CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - In his Synonyma or On the Lamentations of a Sinful Soul (53), St. Isidore of Seville states: "Confession heals, confession justifies, confession grants pardon of sin.  All hope consists in confession.  In confession is found the place of mercy.  Believe, therefore, most certainly, and in no way hesitate, in no way doubt, and by no means despair of the mercy of God.  Have hope in confession, have faith in it.  Do not despair of this remedy of spiritual health.  And do not despair in your healing, so long as you desire to turn to better things."

Any Catholic's spiritual life will be peppered with confessions.  Perhaps the ordinary, routine confessions are the bread and butter of the Catholic sacramental life.  But there are always those extraordinary confessions that stick out in one's mind as times of the resolution of crises, or times of extraordinary grace, or times of just plain beauty.  These are times when, reflecting back, you see how beautiful is this gift that God has given to the Church to be exercised by the ministerial priesthood. 

I recall, for example, the many confessions of my youth--Oh! would my sins today be as jejune, mere peccadilloes, as those of my youth!--with the Passionist priests at the parish of Santa Eduvigis in Caracas, Venezuela, whose black habits were blazoned with an oversized patch of Christ's heart surmounted by a cross, bearing JESUS XPI PASSIO, mysterious words which deeply impressed me.  Because of the Venezuelan custom, these confessions were so Marian ab initio.

"Ave Maria Purísima," the priest would begin, "Hail Mary Most Pure," to the shudder of any Protestant (were he or she within earshot).  To which the penitent was supposed to reply, "Sin pecado concebida," of "Conceived without sin."  I hardly knew the meaning of the words at my age, but they were to remind the penitent of Mary, the Immaculate Conception, our nature's solitary boast, who was perfectly redeemed  by the very Jesus she brought forth into the world, and who therefore was (and is) channel of God's grace.

Then there was the dark period, the fall from grace, when I turned away from the faith of my youth and lived a life so very far from God.  Here, confession was absent from my life, and I went from sin to sin, and never from grace to grace.  And it took such a long time to climb out of the sloughs of despond, the tar pits of sin, into which I had descended.

But God was not so easily defeated.  Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.  (Rom. 5:20)  His grace slowly found holes in the darkness with which I had enveloped my soul, and gently yet inexorably brought me back to Christ first, and then to his Church and her Sacraments.  One such event occurred in that confession where I was refused absolution by Fr. Bourgeois, C.S.C., which was a cause that led me back to the Church, and of which I wrote about in an earlier article.

Eventually, I returned to the Catholic Church, and I had to face the unpleasant prospect of a general confession.  How can I forget my late-night, two-and-one-half-hour, face-to-face general confession with the ever-patient Fr. Joseph Nielson, O.C.D., who--God bless his weary soul--would from time to time nod to sleep and I therefore had from time-to-time to waken.  It took some time to confess all the sins--in both number and kind--that I had amassed for the thirteen years from my last confession at age 13.  Though I scoured my conscience in an examination of conscience before the confession, I am sure I missed some, and so gained comfort from that wonderful Mother Hubbard clause suggested by most practical manuals, "for these and all my sins, I ask God's forgiveness." 

(I ask my readers to pray for the soul of this marvelous priest, a pro-life champion if there ever was one, the only religious priest I have known who jogged in his brown Carmelite habit, and who, unbeknownst to me, died this last March in San Antonio, Texas.  It was through the ministry of this Carmelite friar and priest that I convalidated my marriage, and was received into the full communion of the Catholic Church.  R.I.P.)

I remember the confession at St. Jude's Chapel in downtown Dallas, Texas, where a Filipino priest was yelling at a penitent (a person of the streets), so loudly that it reverberated in the small chapel: "Don't ever think for a moment that there is a sin that God cannot forgive!  To say that there is a sin that God cannot forgive is to say that your sin is greater than God's mercy.  That would mean that you are greater than God!  You clearly are not greater than ...