Confession leads to deeper conversion in Lent

A confessional is seen in a file photo. (OSV News photo/Nancy Phelan Wiechec)Throughout the season of Lent, many parishes offer the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the form of a penance service, when multiple visiting priests make themselves available one evening of the week for parishioners to attend confession at their home parish or to travel to a parish hosting the penance service.

It is common to find weekly confession available at most parishes throughout the year; however, these penance services are scheduled during Lent for specific reasons.
Pastors of Catholic churches are aware that some individuals would prefer to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation with a priest who does not personally know them.

Furthermore, one to two priests may be assigned to serve a community with thousands of parishioners, whereas a penance service can bring together over a dozen priests to assist with hearing a large number of individual confessions.

The hope is that parishioners and guests will feel encouraged to go to confession with a priest with whom they feel comfortable.

Additionally, the central reason for the Sacrament of Reconciliation and penance services during Lent remains connected to personal salvation and Jesus Christ’s death on the Cross.
“It reconciles us to God and the Church as we prepare for Easter,” Father Clark Sample, Archdiocesan vicar for Clergy, said. “The goal is conversion of heart, turning away from sin and renewing our friendship with Christ, so we can fully share in the joy of the resurrection.”
Father Clark said the Mother Church set the precept of confessing serious sins at least once a year, not as a burden, but as a way of keeping her children spiritually healthy and on the right path.

“When someone begins to feel, hear or even think about going to confession after a long time, that is not accidental. That is God’s love gently knocking on the door of the heart,” Father Steven Tran, CSsR, parochial vicar of the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, said. “It is a sign that God has never stopped loving them, never stopped waiting.”

Father Tran hears weekly confession at the co-cathedral and encounters individuals at every stage in their faith journey. He would encourage those who have not gone to confession in years to trust the gentle movement of grace.

“God is not waiting to scold or condemn, but to heal, forgive and restore,” Father Tran said. “Confession is not about shame. It is about freedom. Opening one’s heart to God in this Sacrament allows His mercy to do what we cannot do on our own — to lift burdens we may have carried for years.”

Priests are familiar with questions about the Sacrament of Reconciliation, in particular, why Catholics confess their sins to a priest.

Father Jeffrey Bame, rector and pastor of the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, said the question can be addressed canonically and theologically, and referenced Canon 960, a chapter on the Sacrament of Penance in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Individual and integral confession and absolution constitute the only ordinary means by which a member of the faithful conscious of grave sin is reconciled with God and the Church. Only physical or moral impossibility excuses from confession of this type; in such a case, reconciliation can be obtained by other means.

It is an ordinary means that is interpersonal with a concrete human element. Father Bame went on to cite Scripture as the theological basis for the law, “And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained’” (Jn 20:22-23).

With that passage, Catholics believe that Jesus Christ entrusted the forgiveness of sins to the apostles and His Church. The ordinary means for the forgiveness of sins, especially grave sins, is through the sacramental ministry of priests, Father Bame said.

In the early Church, Confession was often a one-time, public act for those entering the Church before the celebration of Easter. As centuries passed, monastic practices developed, and with them so did the practice of private confession.

By the sixth and seventh centuries, the practice developed into the individual and repeatable Sacrament we know today, making ongoing conversion and reconciliation a regular part of the Christian life, Father Sample said.

Lent continued to remain the privileged season in which the Church taught repentance and reconciliation as essential preparation for Easter.

With the invitation for the faithful to practice the three pillars of prayer, fasting and almsgiving during Lent, there is a risk that those sacred observances can become empty without the grace offered from God through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are ways to convert our wills, and in that sense, the Sacrament of Reconciliation strengthens and builds on them, Father Richard McNeillie, Archdiocesan director of Vocations, said.

Confession not only restores baptismal grace if it has been lost through mortal sin, but it puts us back into right relationship with God. “It doesn’t make our relationship perfect,” Father McNeillie said, “but it’s probably the closest we’ll get to perfection because it’s helping us convert our wills to His will.”