Penance

EWTN, Global Catholic Radio, and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s, and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. Continuing the sacrament of penance, we review the essential acts of penance, one, the confession or the telling of sins, two, contrition or sorrow, three, satisfaction for sins. Thus far we have treated confession or the actual telling of sins, though not completely. It might be asked or objected at this point, there is all kinds of telling of sins, there is a literary confession, and there is also a psychoanalytic confession. What is the difference between any of these and sacramental confession? Well, let us take literary confession, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, and also those who write modern confessions, do not confess sins for the same reason that we do in the sacrament. Rousseau had a great pride in revealing himself. So also in modern confessions, there is almost implied such a sentiment as this, see what a rogue am I? Not only is there pride, but there is also an intent to arouse similar emotions, feelings, urges, concupiscences and passions in the minds of the reader. Every disclosure of vice contributes to the increase of pleasure. When Saint Augustine wrote his confession, there was great shame, not pride, and he did not tell any of his grave sins. One would almost think, reading the confessions of Saint Augustine, that the worst thing he ever did was to steal an apple. And he made that stand for all of his very grave sins. Then he said that he wrote his confessions in order that everyone might know the mercy of God. If you would ever like to read the finest piece of analysis of soul that has ever been done, read the confessions of Saint Augustine. We come now to the other objection. What is the difference between telling one's sins in confessions and telling sins to a psychoanalyst or to a psychiatrist? There are many differences. In psychoanalysis, there is an avowal of the attitude of mind, and particularly an avowal of unconsciousness. Confession, on the contrary, is an avowal not of a state of mind, but a state of conscience. It is an avowal of guilt. Confession is the communion of the conscience and God. The mere revealing of one's subconsciousness is never very humbling. Most people, when they go to a psychoanalyst and tell their state of mind, will often end it up by saying, Doc, did you ever hear a case like that before? They are very proud of it. Another difference between the two is, really, everybody naturally wants to do his own telling, for he knows better than anyone else his guilt. Let me tell it is a primary right of the human heart. Confession satisfies that. Every decent mind resents probing, probing by alien minds. He wants to swing open the portals of his own conscience. He wants no one breaking down doors from the outside. The very uniqueness of personality gives him the right to state his own case in his own words. And that is what happens in confession. We are our own witness. We are our own prosecuting attorney. We are, to some extent, our own judge. No soul likes to be studied like a bug. And another difference is that which concerns the person to whom the avowals are made. Confession is always made to a representative of the moral order. The analyst represents not the moral order, but the emotional order. And when you go to a representative of the moral order, you go there to be made better, to have your sins forgiven, not to have them explained away. In confession, the relationships between the confessor and the penitent are utterly impersonal. The very structure of the confession protects the penitent from revealing his identity. There's a screen. There's a veil. Nothing can be passed the priest cannot see through. So impersonal is this relationship that the penitent may go on indifferently as far as the validity of confession is concerned, and he may go indifferently to any priest. It makes no difference to which one he goes. I say, therefore, that the guilty conscience wants to avow his guilt, not to a theorist of a particular system, but to a mediator or a divinity. That is why the church asks that a priest who absolves the penitent be in the state of grace, a participant himself of divine life. Psychoanalysis never raises the question of the moral fitness of the analyst. He may be beating his wife at home, but the church always raises that question and raises it very seriously, too. And we are never made worse by admitting the need for absolution. We are not made worse by admitting that we are all brokenhearted. When we go to confession, we are brokenhearted. We face our guilt, we face our sin, and because we do, we have the great advantage of being able to let God in, for God can get in only to a broken heart. In an actual confession, the penitent is never cited and forced to go. He receives no summons, but he goes of his own accord. He is not accused. He accuses himself. There are no outside witnesses. He witnesses against himself as the culprit. Therefore there is no question of indictive justice as there is in civil courts. The reason one goes to confession is in order to be healed, to be reincorporated to Christ, and also to receive his mercy. When we go to confession, we are apt to forget sins. If we inadvertently forget to mention even a grave sin, there is no need to go back to confession. It is forgiven in the intention to confess the sin, but we should mention it explicitly in the next confession. No one seems to realize the great advantage there is in confession as regards character building. It confers grace, gives power to the will. An unbeliever once wrote, the custom of monthly confession is a magnificent safeguard for the morals of youth. The shame engendered by this humble confession perhaps saves a greater number than the holiest of natural motives. Now assuming the confession is made, we come to the second act of the sacrament, namely compression or sorrow. Compression means to break, to crush. From the Latin contere. Let me tell you what compression is not. First it is not a worldly remorse. There is the remorse of the world. The remorse of the world is related only to the past. It is not related to a standard, not related to God, not related to the divine life of Christ. It is a wish that what was done be undone. It therefore does not make any reference at all either to neighbor or to self. The great difference between the two is evident in the case of Judas and Peter. Both sinned. Our blessed Lord said that both would sin. He called Peter a devil and scripture says that Judas himself became possessed of the devil and yet Peter was forgiven and Judas was not. Why was that? Well, it was because Judas repented unto himself. That is the exact expression of scripture. Peter repented unto our Lord. Judas had remorse. Peter had sorrow or contrition. Contrition is an interior attitude or disposition of the soul. When it is sincere, it is that. Those who say, and there are many who do, all that a Catholic has to do when he sins is to go to confession and admit sins and he comes out white as snow. Oh no, he does not. The mere confession of sins without sorrow and a firm purpose of amendment does not make a valid confession. The absolution of the priest is not efficacious unless there is a serious sorrow. In fact, under certain conditions, which I will explain, one can have remission of sins without the telling of sins. Sorrow there must be. Under no condition is absolution effective without sorrow. Here is a story. It is only, only a story, but it indicates and reveals how important sorrow is. According to this fiction, a man went to confession and during confession, which happened in the priest's own room, the man was a pickpocket and stole the priest's watch. Then at the end of confession, he said, oh, father, I forgot to tell you I stole a watch. The priest said, you must restore it to the owner. The man said, father, I will give it to you. No, he said, said the priest, I do not want it, you must give it to the owner. Well, said the man, the owner won't take it back. Well, in that case, said the priest, you may keep it. There was no sorrow. Sorrow penance there must be. Remember how much our blessed Lord emphasized it. The kingdom of God is near at hand. Repent, repent and believe the gospel. Our blessed Lord said the sorrow was so important that he introduced the kingdom of God with repentance. As he put it, the kingdom of God is near at hand. Repent and believe the gospel. It was the first sermon of Peter. It was also the sermon of John the Baptist. And penance was the last sermon our blessed Lord preached. Sorrow, therefore, is absolutely essential. And why does God insist upon it? Why is he not indifferent to sin? Because God is holy. He makes a distinction between the sinner and the sin. He wants to separate the two, the disease and the patient, the error and the student. Therefore we must be sorry. In passing, I might say that a Catholic suffers more when he sins than one who has not the faith. The reason a Catholic suffers more is because of his greater love. He understands better the love of our Lord in redemption and in the church. Imagine two men marrying two old shrews. One of the men was never married before. The other was married to a beautiful, kind, lovely, devoted wife who died. Which of the two men do you think suffers more? Obviously the one who knew the better love. Catholics therefore are in great agony when they sin. And not really for any other reason than because they hurt someone they love. But though we suffer more, we never fall into despair. That is the difference with the world. Our sorrow is not only a grief directed toward our Lord, as I shall explain, but it is also a detestation of sin with the purpose of not sinning again. Sorrow is of two kinds. It is imperfect and it is perfect. Imperfect sorrow is the sorrow that we have because we dread the loss of heaven and we fear hell. The perfect sorrow is the sorrow that we have because we offended God. When you go to confession, at the end of it, while the priest is giving you absolution, you recite the act of contrition. Notice that the act of contrition combines both kinds of sorrows. Now listen to it as I say it. Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee. And I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. But most of all, because they offend thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love, I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance for them in my life. Amen. Perhaps I can illustrate these two kinds of sorrows by telling you about two children. Presume they are twins. They both disobey their mother in an equal way. One of the children goes to the mother and says, oh mommy, I'm sorry, now I can't go to the picnic, can I? That is imperfect contrition. The other one throws her arms around the mother and begins to cry and says, mommy, forgive me, I love you. That is perfect contrition. Imperfect contrition is sufficient to receive absolution in sacramental confession. But suppose you are in a state of sin and you cannot go to confession. Suppose you are in a plane that is falling, or you are a soldier going into battle, or you are in any state of grievous sin and there is no way of going immediately to confession. What should you do? You make an act of perfect contrition. A perfect contrition will remit sins, provided that you have the intent to go to sacramental confession at the earliest opportunity. Along with the sorrow, there is the purpose of amendment. Because we say we promise to amend. Now the purpose of amendment is not the certitude of amendment. That would be presumption. St. Paul says, if any man thinks he can stand, let him take heed, lest he fall. What is meant by a firm resolve not to sin is the sincere desire now to do all in our power but the help of God's grace not to fall again. So we examine ourselves and we think up ways of avoiding the fall. I find an illustration of that in this very lesson. In the first part of it, as I was talking to you about confession in general, there was a kind of a tick. I looked about to see if it was my clock, my stopwatch. I stuck it in my pocket and still the little tick went on. Suddenly you heard it, that it was the electric typewriter that I had left on. I had been doing some typing and lo and behold, tick got in behind the voice. Now that's a confession to you, is it not? And with it, sorrow, I'm telling you, and also a firm purpose of amendment. I just shut off the typewriter. So too, when we are in the state of sin, when we are absolved as a result of sacramental confession, we take the firm purpose not to sin again and the way to make up for sin is to do away with many of the occasions of sin and to make up for the sin as soon as possible. If we are nasty, sarcastic, we must make up for it. Many people will cut others, cut them to the quick with nasty remarks, never, never once ask pardon. They just let it pass. They forget it and such a disposition certainly does not indicate a very firm purpose of amendment. If you have stolen something, you have to return it. If you have been guilty of calumny, you rectify it. And I say you avoid the occasions of sin, it might be through certain reading, it might be certain companionship, it might be certain visits, all of these are avoided in order to prove the sincerity of our sorrow. Sorrow in a certain sense is Eros in tears. Eros is the God of the flesh. Sorrow is an intention to abandon the ego. It is hard, sometimes it's like being skinned alive. Have you ever had an old plaster peeled off your body? Well, that's the way it is to peel away sins, to get rid of some of them, to take a firm purpose of amendment, but to conclude the subject of sorrow. You might ask me, which is more common in confession, perfect or imperfect contrition? I would say perfect contrition, that is my experience. I believe that most people are sorry for their sins, not just because they dread the loss of heaven and fear hell, it is because they have hurt our Lord. After all, it is the cross that reveals the dimension of sin. No one ever thoroughly sees sin in its utter nakedness until he understands redemption. Take the errors and the stupidity and the crimes of every day. People summarize them by saying, oh, what a fool I made of myself. There is a world of difference between that and, oh, what a sinner am I. When we go to confession, there is always a crucifix in the confessional box, and as we kneel there, we see goodness nailed to the cross. And incidentally, I should have told you too, when I answered the objection, why go to confession to a priest, remember that we priests have to go. We are sinners too, and we have to go every week. When we see the crucifix before us, we see our own biography. There is no need of anyone writing my life. There it is, nailed to a cross. The nails are like so many pens, the parchment, the skin. There I am as I really am. Far be it therefore for any of us to say, oh, we are not as bad as the Romans and the Jews who crucified our blessed Lord. Let us not forget that they did not crucify our Lord except physically sin crucified him. And in that we are all equal, we are all representatives. When we go to confession, we gather up all the rubbish of our lives, the kind of rubbish that we have thrown down into the cellar of our lives, as we throw rubbish down into the cellar of our house, and we take it all up and lay it at the feet of our Lord. If you have ever walked in the Saturday afternoon or evening to a large city church with rows of confessionals on either side, you have seen feet protruding from the little curtains of the confessionals, big feet, little feet, male feet, female feet. These feet look like wriggling little worms. They belong to people who have finally come to disown their sins by disowning them. The only part of them which is revealed to the world which sticks out from under the curtain is the feet, the lowliest part, the symbol of the absence of pride. When a Catholic goes to confession, instead of putting his best foot forward, he puts his worst foot forward, and every penitent who has ever made a confession, as he enters that box, has said, I may fool others, but what a fool am I to fool myself, and what a sinful fool I am to think I can fool God. Father. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the U.S., call 818-331-3549. And please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio.