Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Archives

Sin

The Spiritual and Psychological Value of Frequent Confession

Judging by the drastic drop in confessions
in countries like the United States, the false opinion is gaining ground that
Confession is not to be received, or made, frequently.

No doubt, one reason for this sad state of affairs is the prevalence of some
wild theories about mortal sin. For example, the Fundamental Option theory
claims that no mortal sin is committed unless a person totally rejects God.
Who but the devil hates God? One adultery or one abortion is not a mortal sin.
On these grounds, there are parishes in which almost no one goes to Confession.

Our focus in this conference, however, is more specific. We wish to emphasize
the value of frequent Confession, where no conscious mortal sins are being confessed.
We are speaking of the frequent, and therefore early confessions of children,
as soon as they reach the age of reasonand lets make sure before they receive
their First Holy Communion. We are speaking of the frequent confessions of
youth, of married people, of those in declining years. We are with emphasis
speaking of the frequent confessions of priests and religious, whose progress
in sanctity is so closely bound up with their often receiving the sacrament
of Penance.

Before going on, let me assure you that I am quite familiar with the present
state of affairs in more than one diocese. People tell me it is becoming increasingly
difficult to find a priest to hear your confession. You may have to make an
appointment by telephone at the priests convenience. You may have to meet
a priest in person in the parlor and identify yourself before you go to Confession.
You may have to listen to an unwelcome homily on not abusing the sacrament by
having nothing except venial sins to confess, or be told to come back some other
time, when you have something worthwhile to say.

Before going any further, I must tell you: choose your confessors carefully
and wisely, and pray for those priests who seem unwilling to exercise this precious
sacramental ministry as the Savior who ordained them wants it to be exercised,
with prudence and kindness and the practice of Christlike mercy.

The Church's Teaching

There is no doubt that the practice of frequent Confession in the absence of
mortal sin is a relatively recent development in the Catholic Church. Such
development under divine guidance is part of the genius of Catholic Christianity.

Consequently, those who frown on frequent Confession and go back to dusty volumes
about the practice of Penance in the early Church are behind the times. They
fail to realize that the Church is not a static organization, but the living
and therefore developing Mystical Body of Christ. So what is wrong with the
Church growing up?

The nine pontiffs of the present century have
defended frequent Confession against, you guessed it, critics among the clergy.

Let me quote the words of Pope Pius XII. The quotation is long, but I do not
hesitate saying it deserves to be memorized.

It is true that venial sins may be expiated in many ways that are to be highly
commended, but to ensure more rapid progress day by day in the practice of virtue
we want the pious practice of frequent Confession which was introduced into
the Church by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to be earnestly advocated.
By it genuine self-knowledge is increased, Christian humility grows, bad habits
are corrected, spiritual neglect and tepidity are resisted, the conscience is
purified, the will strengthened, a salutary self-control is attained, and grace
is increased in virtue of the sacrament itself. Let those, therefore, among
the younger clergy who make light of or lessen esteem for frequent Confession
know what they are doing. What they are doing is alien to the spirit of Christ
and disastrous for the Mystical Body of Christ.

Then came the Second Vatican Council with widespread liturgical changes that
are common knowledge. What may not be common knowledge, however, is that since
the Council, Pope Paul VI authorized one of the most eloquent pleas in papal
history for frequent reception of the sacrament of Penance. While recognizing
that the immediate purpose of the sacrament is to remit grave sins, the new
ritual emphasizes its salutary function also when mortal sins against God have
not been committed. Once again, I quote in full.

Frequent and reverent recourse to this sacrament, even when only venial sin
is in question, is of great value. Frequent confession is not mere ritual repetition,
nor is it merely a psychological exercise. Rather is it a constant effort to
bring to perfection the grace of our Baptism so that as we carry about in our
bodies the death of Jesus Christ who died, the life that Jesus Christ lives
may be more and more manifested in us. In such confessions penitents, while
indeed confessing venial sins, should be mainly concerned with becoming more
deeply conformed to Christ, and more submissive to the voice of the Spirit.

Pope John Paul II, in one document and speech after another, repeats the same
message. He dares to say that those who discourage going to Confession because
it produces a repressive mentality are lying. He tells the faithful to receive
this sacrament as often as possible. Why? Because by this sacrament, we are
renewed in fervor, strengthened in our resolutions, and supported by divine
encouragement. How we need to hear these words in an age when discouragement,
leading to despair, is almost the hallmark of the modern world.

Spiritual Value of Confession

Suppose we examine, and even number, the spiritual
benefits of frequent Confession as identified by the modern popes.

Self-Knowledge is Increased. How blind we are to our own failings and weaknesses. We are hawk-eyed
in seeing the faults of others, but stone blind when it comes to our own. There
is nothing in the world that we more need to grow in humility than to recognize
how stupid and helpless we are in the face of temptation. How desperately we
need Gods grace to see ourselves as we really are.

Bad Habits are Corrected. Another word for bad habits is vices. These bad habits are acquired
by the repetition of bad actions. We may have the habit of unkind words, or
of selfish behavior, which may have taken years to acquire. On the natural
level, it would take years to change these bad habits into the opposite virtues.
But with the grace of the sacrament of Confession, we can overcome these vices
in record time, beyond all human expectation.

Conscience is Purified. We do not commonly speak of purifying the conscience. But we should.
What is a pure conscience? A pure conscience is one that sees clearly, we may
say instinctively, what should be done in a given situation and how to do it.
The opposite of a pure conscience is a dull or insensitive conscience. People
will do all kinds of evil, commit every kind of sin, without even realizing
that they are doing wrong. The sacrament of Penance purifies our mind to recognize
Gods will in every circumstance of our lives, instantly and almost without
reflection. How? By the action of the Holy Spirit, whose gift of counsel enlightens
the mind to know exactly what the Lord wants us to do and how to do it the moment
we are faced with a moral decision.

The Will is Strengthened. We could spend not just a whole conference on this subject, but a semester
course on the value of what I call the sacrament of courage. Certainly, we
all have a free will. But our natural inclination is to do our own will, to
choose what we want and reject what we do not want. The very expression pro-choice
has become a synonym for the culture of death in our society. Christ told us
to love others as He has loved us, even to dying out of love for another person.
The world is now telling us in the laws of most nations to murder innocent unborn
children out of self-love.

Do we ever need to have
our wills strengthened to resist our love of self and submit these wills to
the will of God! I do not hesitate to say it is the single most desperate need
as we come to the close of the twentieth century. The self has been literally
deified. In one Western university after another, the philosophy of Immanuel
Kant is the staple diet of the academic curriculum. At the root of Kantian
morality is the principle of the autonomy of the will. My will is the basic
and final norm of my conduct.

Did we ask whether we
need the sacramental grace of Confession to strengthen our wills to submit to
the will of God? In our age of self-idolatry, this grace is indispensable,
dare I say, for the survival of Christianity.

Salutary Self-Control is Attained. A standard English dictionary
contains, by actual count, three hundred eighty terms beginning with the word
self. Among these are such terms as self-absorption, self-admiration, self-advancement,
self-applause, self-approbation, self-assertion, self-assurance, to mention
only the words with an a after the prefix self.

To its credit, the dictionary defines self-control
as restraint exercised over ones own impulses, emotions, or desires.

But everything depends on what we mean by restraint. All that we have so
far said about the spontaneous tendency we have to satisfy our own desires brings
out the importance of the Christian meaning of self-control.

Our faith tells us that we have a fallen human nature. Part of that nature
is the loss of the gift of integrity that our first parents possessed before
they had sinned. From the moment of our conception in our mothers womb, we
already have the spontaneous tendency to desire what is pleasant and to run
away from what is painful.

On these premises, self-control means the mastery of our impulses to conform
to the mind and will of the Creator. Not everything we want is pleasing to
Him, and not everything we dislike is contrary to His will. Self-control means
mastering our thoughts and desires to correspond to the infinite mind and will
of God.

That is why the Church, founded by the Incarnate God, is telling us to have
frequent access to what Christ has instituted in the sacrament of Confession.
We need the light which this sacrament assures us and the strength we so desperately
need to surrender our Selves to the almighty Self from whom we came and for
whom we were made.

We Become More Sinless. By the frequent and reverent reception of the sacrament of Penance, we
make more perfect the justification we first received in Baptism. What does
this mean? It means we become more and more sinless. Christ thereby exercises
His saving redemption on our souls by cleansing us more and more and thus preparing
us better and better for that kingdom of glory where nothing undefiled can enter
and where only the sinless have a claim to enjoy the vision of the All-holy
God. And who in his right mind would claim he or she is already sinless?

We Become More Conformed to Jesus Christ. We become more like
Jesus Christ in the power to practice the virtues that characterized His visible
life on earth. What virtues are they? We become more humble and better able
to conquer our foolish and stubborn pride. And the very humiliation of telling
our sins to another sinner is Gods way of telling us, If you confess, I will
make you more humble. We become more patient in bearing with pain and enduring
the people that God puts into our lives. Sometimes I think pain should have
a masculine and feminine gender. Most of our suffering, most of the difficulties
and problems and tribulations, that we have to endure on earth, if your lives
are like mine, come from other people. And of course, we pay them the favor
of being corresponding graces of tribulation in their lives. Through this sacrament
we become more conformed to Jesus by becoming more prayerful in greater awareness
of Gods majesty and, therefore, our need to pay attention to God, and in greater
awareness of our weakness and constant need for assistance from the Lord. This
is one place where Jesus did not have to pray to overcome His sinful
tendencies. Above all we become more loving in giving and giving and giving
ourselves according to the divine will even as Jesus kept giving Himself to
the will of His Father even to the last drop of His blood.

We Become More Submissive to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, dwelling in the depths
of our hearts, is always speaking to us, but we are not always listening to
Him. We are so busy with so many things, so preoccupied with ourselves, our
interests and concerns, that He is often not only the unseen but, I am afraid,
the unappreciated Guest in our souls. As John the Baptist said of the Savior
to his contemporaries, There is one in our midst whom we know not. And if
we are going to be submissive to this Spirit of God, the first condition is
that we are aware that there is a Spirit, that He has a voice and that He is
talking. You do not listen to silence. And this is divine speech.

The Spirit of God wants nothing more than for us to pay attention to Him.
Pay Him the courtesy, if you will, of recognizing that He is within us. The
Spirit of God wants us to thank Him for all the good things He has given us.
He wants us to keep asking Him. That is why He keeps creating problems. Those
are divine signals. Did you know that? They are divine shouts, Listen to
me. Thanks. Thanks for at least looking at me. And except for the pain or
sorrow or trial or temptation, knowing you, He tells us, you would not even
bother thinking of me. Thanks! Now that you are awake, listen! So we rub
our eyes and say, Yes, Lord.

But mainly the Holy Spirit wants us to be submissive to His will whether this
be obedience to His commands when He tells us, Do this, or Do not
do that, or when He gently invites us to do something more than we have
to under penalty of sin, when He just whispers, Would you mind doing this?
or Would you mind avoiding that? Not because you have to, but because
I would like you to show that you love me. All of this, and far more than
human speech can describe, is available to us, so the Church of God tells us,
by our frequent and reverent reception of the sacrament of Christs peace.

Psychological Value of Confession

Frequent Confession has not only deep spiritual value as
we have just seen. It is also immensely beneficial psychologically. In other
words, the frequent reception of the sacrament of Penance contributes to the
well-being of our mind. In one declarative sentence, it is a divinely instituted
means of giving us peace of soul.

Remember what happened on Easter Sunday night. As described
by St. Luke, The doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for
fear of the Jews. Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, Peace
be with you, and showed them His hands and His side. The disciples were filled
with joy when they saw the Lord, and He said to them again, Peace be with you.
As the Father sent me, so am I sending you. After saying this, He breathed
on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. For those whose sins you forgive,
they are forgiven; for those whose sins you retain, they are retained (Jn
20:19-23).

As the Catholic Church teaches, by these words of the risen
Savior, He instituted the sacrament of Confession. For twenty centuries, it
has been called the sacrament of peace.

The principal source of conflict in the human spirit is
the sense of guilt. Psychologists tell us, it is the mysterious feeling of
guilt which lies at the root of most peoples disquiet of mind and disturbance
of will. On both levels, the sacrament of Confession is the Lords great gift
to His followers.

Peace of mind is the experience of knowing the truth. We
all know that we are sinners. We also know that, as sinners, we have offended
God and become estranged from His love in the measure of our sins. How we need
the assurance, based on faith, that this offended God is still pleased with
us. When Christ tells us that there is greater joy in heaven over one sinner
doing penance than over ninety-nine who are just, He is speaking of us who have
deserved His rejection. The more often we receive His sacrament of mercy, the
more deeply we are at peace.

Peace of heart is the experience of doing the will of God.
There is no peace in doing what we want. I know whereof I speak when I say
that, doing ones own will is hell on earth. God wants us to enjoy peace of
heart. That is why He instituted the sacrament of Confession. The more frequently
we confess our failings, no matter how minor they may seem to be, the more deeply
peaceful we shall be. Why? Because if there is one thing that God wants us
to admit, and keep admitting, it is that we are sinners who trust in His loving
mercy.

There is some value in explaining what the Catholic Church
understands by guilt. Guilt is the loss of Gods grace. The more deeply we
have sinned, the more guilt we incur. That is what mortal sin means. It is
the supernatural death of the soul by the loss of sanctifying grace.

But all sin incurs guilt. Every sin we commit deprives
us of more or less of the grace of God. The subjective experience that is called
guilt is only the tip of an iceberg. Beneath the feeling of guilt is the objective
fact that we have been deprived, however minimally, of Gods friendship.

I like the statement of
St. Thomas Aquinas who says, The act of sin may pass, and yet the guilt remains.

The more frequently we receive the sacrament of Christs
mercy, the more grace is restored to our soul. We can experience the effect
by growing in that peace of soul for which there is no substitute this side
of heaven, realizing and not only knowing that, in spite of our sins, God loves
us with that special love He deserves for repentant sinners.