Project Rachel also offers an extensive retreat program, including retreats during Lent.ĭo I have to go to Confession before receiving Holy Communion like everyone did years ago when I was a child? Cardinal Seán O’Malley has granted these faculties to all priests in the Archdiocese of Boston.) The Project Rachel website contains testimonials from dozens of women who have found reconciliation and healing through Project Rachel and some very moving comments about the Sacrament. (Priests must be given faculties explicitly by their bishop to absolve the sin of abortion. If you would prefer to confess to a priest who has experience ministering to women who have abortions, please contact Project Rachel (508.651.3100, and they will put you in touch with such a priest. The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation." Come, begin the process of healing. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong, but do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Yes! Pope John Paul II once wrote to women in your situation, “The Church is aware of the many factors that may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. I know mortal sins must be confessed, but should I also confess the venial sins I’m aware of? That’s what the Church continues through preaching the need for repentance and making Jesus’ mercy available through the Sacrament of Penance. After his resurrection, not only did Jesus give the apostles the ability to forgive sins in his name but commanded them to preach “repentance and forgiveness of sins” to all nations (Jn 20:21-23 Lk 24:47). On the Cross, as he prepared to die to take away our sins, Jesus’ salvific words were, first for sinners in general, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” and then for one sinner, the Good Thief, in particular (Lk 23:34,43). He taught us to pray to the Father to forgive us our sins and to bring us to forgive the relatively smaller debts of those who sin against us (Mt 6:12 18:21-35). #Confessions part ii phone call how toHe taught us how to be brutal toward sin, instructing us in the Sermon on the Mount us that it would be better to rip out our eyes or cut off our hands if they were leading us to sin than to do nothing and lose our bodies and souls forever in Hell (Mt 5:29-30). He preached on God’s desire to reconcile us with the beautiful images of the lost sheep, lost coin and lost son (Lk 15). He healed the sins of the paralyzed man and of the woman caught in adultery (Mk 2:5 Jn 8:11). His first public words were “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mt 4:17). Jesus is the Lamb of God who came to take away the sins of the world (Jn 1:29). Why do people vary in calling it the Sacrament of Penance, Confession or Reconciliation? In its main lines this is the form of penance that the Church has practiced down to our day” (CCC 1447). It allowed the forgiveness of grave sins and venial sins to be integrated into one sacramental celebration. This new practice envisioned the possibility of repetition and so opened the way to a regular frequenting of this sacrament. From that time on, the sacrament has been performed in secret between penitent and priest. During the seventh century Irish missionaries, inspired by the Eastern monastic tradition, took to continental Europe the ‘private’ practice of penance, which does not require public and prolonged completion of penitential works before reconciliation with the Church. To this ‘order of penitents’ (which concerned only certain grave sins), one was only rarely admitted and in certain regions only once in a lifetime. During the first centuries the reconciliation of Christians who had committed particularly grave sins after their Baptism (for example, idolatry, murder, or adultery) was tied to a very rigorous discipline, according to which penitents had to do public penance for their sins, often for years, before receiving reconciliation. The Catechism succinctly teaches, “Over the centuries the concrete form in which the Church has exercised this power received from the Lord has varied considerably.
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