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Reconciliation
Weekly Confessions heard before The 4PM Vigil Mass
Saturdays from 3-3:30pm -
What If I Can’t Go To Confession?
As Catholic Christians, one of the great gifts we have is turning our sins over to God through the ministry of our priests, who carry on the work of mercy and forgiveness founded in Christ Jesus. This sacramental encounter with our loving Lord is vitally important to both growing in holiness and being freed for salvation, so that we come to fully reconciled communion with the Trinity and one another in the undying splendor of the new creation.
Though it is still possible to go to Confession to one of our priests, for some the present conditions may truly prevent them from celebrating this healing sacrament. What if this happens? Both our Bishop and the Pope have spoken to this situation, echoing the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Where the individual faithful find themselves in the painful impossibility of receiving sacramental absolution, it should be remembered that perfect contrition, coming from the love God . . . expressed by a sincere request for forgiveness and accompanied by the firm resolution to have recourse, as soon as possible, to sacramental confession, obtains forgiveness of sins, even mortal ones.”
Thus, although we should seek sacramental confession whenever it becomes possible for us, it is good in the interim to express our sins and failures to our Heavenly Father, who hears in mercy and offers us pardon and peace.
Click Here for USCCB Examinations of Conscience
Act of Contrition
O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishments, 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 sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin. -
Why We Confess
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Confession is a Place of Victory
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Only God forgives sins. Since he is the Son of God, Jesus says of himself, "The Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins" and exercises this divine power: "Your sins are forgiven." Further, by virtue of his divine authority he gives this power to his representatives to exercise in his name.
During his public life, Jesus not only forgave sins, but also made plain the effect of this forgiveness: he reintegrated forgiven sinners into the community of the People of God from which sin had alienated or even excluded them. A remarkable sign of this is the fact that Jesus receives sinners at his table, a gesture that expresses in an astonishing way both God's forgiveness and the return to the bosom of the People of God.
In imparting to his apostles his own power to forgive sins the Lord also gives them the authority to reconcile sinners with the Church. This ecclesial dimension of their task is expressed most notably in Christ's solemn words to Simon Peter: "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." "The office of binding and loosing which was given to Peter was also assigned to the college of the apostles united to its head." (Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), Nos. 1441-1444)
The confession (or disclosure) of sins, even from a simply human point of view, frees us and facilitates our reconciliation with others. Through such an admission man looks squarely at the sins he is guilty of, takes responsibility for them, and thereby opens himself again to God and to the communion of the Church in order to make a new future possible.
Confession to a priest is an essential part of the sacrament of Penance: "All mortal sins of which penitents after a diligent self-examination are conscious must be recounted by them in confession, even if they are most secret and have been committed against the last two precepts of the Decalogue; for these sins sometimes wound the soul more grievously and are more dangerous than those which are committed openly." When Christ's faithful strive to confess all the sins that they can remember, they undoubtedly place all of them before the divine mercy for pardon. But those who fail to do so and knowingly withhold some, place nothing before the divine goodness for remission through the mediation of the priest, "for if the sick person is too ashamed to show his wound to the doctor, the medicine cannot heal what it does not know." (CCC 1455-1456)
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