensitive to sin and resistant to temptation. It knocks the devil witless.

Confession even has very healthy natural, as in psychological, effects. If understood and done properly, it truly makes us feel light and happy, free and unburdened. It makes us simple yet knowledgeable, transparent yet prudent.

We should do everything to promote the habit of going to confession. The same with its required virtue of penance, the abiding sense of our sinfulness leading us to always ask for forgiveness.

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