|
 Confession,
the Sacrament of Divine Mercy
 By
Luiz Sergio Solimeo
To better understand the great spiritual
treasure contained in the Sacrament of Penance or Confession,
let us turn the clock back two thousand years to Palestine,
to a scene in the public life of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The majesty of His Person, the wisdom
pouring forth from His mouth and the power manifested by His
miracles attracted a multitude that followed Him everywhere.
Only God can forgive sins
One day, after curing the centurion’s
daughter as a reward for his faith, silencing the storm before
the fearful apostles, and expelling the demons in Gerasa,
he boarded Peter’s boat for Capharnaum.
Hearing that He was in a house in their city, the people
gathered in such numbers that the door of the house was obstructed.
But for faith there are no obstacles, so some charitable persons
carrying a paralytic, unable to enter by the door, climbed
to the roof and lowered the suffering man into the room, setting
him at Our Lord’s feet to be cured.
To everyone’s surprise, instead of simply performing
the expected miracle, Jesus said: “Courage, son, thy
sins are forgiven.”
This was something new. No prophet had dared pardon sins.
Not even John the Baptist, the greatest of all, had dared
so much, preaching only the baptism of penance for the forgiveness
of sins.1 Nevertheless, this new Prophet declared, “thy
sins are forgiven.”
The Pharisees, always looking for something with which to
be scandalized, despite the Master’s astounding miracles,
thought to themselves: “How does this man speak this
way? He is blaspheming. Who but God alone can forgive sins?”
Truly, only God can forgive sins. That is because sin is an
offense against the divine Majesty and only the object of
the offense can forgive the offender. No one can forgive an
offense done to another, above all when this Other is of a
superior nature, God Himself.
Still, the wisdom and the miracles showed that this Prophet
possessed powers that no other prophet before Him had possessed.
His was an unfathomable perfection. But the Pharisees had
hardened their hearts, and their understanding was clouded
by passion. Within themselves, they uttered the same accusation
that they were to renew at His passion: “He has blasphemed.”2
There was drama in the air. Everyone felt it. How would
Jesus react before that mute accusation and ill-disguised
surprise?
The answer came as a challenge. “Why are you thinking
such things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the
paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say,
‘Rise, pick up your mat, and walk’?”
As always, the Pharisees were speechless before the dilemma
offered them by the Rabbi.
In answer to their silence, Jesus said: “But that you
may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive
sins,” He said to the paralytic, “I say to you,
arise, pick up your mat, and go home.”
“And immediately,” writes Saint Mark, the paralytic
“rose, picked up his mat, and went away in the sight
of everyone. They were all astounded and glorified God, saying,
‘We have never seen anything like this.’”3
The miracle performed by Our Lord on this occasion had an
apologetic value. As Saint John Chrysostom explains, Jesus
proved His divinity by a triple miracle: “First, declaring
openly their secret thoughts and murmurs against Him; second,
healing the paralytic, third, performing the miracle with
this end in view, that, by it, He might show that He had the
power to forgive sins.”4
Our Lord gave the Apostles the power
to forgive sins
Here we have the explanation for Confession.
As Jesus proved that He was God by means of an astounding
miracle, He also proved that He could forgive sins. And, as
God, He has not only the power to forgive sins but has also
the power to confer this faculty on others.
Furthermore, as Jesus is the only
priest of the new Law, the mediator between God and men, a
simple “delegation” of the power to forgive sins
would still not be enough. It was necessary that Christ unite
His Eternal Priesthood to that of those that would continue
His work on earth after His ascension into Heaven.5 For this
reason, He instituted the ministerial priest as the visible
instrument of His action.6
The power to forgive sins was bestowed on the Apostles on
the evening of the day Our Lord resurrected from the dead
and mysteriously appeared amidst the Apostles gathered in
the cenacle behind locked doors.
Saint John narrates:
Now when it was late that same day, the first of the week,
and the doors were shut, where the disciples were gathered
together, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the
midst and said to them, “Peace be to you.”
When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side.
The disciples therefore were glad, when they saw the Lord.
He said therefore to them again, “Peace be to you. As
the Father hath sent me, I also send you.”
When He had said this, He breathed on them and He said to
them, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall
forgive they are forgiven them, and whose sins you shall retain
they are retained.”7
The power to judge and to forgive
It is clear in the narrative above
that Our Lord instituted not only the Sacrament of Penance,
but also the mode in which it must be practiced. On declaring
that the sins that a priest forgives are forgiven and those
that he retains are retained, He is signifying that, before
forgiving, the priest must become acquainted with the sins
as well as with the dispositions of the sinner. Only then
will he be in a position to judge if there are conditions
for forgiveness or not.
Thus, in the tribunal of Confession,
as in any other tribunal, it is necessary that there be an
accused, an accuser, and a judge. In Confession, the role
of accuser is exercised by the penitent who accuses himself
to the priest of the sins he has committed; hence the necessity
of oral confession.8 The judge is the priest.
The absolute necessity for secrecy
in Confession
Our Lord, having established the Sacrament
of Penance and the need for the penitent to declare his sins
to the priest, also established the secrecy of Confession.
If secrecy were not obligatory, Confession would be odious
if not impossible. This would render the sacrament ineffective,
which is absurd.
Therefore, the secrecy of Confession
is a divinely instituted right and cannot be abolished by
any earthly authority. Any attempt in this respect is in direct
opposition to God’s will.
Besides being a divine right, this
obligation of secrecy was also established by ecclesiastical
law, which always imposed the severest penalty for its infraction.9
Current legislation continues to maintain the same, declaring
that any confessor who violates the secrecy of Confession
is automatically excommunicated and can only be absolved by
the Holy See.10
Is it not too humiliating to confess
to another man?
Is it not too humiliating to have to
submit to another man, himself a sinner, at times possibly
even a greater sinner than the one confessing his sins?
If we truly realized the scope of
God’s infinite grandeur and majesty and His immense perfection,
we would be much more ashamed of telling our sins to Him (as
if He did not already know them,) than to a man. The more
perfect is the creature we address, the more miserable we
appear and the more evident is the contrast between perfection
and sin.
That is why theologians say that when
a person dies in the terrible state of mortal sin and appears
at his private judgment before the unspeakable perfection
of God, he flees from God and hurls himself in Hell to hide
his shame.
Thus if we analyze this well, this
very humiliation of having to confess our sins to another
man is a mercy of God. How much more humiliating it would
be to kneel before the Divine Master Himself and tell Him
all our sins! What is the humiliation before a man compared
to the humiliation of recounting our sins before the infinite
perfection of God?
In any case, this is the form in which
Our Lord instituted the Sacrament of Confession, so we should
submit in a spirit of obedience and love. In His infinite
wisdom, He does everything to perfection. When men try to
modify what He instituted, the result can only be deplorable.
The prideful attitude of saying, “I
confess directly to God,” is almost the same as saying:
“I am so perfect that I go directly to God Himself. I
have no need of those crutches that are the Sacraments, the
advice or the help of other men.”
The priest is “taken from among
men and made their representative before God to offer gifts
and sacrifices for sins.”11 An angel cannot be a mediator.
To refuse thus the mediation of another man is to refuse the
priesthood, because the priest, while a mediator, has to be
of the same nature as those for whom he mediates. That is
why Our Lord, the Supreme Priest, became flesh and took our
nature onto Himself, as Saint Paul says: “For we do not
have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,
but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without
sin.”12
But can a sinner forgive sins?
To a priest applies, even more than
to the common faithful, the general convocation to sanctity
of Our Lord when he said: “So be perfect as your heavenly
Father is perfect.”13 But a priest is also subject to
temptation and can not only sin but be, in certain cases,
a sinner. Nevertheless, even when he sins, he does not forfeit
the power that comes to him from the Sacrament of Holy Orders.
This was the objection raised at the
beginning of the Church by the Donatist heretics as a result
of a misunderstanding of the doctrine on the sacraments. But
Saint Augustine made it very clear to these same heretics
that the power of the sacraments does not come from the sanctity
of its ministers but from the infinite sanctity and perfection
of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
I have no sins to confess…
Many people feel no need to go to Confession,
thinking that they have no sins. They should consider what
Scriptures says: “For the just man falls seven times.”14
“Yet there is no man on earth so just as to do good and
never sin.”15 “If we say, ‘we have not sinned,’
we make Him [God] a liar, and His word is not in us.”16
In these times of extreme corruption,
let us avail ourselves of this instrument of divine mercy
that is Confession. Let us carefully examine our consciences
and with the firm resolution of turning away from sin, confess
our failings to the priest.
For this small effort, this small humiliation, the reward
is immense. Our soul is washed clean, our sins are forgiven,
and we return to God’s friendship. As the Psalmist says:
“cleanse me with hyssop, that I may be pure; wash me,
make me whiter than snow.”17
|
