Why Go To Confession?

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Spirituality / How to Pray

ARCHBISHOP BRUNO FORTE addresses the most common questions and concerns Catholics have about the sacrament of Reconciliation: “Why do we have to go to Confession?” “Why tell my sins to a priest; can’t I confess directly to God?” “Does sin even exist?” Clear, honest, and pastorally sensitive answers help readers better appreciate this sacrament of personal encounter with the mercy of God. Archbishop Forte further explores how asking for forgiveness with conviction, receiving it with gratitude, and generously giving it to others can bring us unrivalled peace.

Includes helpful questions for an examination of conscience based on the 10 Commandments and prayers of sorrow in preparation for Confession. $6.95

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WHY GO TO

CONFESSION? Reconciliation and the Beauty of God Bruno Forte

BOOKS & MEDIA Boston

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Forte, Bruno.

Why go to confession? : reconciliation and the beauty of God / Bruno Forte. p. cm.

ISBN 0-8198-8314-X (pbk.)

1. Confession. 2. Reconciliation—Religious aspects—Catholic Church.

I.Title.

BX2265.3.F67 2007 264’.02086—dc22 2006017750 The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Rosana Usselmann Cover art: The Prodigal’s Return, Sir Edward John Poynter (1836–1919) / Private Collection, © The Fine Art Society, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library International.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

“P” and PAULINE are registered trademarks of the Daughters of St. Paul.

Translated by Matthew Sherry Copyright © 2007, Bruno Forte Published by Pauline Books & Media, 50 Saint Paul’s Avenue, Boston, MA 02130-3491. www.pauline.org.

Printed in the U.S.A. Pauline Books & Media is the publishing house of the Daughters of St. Paul, an international congregation of women religious serving the Church with the communications media.

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Contents

Introduction

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Part One Why Go to Confession?

Reconciliation and the Beauty of God Why go to confession?

The experience of forgiveness Confess to a priest?

A God who is close to our weakness The stages of the encounter with forgiveness The celebration of forgiveness The return to the Father’s house

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The encounter with Christ, who died and rose for us New life in the Spirit We must let ourselves be reconciled with God!

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Part Two The Father Sets Us Free

A Lectio divina on Luke 15:11–32 The Father of mercy: a love that welcomes The younger son: the story of a return The older son: physical closeness and closeness of the heart

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Part Three For an Examination of Conscience

Scripture Readings The Ten Commandments Act of Contrition

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Introduction

LET’S TRY TO UNDERSTAND, TOGETHER, what confession is. If you truly understand it—in your mind as well as your heart—you will feel the need for this encounter and experience its joy. It is an encounter in which God, by giving you his forgiveness through the ministry of the Church, creates a new heart and places a new spirit within you, so that you may live in reconciliation with God, with yourself, and with others, becoming capable of offering forgiveness and love yourself, leaving behind any temptation to distrust or any sense of weariness.

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Part One

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Why Go to Confession?

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Reconciliation and the Beauty of God

Why go to confession?

AMONG THE HEARTFELT QUESTIONS that people pose to me as a bishop, there is one that I hear frequently:Why do we have to go to confession? The question comes in many forms:Why do we have to tell our sins to a priest; why can’t we go directly to God, who knows and understands us better than any human being? And to take it even further:Why should I talk about personal matters, especially things I am ashamed of, with someone who is a 3

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sinner like myself, who may have a completely different view of things that I have experienced, or may not even understand my problems at all?

What does a priest know about my experience of sin? Some add: Does sin even exist, or is it just a priest’s power-play trick to make us behave? I can answer the last question immediately, and without any fear of misspeaking: sin exists, and it is not only evil itself; it creates more evil. Just look at what goes on every day in the world, with violence, war, injustice, abuse, egoism, jealousy, and vengeance (for example, just think of all the “war bulletins� that are diffused every day in newspapers, on the radio, television, and the internet).

Further, those who believe in the love of God realize that sin is love turned back upon itself (amor curvis, as the theologians of the Middle Ages put it), the ingratitude of those who respond to love with indifference and rejection. This rejection has consequences not only for those who experience it, but also for society as a whole, producing tangled strands of egoism and violence that constitute 4

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genuine “structures of sin” (one thinks of social injustice, of the inequality between rich countries and poor countries, of the scandal of hunger in the world...). Precisely for this reason we must not hesitate to emphasize how great a tragedy sin is. How profoundly the loss of the sense of sin— which is quite different from the psychological neurosis that we call the “guilt complex”—weakens the heart in the face of the display of evil and the seduction of Satan, the Adversary who seeks to separate us from God.

The experience of forgiveness DESPITE ALL THIS, I don’t mean to say that the world is evil and that it is useless to do good. I am convinced that goodness exists, and that it is much greater than evil; that life is beautiful and that living uprightly, for love and with love, is really worth the effort.The basic reason why I think this way is my own experience of the mercy of God and the sight of this same experience shining forth 5

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in many humble persons. It is an experience I have had many times, both in extending forgiveness as the Church’s minister and in receiving it. For many years now I have gone to confession, joyfully, several times a month.This * joy comes from feeling God Asking for forgiveness love me in a new way every time his forgiveness comes to with conviction, me through the priest, who receiving it extends it to me in God’s with gratitude, name. It is a joy that I have and giving it seen so often on the faces of with generosity those who come to confess. are the source of This is not the empty sense of a priceless peace. lightness that those who have “taken a load off ” feel (confession is not a psychological release mechanism or a consolation, or at least not mainly so), but the peace of feeling whole inside, touched in the heart by a love that heals, a love that comes from above and transforms us. Asking for forgiveness with conviction, receiving it with *

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gratitude, and giving it with generosity are the source of a priceless peace. That’s why confession is such a beautiful thing, and the right thing to do.

I hope that everyone who reads this will come to understand the reasons for such joy.

Confess to a priest?

WHY IS IT NECESSARY TO CONFESS one’s sins to a priest, and not directly to God? Of course, the confession of sins is always addressed to God. But it is God himself who shows that we must confess before a priest: by choosing to send his Son in our flesh, he showed that he wanted to meet us through direct contact, using the signs and language of our human condition. Just as he stepped out of himself for love of us and came to “touch” us with his flesh, so we are called to come out of ourselves for love of him and go with humility and faith to those who can give us forgiveness personally in his name. Only the absolution from sins that the priest offers you in the sacrament can give 7

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you the interior certainty that you have really been forgiven and welcomed back by your heavenly Father, because Christ has entrusted to the ministry of the Church the power to bind and to loose, to exclude from or admit to the community of the covenant (cf. Mt 18:17). It is he who, risen from the dead, said to the apostles: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained (Jn 20:22ff.).

So confessing to a priest is entirely different from confessing in the secret of your heart, which is exposed to the many insecurities and ambiguities that fill our lives. On your own, you will never know if what has touched you is the grace of God or your own emotions, if you have forgiven yourself or been forgiven by God. When you are absolved by the person the Lord has chosen and sent as the minister of forgiveness, you can experience the freedom that only God gives, and understand why confession is a source of peace.

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A God who is close to our weakness CONFESSION IS AN ENCOUNTER with divine forgiveness, which Jesus offers and transmits to us through the ministry of the Church. In this efficacious sign of grace, which is the experience of a mercy without limit, we are shown the face of a God who knows our human condition like no one else, and who brings himself near to us with tender love. This is seen in countless episodes in the life of Jesus, from the encounter with the Samaritan woman to the healing of the paralytic, from the Lord’s pardoning the adulterous woman to his tears at the death of Lazarus.We have a great need for this tender and compassionate closeness of God, as even a brief glance at our lives will show: we all live with our own weaknesses, suffer illness, and face death, and we are aware of the challenging questions that all of this raises in our hearts. And as much as we desire to do good, the fragility that plagues us all brings the constant risk of our falling into temptation. The Apostle Paul 9

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described this experience well: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom 7:18–19). It is the interior conflict that leads to the appeal: “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24) The sacrament of forgiveness responds to this dilemma in a special way, * always coming to sustain us afresh in our condition as sinIt is Jesus, the divine physician, ners, bringing to us the healing power of divine grace and who comes to take transforming our hearts and our sins upon himself our habits. That is why the and accompany us... Church never tires of offering us the grace of this sacrament throughout our entire life’s journey: through the sacrament, it is Jesus, the divine physician, who comes to take our sins upon himself and accompany us, continuing his work of healing and salvation. As is true for any love relationship, our covenant with the Lord *

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must be renewed continually. Fidelity is the undying commitment of the heart that both gives of itself and welcomes the love that is extended to it, until that day when God shall be all in all.

The stages of the encounter with forgiveness BECAUSE IT IS WILLED BY A GOD who is profoundly “human,” the encounter with mercy offered to us

by Jesus takes places through multiple stages, which respect the rhythms of our lives and hearts. At the beginning there is the hearing of the good news and the call of Jesus: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mk 1:15). Through this voice the Holy Spirit acts in us, lending a sweetness to our faith and our consent to the Truth. When we become docile to this voice and decide to respond with all our hearts to the one who is calling us, we set out upon the road that leads us to the greatest 11

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gift, a gift so precious that Paul was compelled to say: “We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20).

Reconciliation is this sacrament of encounter with Christ, who through the ministry of the Church comes to help in their weakness those who have betrayed or refused the covenant with God. He reconciles them with the Father and with the Church, and makes them a new creation by the power of the Holy Spirit. This sacrament is also called penance, because it expresses the reality of conversion, the journey of the heart that repents and comes to ask for God’s forgiveness.

The commonly used term, “confession,” refers to the act of confessing one’s sins before a priest, but also refers to the triple confession we must make in order to live the sacrament of Reconciliation to the full. The first of these is the confession of praise (confessio laudis), in which we bring to mind the divine love that precedes and accompanies us, recognizing the signs of this love in our lives and thus understanding better the seriousness of our 12

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fault. Then there is the confession of sin (confessio peccati), in which we present to the Father our humble and repentant hearts, acknowledging our sins. Finally there is the confession of faith (confessio fidei), in which we open ourselves up to the forgiveness that frees and saves us, which is offered to us in absolution. The actions and the words by which we express the gift we have received confess, in their turn, of the wonders worked within us by the mercy of God.

The celebration of forgiveness IN THE CHURCH’S HISTORY, penance has been experienced in a great variety of ways, both communal and individual, but these have all maintained the fundamental structure of the personal encounter between the repentant sinner and the living God, through the mediation of the ministry of the bishop or priest. Through the words of absolution, which are spoken by one who is also a sinner but has been chosen and consecrated for ministry, it is 13

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Christ himself who welcomes the repentant sinner and reconciles him or her with the Father, and through the gift of the Holy Spirit renews him or her as a living member of the Church. Reconciled with God, we are welcomed into the life-giving communion of the Trinity, and we receive the new life of grace, the love that only God can pour out within our hearts. So the sacrament of forgiveness renews our relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in whose name we receive absolution from our sins.

As shown by the parable of the prodigal son, the encounter of reconciliation leads to a banquet of delicious foods, which one attends in a new garment, with a ring on one’s finger and sandals on one’s feet (cf. Lk 15:22–23). These images express the joy and beauty of the gift that is offered and received. Truly, to use the words of the father in the parable, we must celebrate and rejoice, “for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” (Lk 15:24) How beautiful it is to think that each of us can be this child!

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The return to the Father’s house IN RELATION TO GOD THE FATHER, reconciliation can be seen as a “return home” (this is the meaning of teshuvà, the Jewish word for conversion).

Through awareness of our * sins, we realize that we are in exile, far from our homeland ...Sin is a source of of love. We feel uneasy and alienation because it sad, because we understand uproots us from our that sin means breaking the real home: the heart covenant with the Lord and is of the Father. a rejection of God’s love. It means that his love receives no love in return, which is why sin is a source of alienation, because it uproots us from our real home: the heart of the Father.

It is then that we must remember the home that awaits us. Without this memory of love, we can never have the trust and hope we need to decide to return to God.With the humility of one who knows he or she is not worthy of being called “child,” we can decide to go knock on the door of *

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the Father’s house; what a surprise it is to discover that he is at the window, peering into the distance, because he has been waiting so long for us to return! Our open hands and humble and repentant hearts receive the free gift of forgiveness, through which the Father reconciles us with himself, “converting” to us, in a manner of speaking: “While he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him” (Lk 15:20).

With extraordinary tenderness, God brings us back into the condition of children, a condition offered by the covenant established in Jesus.

The encounter with Christ, who died and rose for us IN RELATION TO THE SON, the sacrament of Reconciliation offers us the joy of encountering him, the crucified and risen Lord, who through his Passover gives us new life, pouring out the Holy Spirit in our hearts. This encounter takes place 16