IAACS: IT’S ALL ABOUT CONFESSION SILLY
My family invited a friend who was the former associate pastor at our parish, Father Tony. He has since moved to the role of pastor at his current parish. We picked his brain about how to make parishes stronger. Without skipping a beat, he proclaimed “adoration and confession.”
I’m going to focus on confession in this article. Father Tony said that parishes need to do more than just offer the Sacrament of Confession for 30 minutes before the Saturday vigil Mass. It needs to be widely available and promoted. Think about it, when was the last time you heard a priest talk at length about the importance and value of Confession?
WHERE GRACE ABOUNDS
You really have to think of a parish as a group of people with various sins on their souls. Now, which parish will be stronger? The parish where a large portion of the congregation receives the Sacrament of Reconciliation regularly or the one with very few penitents? From a purely logical viewpoint, the stronger parish is the one with less communal sin.
Faith and grace flourish where sin is reduced. It’s like cleaning up all the junk and trash to reveal the natural beauty of the soul. If you understand the importance of Confession, then you also recognize the importance of the other sacraments as well. You will want to go to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day and receive the Eucharist in a state of grace. In fact, you will follow all the precepts of the Church. Where Confession abounds, so does grace.
FAMILY PEACE
Here’s a small example of the communal power of Confession. My wife, who is a living saint, insisted that we all go to Confession as a family because we haven’t gone in a few months. We all received the forgiveness and for a brief time, we were a family without sin.
The following Sunday was a peaceful one. I don’t know if it was just a coincidence, but it seemed like there was a greater effort in the household to foster a sense of peace and joy. Personally, I really wanted to live out the last part of The Act of Contrition — “And I firmly resolve with the help of your grace to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin.” It’s like the entire family wanted to keep the sinless streak alive, at least for a day.
I can see the wisdom in Father Tony’s words about building a parish on the foundation of the Sacrament of Confession. After all, if my immediate family felt a sense of peace and joy after Confession, imagine how an entire parish must feel. At any given time, a good proportion of the congregation has a “clean slate” and is trying to keep their sinless streak going. That will have an entirely different dynamic than a parish where only a few “old school” members are going to Confession while the vast majority haven’t gone in years.
While we should support an individual going to Confession whenever they need to, we should push our pastors to place a greater emphasis on that sacrament. They need to encourage more people to receive it. If there isn’t enough time in the current slot, increase it. A parish family that is free from sin will be a stronger parish. I don’t know a single pastor that doesn’t want a stronger, more vibrant parish with more individual souls in a state of grace.