Reconciliation and Sacrament

It’s not easy to know how to cure the present Catholic malaise over the sacrament of reconciliation, or confession as most people still refer to it.  No one, however, would credibly deny that a malaise exists.  As a priest, I am well aware of present patterns in the practice of this sacrament: about 15-20% of active Catholics will celebrate the sacrament once or twice a year, typically at services provided by parishes during Advent and Lent.  Most Catholics, clearly, do not celebrate the sacrament, and this for a variety of reasons.

One basic reason comes down to a substantial change in the way Catholics look at sin.  Whereas once sin seemed to be impossible to avoid and almost always “mortal” (especially after the onset of puberty), now Catholics tend to see sin as mostly venial.  Catholics are not obsessed with sin, probably a reaction to the past experience of a Catholicism totally obsessed with sin, particularly sins “against the sixth and ninth commandments.”  While some pastoral leaders might want to lead us back to our former obsession, most Catholics think that an unhealthy focusing on sin obscures the dominant points of the Gospel.  It isn’t so much that the Catholic definition of sin has changed, nor is it so much that Catholics suddenly live in complete innocence; rather, decades of psychological insight have led many Catholics, often rightly and often wrongly, to a new perspective about sin. 

Another basic reason revolves around our modern phobia about shame.  Modern people cannot tolerate shame.  Whereas former generations witnessed children making fun of others because of the size of their noses, or how many blemishes they had, or even their ethnicity and skin color, today doing something like this would seem like a massive violation of the human person.  Fifty years ago a teacher might deliberately shame a student.  Try that today and the lawsuits would follow.  Perhaps modern psyches have become so frail that shame has become the ultimate enemy.  So when it comes to whispering sins to another, it takes a lot for modern people to swallow this.  Far better to pay professionals to hear our faults; the professionalism itself mitigates the shame.

Perhaps a third reason is the substantial demotion priests have received in they eyes of many—both Catholics and non-Catholics.  Catholics always knew their priests were “human,” and we celebrated this in the years after Vatican II.  “Call me John,” father would say to his friends.  Father was one of us.  But the persistent exposure of the terrible failings of a small percentage of priests has colored how everyone looks at priests. “Why tell my sins to a human”—the standard argument of non-Catholics against confession—has morphed into “Why tell my sins to sinful priest,” merging with the suspicions that mark modern life.

The malaise of reconciliation will not be healed so long as these three factors loom large in the public mind.  Yet none of them speaks to the fundamental value, the essential importance, of celebrating reconciliation.  For the sacrament is not about obsessing over sin, or inducing shame, or pretending that priests are perfect.  Rather, the sacrament is an indispensible step in the whole process of reconciliation.

Catholics often have had it put to them, “God forgives sin in the sacrament of confession.”  This just as often translates into the totally incorrect (and heretical) idea that unless we do one thing or another, God does not forgive.  The truth is that God has already forgiven humankind of sin; that’s what the death and resurrection of Jesus is all about.  God’s forgiveness has been offered.

This issue, then, is not about God’s forgiveness, but about our ability to actively appropriate that forgiveness in our lives.  I may offend a person; that person may forgive me; but unless that forgiveness becomes relationally active in my own life, it has no power to change and heal.  God, indeed, has forgiven the world.  But that forgiveness becomes real only when humankind accepts and appropriates it.

The sacrament of reconciliation is the process whereby God’s forgiveness is actively received and accepted by someone who seeks to renew his or her discipleship.  Through this process we make the experience of forgiveness real.  In reconciliation we face the stark reality of our true sins, the bluntness of how we have compromised our discipleship, the pain of our broken relationships (with others and God), and the concrete patterns that lead us to obscure God’s love in our lives.  While much of reconciliation can happen in our heads (examination of conscience) and our hearts (sincere contrition), a solid piece of it needs to be enacted, put into human action and discourse, in order to become real.

The recitation of sin privately to a priest emerged slowly in the Church’s experience of reconciliation. We may well be experiencing the emergence of other styles of reconciliation—and it may take hundreds of years for this to happen.  But the private recitation of sin contributed one absolutely necessary dimension of reconciliation—it forced the personal involvement of a person with the reality of his or her sin.  It discouraged the bland euphemisms and bromide evasions by which we buffer our experience of sin.  It made sin personally real.

Catholic piety abounds with stories of saints who, in the confessional, were able to read souls.  Catholic discipleship, however, needs to emphasize the blessed grace of all Catholics being able to read their own souls by bringing themselves and their stories into the openness of God, of forgiveness, of healing and community.  This experience—widely practiced in a different way in a whole slew of self-help and recovery programs—is what Catholics need today.  Honesty, insight, correction, faithfulness and change. Otherwise reconciliation will still seem to be about shame, or obsessiveness, or the priest—when it needs to be, most of all, about our engagement with the wonder of grace and forgiveness in the nooks and crannies of our lives.

[Special thanks to the Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary who published this piece in their community newsletter, Journeys, in the Spring of 2010, Vol. 28, #1]