Transcript

For new Catholics, it can sometimes be intimidating to think about going frequently to confession.

But in fact, it's one of the most fruitful spiritual practices you can adopt and develop for your spiritual life and your spiritual growth.

So, let me start off this session on regular confession by giving you the view of a priest, a view from the other side of the confessional, as it were.

Before I became a priest, I, of course, often experienced going to confession and thinking about what the priest would think of me when I was confessing my sins.

But actually, I can tell you that as a priest and having spoken with lots of other priests about, uh, not about individual sins, of course, or what you hear in particular in a confessional, but the experience of a priest as a confessor, I can tell you something very important and which I find actually very consoling.

As a priest sitting in a confessional, the first thing you hear, and over and over in a very beautiful way, is the repentance of the penitents who desire to be restored to communion with God.

And that actually is a really wonderful thing to hear.

You hear people who are trying to grow in holiness.

They may be struggling, they may have real challenges and difficulties, but they want to be closer to God.

They want to leave their sins behind, and that is actually extremely consoling.

Sometimes, people wonder if a priest finds it, uh, to be a real downer to hear confessions, and actually, I must say, it's a great privilege.

It's one of the greatest privileges after celebrating the Eucharist that I have as a priest.

Why?

Because you become a kind of witness to the way God is at work within someone's soul and you have the great privilege to encourage them in their living of the Christian life.

In fact, in a way, you get to watch the transformation that comes over them as they receive the forgiveness of Christ through the priest's absolution.

So, you should never be worried about what the priest is going to think about you.

The priest is not thinking about you.

In fact, priests have pretty bad memories when it comes to hearing confessions.

Why?

Because you're not there to focus on who did what.

You're there to help these penitents be free of their sins and to receive the grace and mercy of God, and that is a wonderful gift.

The sacrament of confession is the normal means by which sins committed after baptism are forgiven, and Jesus instituted this sacrament, He gave this to us because He knew that we need it.

Why is that?

Well, the first, and perhaps most important reason is the Devil tries to blackmail us, and that blackmail can be effective only if we keep our sins secret.

So, how does the Devil try to convince you that you shouldn't go to confession?

Well, the first step in any temptation is our enemy trying to convince us that the sin he wants us to commit isn't really very bad at all.

It's not a big deal.

Don't worry about it.

The Church's teaching is probably over the top on this.

Those are the kinds of things that he will want you to believe.

But after you fall into a sin, what does he say to your soul then?

He says, You are a sinner.

You are evil.

What you have done is really awful, even unforgivable.

He will try to convince you that you are nothing but your sin.

Of course, that is false too.

So, he tries to blackmail us into thinking that we cannot escape our sins, that we can never be forgiven, that we can't go back to our Father and admit to Him what we have done.

This is a lie.

He is the father of lies, after all.

And the way that you break the power of the Devil's blackmail is by bringing into the light exactly what his threats are, to expose them to the light of Christ, and to receive God's mercy, because this will render the Devil powerless over you.

What is more, we as human beings, need the opportunity to bring our sins out into the light, also for our own sake so that we ourselves can come to grips, not simply with how sinful we are, but rather with how much we stand in need of God.So, one of the Desert Fathers, one of the early great saints who went out into the Egyptian desert in the early ages of Christianity, he wrote this.

Rejoice when you discover in yourself a new imperfection.

That sounds very strange to us, even paradoxical.

Why should I rejoice when I discover a new way that I am failing or faulty?

Well, the reason to rejoice is this.

Our imperfections, our faults, they really are there.

They're in all of us because we are fallen human beings with a fallen human nature.

What is really important is not that we have those faults, but that we discover the power of God's grace to remove those faults from within.

That means that when you discover a new fault, you now can begin to ask God for the grace to remove it.

And even more so when we have sins hiding in us, sins that we may not even be fully aware of.

As we come to confess more, we come to recognize all the more how much we need God's help.

And of course, God is always ready to give us His help.

So we need to have no worries about whether He will provide what we need.

What is more, in living out the Christian life, it's a great help to have wise counsel, especially when we're struggling with sin.

So if there is something that you find difficult to figure out how to untie in your life, bring it to the Sacrament of Confession.

Priests are there precisely to help you with this, and you are not burdening a priest when you ask him to hear your confession.

That's why we're priests.

It's what priests exist for.

Give us the opportunity to be ministers of Christ's grace by coming regularly to that sacrament.

Now, in going to confession, it is absolutely necessary in order to have a valid confession that you acknowledge all of the serious sins that you've committed since your baptism that you've not confessed before.

So this is an important reminder about a regular practice of confession.

Even if you might be tempted to omit or hide some sin that you are particularly ashamed of, don't do it.

Hiding sins in the confessional actually prevents you from making a valid confession.

Why?

Because you're not renouncing completely your attachment to sin.

In a way, you're holding onto something, not bringing it forth into the light of Christ's grace, and therefore, you're holding onto an obstacle to loving God above all things.

Now, sometimes it happens that you will forget to confess a sin, or maybe after you've gone to confession, you will remember, Ugh, I meant to confess that, and it just slipped my mind when I got in the confessional.

Now, if this happens to you, don't worry.

Sins that you omitted because you forgot, those are really forgiven by the priest's absolution.

As long as when you're in the confessional, you intend to confess everything, it is all forgiven, even what you might forget.

So should you remember something after you've finished a confession, then simply confess it at your next opportunity.

Now, in addition to grave sins or mortal sins, each of those have to be confessed in a confession, it's also very spiritually fruitful and useful to confess also venial sins or lighter sins.

Every venial sin involves a kind of negligence, a wavering of your focus on the supreme good who is God, whom you should love above all things.

So if you let venial sins build up over time, if you let them build up for a long period of time, they tend to slowly get worse and worse, and in fact, they tend to set you up for a big fall into mortal sin.

That's partly because sin always involves a kind of blindness, and even you could say a numbness.

The more you commit a sin, the more immune to recognizing it as a sin that you become.

So what you want to do in your spiritual life is not become numb to the effects of sin.

Rather, you want to become more sensitive.

You wanna become more sensitive, not because the church wants you to be depressed about how wretched you are.

No, not that.

But rather because as you become more sensitive to God and the things of God, you will find new ways that God will free you to grow even more in spiritual freedom, in self-control, in His peace and His love.

In other words, the spiritual life is kind of like acquiring a taste for fine food or fine wine.

It doesn't necessarily happen in the first moment that you taste it.But as you taste the delights of the spiritual life, the delights of life with God, you become more sensitive to the imperfections in yourself, and that's precisely what frequent confession can help you do.

Frequent confession also helps you grow in the virtue of hope, that theological virtue, which is to trust in God's help to attain to the greatest good, which is to know and love God, ultimately to be with Him in heaven.

So, the important thing is not that you fall into sin.

The more important thing than your sins is that you get back up after you sin, and return to your Father.

That is, come back to confession.

Sometimes, some people find that there are certain habitual sins or recurring sins that they have a very hard time uprooting from their spiritual life.

And some people can mistakenly think that what is needed there is more willpower.

You just have to try harder.

In fact, the practice of regular confession will also help you understand that you will be saved, especially in these cases of difficult sins, not by your willpower, but by the power of God's grace.

That's because God is vastly more powerful than your weakness.

So when you fall, God forbid that you do, but if you should fall, this gives you an occasion to acknowledge just how weak you are, and therefore, just how much God will help you.

As Saint Paul says, When I am weak, then I am strong.

This is a great secret for growth in holiness.

That's because our growth in holiness will not depend on our being strong.

It will depend on our relying on God's power.

And God will help you, and above all, through the sacraments.

So if you do fall into sin, don't beat yourself up about it.

Get right back up and come back to confession and start over.

Now, how frequently should you go to confession?

Now traditionally, the Catholic Church would recommend even every one to two weeks.

That's not too often.

But at least a good rule is once per haircut.

So don't let it become months, and definitely not years, between confessions.

The more you go, the more fruitful it will be for you.

Finally, how to prepare to make a good confession.

One thing that can be very helpful for people is to get a good examination of conscience.

Spend some time before you go into the confessional praying to God.

Ask God to show you where you need to grow, to show you your sinfulness, and more importantly, to help you to trust more and more in the power of His mercy and His grace.

Ask Him for the grace of repentance.

And then after you go to confession, come out of the confessional, do your penance, the penance that the priest will assign to you, and give thanks to God for the grace of forgiveness that God has given you.

And one last piece of advice.

Tell your friends about what a great gift this sacrament is.

Far too few, even practicing Catholics, take advantage of the mercy of God waiting for us in the confessional.

Tell other people about this good news.