Confession

“While the grace implanted in us in Baptism will never fail us if we turn to it and receive from it the strength to live the lives of love God has always intended us to live, it is often that case that we turn from grace…often to ourselves, away from God, away from love, away from goodness and righteousness. Falling into the pattern of original sin whose power was undone in us in our baptism but by which we still find ourselves conditioned (the more so as we refuse the pattern of grace alive in us through Christ), we seek ourselves above others, or desire some lesser good over the greater Good that is God and God’s commandment to love. Hurting others and ourselves, growing loveless and cold, we fall out of relationship with God, out of right relationship with our communities, our neighbors, and we submit ourselves once more to the bondage of sin and death. In Confession, we seek to mend our broken relationship with God, or rather: we offer our brokenness to God and seek God’s grace to mend us. In Confession, we receive power to turn from sin once more, and we receive the complete absolution and forgiveness of sins won for us on the Cross; indeed, we come to the Cross in Confession to receive new life. In declaring the absolution of a penitent, the priest serves as an instrument of God’s mercy, announcing and affirming God’s forgiveness not as something new God has suddenly desired to give, but as something the repentant soul can now receive by grace, something the contrite heart can now embrace as healing and balm. Penance may be given by the priest, not as a condition of absolution, but as a way of nurturing healing, as a spiritual medicine. The priest who hears a confession is bound by the Seal of the Confessional.