Confession: Announcing the novelty of the Gospel.

In George Orwell’s world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, “Newspeak” is the language of the totalitarian state Oceania, and was created to meet the ideological requirements of the ruling elites. Linguistically designed to limit freedom, it underpins a criminalisation of thought and contradiction of the prevailing orthodoxy. In this context one might imagine as “Newspeak” the pejorative use today of the word Christian.

In modern Australia powerful interests have been battling to exclude religious believers from public life. They attack as bigoted our Christian beliefs, and diminish as mere uninformed and out of touch opinion what we hold as Truth. Most recently in a quite extraordinary way they have turned their sights on the Confessional. As one Australian archbishop noted, “The government threatens religious freedom by appointing itself an expert on religious practices and by attempting to change the sacrament of confession while delivering no improvement in the safety of children.”

But this most precious sacrament is threatened today both by attack and perhaps more ashamedly on our part, by neglect. In the battle against evil, Pope Francis reminds us to be courageous and prepared to battle against evil and choose the good. Pope Benedict XVI identified confession and true conversion of people’s hearts as an authentic force for evangelisation. The forgiveness of sins has a direct impact on efforts to spread the Gospel, he explained, pointing out that only those “who allow themselves to be profoundly renewed by divine grace can internalize and therefore announce the novelty of the Gospel”.

In the administration of the Sacrament of Pardon and of Reconciliation, the priest — as the Catechism of the Catholic Church recalls — acts as “the sign and the instrument of God’s merciful love for the sinner” (n. 1465). In this way the Sacrament is especially a mystery of love, a work of the merciful love of the Lord. The Lord calls us to be reconciled to Him as the lover courts his beloved in earnest. As the perfect love he provides even the means and desire by which we may be reconciled. Let us pray for our confessors and encourage them by engaging in the Sacrament more religiously. And if “Christian” is to be a pejorative, may it not be so on our account. Rather let us allow ourselves to be profoundly renewed by the divine grace of the Sacrament to go out into a hostile world and radically announce the novelty of the Gospel.

Image: Rembrandt Harmensz. Van Rijn – The Return of the Prodigal Son – Detail Father Son (Creative Commons)

By Michael McKenna, immediate past Director of the Office of Liturgy