"RIVER OF MERCY"
Pastoral Letter by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap.
Part Two
III. THE URGENCY OF RECONCILIATION
"Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: Though
your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though
they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool" (Is
1:18).
15. The first words of Jesus' public ministry provide the key to
His entire mission: "The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of
God is at hand: Repent, and believe in the Gospel" (Mk 1:15).
Repent and believe in the Gospel, the "good news" of
salvation. Even as right conscience makes us aware of the
sins which separate us from God, Jesus the Redeemer
comes to restore our dignity; reconcile us with His Father;
and offer us the means — repentance — to turn away from
sin and accept the free gift of salvation. In every sense,
repentance is the gateway to joy, including the joy of the
Great Jubilee, just as, through his repentance, the Prodigal
Son was welcomed home to his father's love and forgiveness
in a feast of reconciliation (Lk 15:11-24).
16. Jesus reconciled humanity to the Father through His life,
sacrificial death on the cross, and resurrection. So too the
Church, in "intimate connection with Christ's mission, [has as
her central task that of] reconciling people: with God, with
themselves, with neighbor, with the whole of creation" (RP,
8). Moreover, to "evoke conversion and penance in man's
heart and to offer him the gift of reconciliation is the specific
mission of the Church as she continues the work of her
divine Founder" (RP, 23).
17. The Church carries out her mission of reconciliation in
various ways, but first among them in the life of the Catholic
faithful is the sacrament which Jesus instituted exactly for this
purpose: the Sacrament of Reconciliation, also known as
Penance. Since the Second Vatican Council, many Catholics
have unfortunately neglected the practice of personal
confession to a priest. In doing so, they've robbed
themselves of a tremendous source of consolation. I strongly
encourage all Catholics of the archdiocese to return to
personal confession on a regular basis as a vital part of their
preparation for the Great Jubilee. I ask parents to draw their
children into this sacrament by word and example. I ask my
brother priests, where the demands of their ministry allow, to
extend the hours of confession in their parishes and to make
available more communal celebrations of the sacrament,
with private confession included, as part of their planning for
the Jubilee. Finally, I ask parish and Catholic school
catechists to emphasize the Sacrament of Penance as an
experience of pardon and peace; cleansing and healing;
honesty and restoration; weakness and strength; guidance
and correction; judgment and penance; conversion and joy. In
a very real sense, Penance is the sacrament of conscience,
because the sins we confess are those disclosed by a
careful examination of the secret sanctuary of the heart.
18. The Sacrament of Penance can be intensely fruitful
because it is intensely intimate and private: The penitent
admits his sins with a contrite heart, confessing them to
Christ in the person of the priest, who is bound to absolute
secrecy by the sacramental seal. Yet it is also expansive in its
scope. Not only is the sinner reconciled to God; he is
reconciled to the Church and all her members. In this, we
better understand the banquet given by the father of the
Prodigal Son: Not only do the father and son rejoice, but all
those invited to the banquet share their joy. Moreover,
Penance, the sacrament of mercy, enables us to become
more merciful ourselves, and disposes us to more deeply
celebrate the Eucharist as a foretaste of Heaven.
19. The question sometimes arises: Why do we need to
confess our sins to a priest? Why not seek forgiveness in
private prayer before the Lord? The answer is that, while
private contrition before God is always a crucial first step,
Jesus Himself established Penance as the ordinary means of
a sinner's forgiveness. As we've already seen, the rupture
caused by sin is not just vertical, between child and Father,
but also horizontal, among brothers and sisters. All sin has a
social dimension. In Penance, the priest not only acts in
persona Christi ("in the person of Christ"), forgiving sins
through the unique authority Jesus Himself invested in the
priesthood through His apostles (Jn 20:22; Mt 18:18), but he
also takes part in the reconciliation as a representative of the
ecclesial community. Finally, on a very satisfying human level,
the things we speak out loud to another person have a finality
and personal commitment which thoughts rarely do.
20. Another question involves the spirit best suited to
receiving this sacrament. Here we can return to the example
of Advent. Properly lived, Advent involves emptying ourselves
precisely of our selves - removing our selves from the altars
of our own hearts, the better to prepare our hearts as
mangers to receive the poverty of Jesus. In like manner,
Penance involves emptying ourselves of our sins, which are
an expression of our selfishness, in order to be filled with
new life in Christ. A good confession should therefore be
honest and thorough; it should follow some period of mature
self-examination where we ask God for an accurate
knowledge of our sins; it should seek God's grace in humility;
it should be clear, concise and to the point; it should trust in
God's forgiveness; and it should bear fruit in conversion and
tangible acts of charity.
21. Regarding the examination of conscience, the Holy Father
reminds us that it "must never be one of anxious
psychological introspection, but a sincere and calm
comparison with the moral law, with the evangelical norms
proposed by the Church, with Jesus Christ Himself who is
our teacher and model of life, and with the heavenly Father,
who calls us to goodness and life" (RP, 31:III). Penance will
often involve elements of spiritual direction and personal
counseling, but it is a substitute for neither. The Sacrament of
Penance exists as a tribunal of mercy and a place of spiritual
healing; its purpose is to restore the sinner to freedom from
his or her sins, and to set the sinner on a new path of
conversion. In that light, scrupulosity and a mechanical resort
to the sacrament are not signs of grace, but rather the
opposite. They imply a fear of a wrathful God, distrust of His
forgiveness and even a kind of narcissism. They are simply
the negative image of the other primary sin against the
sacrament, which is laxity.
22. The healthy conscience neither withholds indictment
where real sin exists, nor indicts where there is no sin. What
brings balance to our lives in Christ, is love. The key to right
conscience, to repentance, to conversion and to
reconciliation — in fact, the key to understanding and
celebrating the Great Jubilee — is an overriding trust in God
and His love for us, which is greater than the greatest sin and
stronger than death.
IV. IV. LIVING THE GREAT JUBILEE
"Oh God, thou art my God, I seek thee, my soul thirsts for
thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land
where no water is" (Psalms 63:1).
23. Each of us is born with a yearning in our souls for
"something more." We have a natural longing for happiness,
but we cannot be happy alone. We were made for
wholeness, for fraternity with one another, and for
communion with our Creator. This is what Augustine means
in his words from the Confessions: "Our hearts are restless,
[God,] until they rest in thee." This reminds us of the second,
and even more important, task of conscience. John the
Baptizer not only cried out against the iniquity of Israel; he
also pointed toward her Deliverer: "Behold the Lamb of God,
who takes away the sin of the world!" (Jn 1:29). In like
manner, a right conscience not only alerts us to what is
wrong in our actions, but also urges us toward the One who
is beautiful, life-giving and true. Like Augustine, our hearts
are restless, and like the psalmist, our souls are thirsty, for
the abundant life which only reconciliation with God through
Jesus Christ can bring.
24. In his 1994 apostolic letter, "As the Third Millennium Draws
Near" (Tertio Millennio Adveniente), John Paul II defines "the
joy of every Jubilee" — but especially the Great Jubilee of the
Year 2000 — as "above all a joy based upon the forgiveness
of sins, the joy of conversion" (32). And elsewhere in the
same document, he notes that "preparing for the Year 2000
has become . . . a key of my pontificate" (23).
25. The importance of the Great Jubilee is this: It is a
countersign to the sinfulness of our age. We live at a pivotal
moment in history, a time of unsurpassed achievement and
unsurpassed inhumanity. We're closing a century which has
served as a great battleground between the "culture of life"
and the "culture of death." Around the world, humanity
struggles for freedom and dignity. At the same time, it
methodically creates the instruments of its own destruction.
In contrast to this culture of death, the Great Jubilee calls us
to turn again to God's Son; and it lifts up His cross so that we
might see and believe in our salvation — "Behold the Lamb
of God who takes away the sin of the world!"
26. Our role in this drama is simple, but crucial. The future is
not determined; we co-author it with God. As John Paul II
observes, ". . . sin, in the proper sense, is always a personal
act, since it is an act of freedom on the part of an individual
person, and not properly of a group or community" (RP, 16.).
In a similar way, the choice to be virtuous is also a personal
act. Each of us has free will. We are each a seed planted by
the Sower to bring forth justice and reconciliation, through the
power of the cross of Christ, by our personal actions and the
witness of our lives. We are each — and especially together
— the Gospel leaven which can begin to change the "culture
of death" from within.
27. In the light of the Great Jubilee, says the Holy Father, "the
whole of Christian history appears to us as a single river into
which many tributaries pour their waters. The Year 2000
invites us to gather with renewed fidelity and ever deeper
communion along the banks of this great river: the river of
Revelation, of Christianity and the Church, a river which flows
through human history starting from the event which took
place at Nazareth and then at Bethlehem 2,000 years ago.
This is truly the 'river' with which its 'streams,' in the
expression of the Psalm, 'makes glad the city of God' (46:4)"
(TMA, 25).
28. I began these pastoral reflections by asking: How do we
lay claim to an "Advent joy" that seems so often contradicted
by the sorrows and confusions of daily life? We know the
answer now: by drinking from that river of mercy which is
God's free gift of love and forgiveness in Jesus Christ; and
bringing that same love, that same forgiveness, to others. In
the desert of our sometimes sinful hearts, in the desert of our
often sinful world, this river of God's mercy is the river which
brings life.
|