Confession for the Priest
Second Meditation - Evils Arising from the Priest's Neglect of Confession
I. If there is ever a priest who goes for weeks and months and possibly years without confessing his sins, without purifying his soul from stain in the Blood of the Lamb shed unto the remission of sin, how can this priest hope to escape the indictment of being a man devoid of piety or moral rectitude, of being downright wicked, dishonest, and dissolute?
Having fled from the Sacrament of Penance, how many weeks, how many months would he go through without profaning with detestable sacrilege not only as many Sacraments as he administers but the very Body and Blood of the Eternal Word in the Sacrifice of the Mass? How long could he hope by his own unaided efforts to remain free of grave sin?
When a priest reaches the stage of venturing with supreme audacity to eat and drink unworthily of Christ's Body and Blood by celebrating Mass sacrilegiously, when a priest tramples on the very Person of Christ, what else is there for him to respect? Christ's commands? Are they of greater value than Christ in Person?
One may gather a priori that such a priest will contemn and walk over with equal audacity as many commandments (and they will be more than one) as come in the way of his unleashed passions; abandoned by God, he will treat God's laws with at least as little respect as he treated the Divine Person, the God of God.
What qualms of conscience will refrain him from brushing aside the laws of justice when it comes to administering or exacting goods that do not belong to him? How lightly he will tear to tatters those bonds wherewith the fear of God and his own solemn priestly promise sought to curb the wild lustings of the flesh!
Once the hope of eternal reward begins to evaporate, or nearly so, due to his habitual state of mortal sin, what depths of crime will he not plunge into?
II. And each time farther and farther away from confession, he will perhaps begin to hate this last remedy like a bad dream; he will turn away indefinitely from all examination of his own interior; he will become estranged to himself, and by dint of refusing to listen to the appeals of his conscience, by sheer deliberate distraction in order to silence its importunate warnings, his conscience - the echo of God's Voice - will gradually lose pitch, will muffle and extinguish its jarring inflexions, and making common cause with the inadvertence and the crass ignorance of an intelligence which allowed years to elapse without revising its distasteful obligations, his conscience will finally drop off to sleep, losing all sensitiveness and delicate awareness in order to sink lower and lower into the most abominable excesses without noticing them and with such a hardness of heart that the most terrible admonitions of Divine Justice will be powerless to soften; and then will be fulfilled in that priest the fearful words of Isaias, transcribed by the four Evangelists:
"Go then. . . and give a message to this people of mine: Listen as you will, but ever without understanding: watch all, and nothing perceive!This is the foreshadowing of the just judgements of God against those who have spent their life's energies fighting and resisting the Holy Spirit.
"Thy office is to dull the hearts of this people of mine, deaden their ears, dazzle their eyes, so that they cannot see with those eyes, hear with those ears, understand with that heart, and turn back to me, and win healing." (Is. vi, 9-10.)
Would to God such fearful lines were written only in the pages of Sacred Scripture! Would to God they were not engraved indelibly in more than one priestly heart lost beyond recovery and sealed with the death of the sinner! This, in the last resort, is the fate of the priest who fled from Sacramental Confession; this is the history of the impenitence of weeks and months and years issuing with relentless logic into an impenitence final and everlasting.
III. A priest of the type described above, being insensitive to his own sad condition, will show a much greater indifference towards the spiritual evils of his neighbour, even of those souls whom he is bound by duty of justice to lead to salvation. He will obstinately refuse to sit down and hear confessions - he does not go to confession himself; and well may the Church appeal to him and command him in every pitch and key to draw souls to the Sacraments, he just turns a deaf ear: all her admonitions and precepts are dismissed as a piece of play-acting, as narrow-minded fads and pietistic extravagances.
That, O God, that is the reason for those Catholic churches and chapels where the confessional is a mere ornament gathering dust and cob-webs and mouldering away, where the Tabernacle is well-nigh superfluous and the altar-rails remain unused by the parishioners, who take it as the natural thing to go from one year's end to the other without receiving the Bread of Life, except during the period of Easter duties.
And when that day arrives the indolent pastor will condescend, with no little reluctance and hurriedness, to sit down and hear his peoples' confessions with all the rush and fury of a hurricane, and without having gone to the trouble of preparing or instructing them in advance; and once the hurricane of confessions and the tornado of communions have blown over, again the Tabernacle doors are closed and the confessional is relegated to oblivion until the following year, to the great relief and rejoicing of both shepherd and flock. . . .
And God forbid that the only person in the parish who has not fulfilled the Paschal precept be the priest, the confessor himself!
O Jesus, let there not be a single case of this; let this dark picture exist only in the writer's imagination, the outlet of his irrational pessimism and of his ill-founded fears; no, never, never an appalling reality!
Resolutions
1. My first resolution is to confess my sins every week, as so many other people do who are not priests, and to confess as often as I need to in order to celebrate Mass worthily and administer the Sacraments in the state of grace. And this resolution is based on the following convictions: a proper and frequent reception of the Sacrament of Penance is sufficient to preserve a priest within the terms of honourableness and virtue befitting his priestly state, or to recall him if he has fallen away; not a few of the abuses and weaknesses and scandals among the clergy are directly the outcome of their neglecting this efficacious Sacrament; in spite of my inherent frailties, I know that frequent and fervent confession will keep me in the state of grace; my own experience has borne out the experience of others, namely, that nearly every virtue of Christian souls is rooted in them through this Sacrament. Therefore, to keep my resolution of frequent confession I shall crash my way through all difficulties.
2. Out of gratitude for the ineffable benefits God has bestowed and will continue to bestow upon me, in His loving Mercy, through this Divine Sacrament of Penance, I am resolved to hold this ministerial duty of mine in the highest esteem, as being my noblest occupation and the task most profitable to my neighbour; and in spite of fatigue and annoyances that accompany the hearing of confessions I shall devote myself to it with all my heart and as often as I am permitted to do so; in order that God's other children may not be deprived of what I, unworthy sinner, can obtain for myself with such great ease and comfort to my soul.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.
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Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!
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