Bishop: Sacrament also helps people grow in holiness

By Margaret M. Russell

Penance has gone off the spiritual radar screen of many Catholics. A study cited in Bishop McManus’ pastoral letter of two weeks ago says 45 percent of church-going Catholics have not ever, or rarely, availed themselves of the sacrament.

“This is a pastoral crisis,” Bishop McManus says.

“Penance is not something peripheral to the Catholic life, like the blessing of throats or wearing a scapular. Those are wonderful things, but penance is a sacrament.” A sacrament, he says, that affects a person’s eternal life.

“And for it to have just dropped out of the regular practice of Catholics is mind-boggling.”

There were generations of Catholics who would not think of going to Communion without first going to confession, he said. But today, with the confessionals mostly quiet, everybody marches up for Communion.

There is a failure in the contemporary Catholic understanding of what the sacrament is, he says. “Come Home to God’s Mercy,” the diocesan initiative on penance, hopes to address some of those misunderstandings and be part of a new evangelization reintroducing people to the beauty of the sacrament.

“The sacraments have been given to the Church by Christ so that we can grow in holiness of life. We have to realize we cannot live the Christian life - the way God wants us to live and as the Scriptures direct us to live - we cannot do that on our own. Every person needs the grace of God to deal with the challenges in his or her life,” he said.
And some of our lives are messy.

“We live in a culture where there are so many broken relationships,” Bishop McManus said. Penance is a sacrament of healing and, on many levels, our lives need to be healed, he said.

“We live in a society that’s very, very restless. And part of that restlessness is that we do not have our relationship with God, ourselves and others in right perspective. That is what the sacrament of penance helps us to do.”

“When those relationships get out of kilter, when they get distorted, or, God forbid, when they get broken, here we have a gift that Christ has given to his Church in the sacrament of penance to heal that. And, where it’s not broken, strengthen us,” he said.

He wonders why more people don’t seek out the sacrament. “If we believe that every time we celebrate a sacrament we encounter Christ and receive a sacramental grace to help us live a Christian life, if that is true, and knowing that the sacrament of penance is a sacrament and therefore an occasion for grace, why would I not avail myself of another gift of the Church in order to strengthen my relationship to Christ and the Church?”

The bishop referred to a quote from St. John the Evangelist cited in his pastoral letter: “If we say, 'We are without sin,' we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us,” to bring home his point that all people sin and need forgiveness.

“To say that we do not have sin and therefore we do not need to be forgiven is to make a mockery of the cross. The cross in the Catholic Church is a reminder that it is the cross of our salvation. And as St. Paul says, Christ took our sins and nailed them to the cross so that we’d be free,” the bishop said. “This is fundamental Christianity. And for this whole aspect of the Christian life to be jettisoned ... that’s a pastoral crisis.”