The Penitential Season

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 3/29/07)

Attending Mass early in Lent at a Roman church located just a five-minute stroll from St. Peter's, I noticed a priest sitting alone in a side chapel. Then I noticed something else. As Mass progressed, members of the congregation—an elderly man, a middle-aged woman, a teenage girl, maybe a half-dozen in all—approached the priest one by one, knelt down, and quietly went to confession.
Liturgical purists will rend their garments about that, and I guess they're right. But for me there was something deeply moving and pastorally fitting in this testimony that at least for some Catholics the sacrament of Penance remains a normal, natural part of their religious lives.
It hardly needs saying that today this isn't everywhere true. There's been a drastic decline in reception of this sacrament in the last 30 or 40 years. The question is—why?
You can see a hint of an answer, perhaps, in a Catholic News Service story noting the topics of some of this year's Lenten pastoral letters in the United States: "immigration reform, an end to the death penalty and helping children in need."
Immigration reform, ending the death penalty, and helping kids are good causes that I strongly support. Nor do I question a bishop's right to determine what needs saying in his diocese at any given time. The question I'm raising isn't the goodness of the causes or the rights of bishops. It's whether, generally speaking, it makes sense to focus the meaning of Lent issues like these.
Lent is a special occasion for penance in both its sacramental and general senses. Penance means sorrow and reparation for one's sins. Obviously there are many good ways to express sorrow and make reparation. But immigration reform—desirable though it is—seems a bit of a stretch. Work for it, certainly, but in Lent work especially to eradicate sin from your life.
While many factors account for the dropoff in receiving the sacrament of penance, a well-intentioned but misplaced emphasis—arguably, overemphasis—on social justice issues in place of sorrow for personal sin appears to be one. The two things, penance and justice, aren't in conflict. Rather, they mesh. And unless we get the penance part of the equation right, the justice part will be forever at risk.
Not to leave it at that, though—a goodly number of the 2007 crop of Lenten pastorals did get it right. I mean those that spoke about the reality of personal sin and our need to receive the sacrament of penance—the sacrament of confession and forgiveness of sins.
In Washington, D.C., and Rockville Centre, N.Y., for instance, bishops combined pastoral letters with special programs aimed at drawing Catholics back to the sacrament of reconciliation. Down in San Antonio, Archbishop Jose Gomez made it a point in his pastoral to stress the sacrament's importance for progress in the interior life.
Pope Benedict XVI chipped in, too, devoting a section of his splendid new eucharistic document, Sacramentum Caritatis (Sacrament of Charity), to the close link between Penance and the Eucharist. Catholics today, he wrote, inhabit a world "that tends to eliminate the sense of sin and to promote a superficial approach that overlooks the need to be in a state of grace in order to approach sacramental communion worthily."
"The loss of a consciousness of sin always entails a certain superficiality in the understanding of God's love," the pope added. Penance for sin puts things in their true perspective. There's no better time than Lent for doing exactly that.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

(c) Copyright 2007 by Arlington Catholic Herald