At the blog of the Gregorian Institute of Benedictine College in Kansas, there is an entry for the Fortnight for Freedom about the importance of returning to the sacrament of penance.
In other words: Wanna be free? Go to confession!
Let’s have a look at their entry which I will edit down. Read the whole thing HERE. My emphases and comments:
Seven Reasons to Return to Confession
Posted June 23, 2012 by Tom Hoopes
During the Fortnight for Freedom, the Gregorian Institute at Benedictine College is offering resources for promoting Catholic identity in public life in the simplest, most high-impact ways possible.
Today’s suggestion: Promote confession.
But don’t take our word for it.
“The renewal of the Church in America depends on the renewal of the practice of penance,” Pope Benedict told us at Nationals Stadium in Washington.
Pope John Paul II spent his last years on earth pleading with Catholics to return to confession, including in an urgent motu proprio document about confession and in his encyclical on the Eucharist.
He called the crisis in the Church the crisis of confession and wrote to priests: “I feel a pressing need to urge you, as I did last year, to rediscover for yourselves and help others to rediscover the beauty of the sacrament of reconciliation.”
Why all of this angst over confession? Because when we skip confession, we lose the sense of sin. [Let me make this easier: We risk going to hell.] The loss of the sense of sin is at the root of so many evils in our time, from child abuse to financial dishonesty, from abortion to atheism.
So, how to promote confession? Here are some talking points. Seven reasons to return to confession, both natural and supernatural.
[Here begin the bullet points without explanations.]
- Sin aggravates you.
- Sin makes you aggravating.
- We need to say it.
- Confessing helps you know yourself.
- Confession helps children.
- It needn’t be like that.
- Confessing mortal sin is required.
- Confession is a personal encounter with Christ.
Examine your consciences every evening.
Make amends.
Ask God to save you from an “unprovided” death.
Go to confession.
Make a plan and just go, already.
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Please pray for me, that I will be able to screw up my resolve to go.
Honestly, in the last year, with one exception, I have had nothing but awful confessions . . . priests who rush me through my confession, stop me before I’m done, begin their absolution before I’ve completed my act of contrition, priests who give me counsel that I know is contrary to Catholic teaching, priests who use the wrong formulary for absolution or who shorten it or use “I forgive” instead of “I absolve” . . . all of which contributes to increasingly weaken my desire to go back to the same priest or church.
For a while, I was receiving the sacrament regularly and had very good experiences, then the “wheels fell off”, and it’s really hard to go back when you’re afraid that you’ll get Fr. Lovebeads prattle on about how I should love myself better and then mutter his way through some touchy-feely 60’s-induced absolution he’s made up ‘cuz it’s more loving than the Church’s words.
I have tried on several occasions to humbly and charitably ask the priest to please use the traditional formulas, and one priest’s response was so uncharitable and sarcastic that I seriously doubted whether the sacrament was even valid.
Please, pray for me and help me to return to the sacrament. I know I need it, but it’s much like getting blood drawn by a phlebologist who doesn’t know what they’re doing and they keep ramming the needle into the wrong spot time after time every time you go back. After a while, you just don’t want that kind of pain again.