Reconciliation, or Confession?

If you have been following the articles I have been writing, you will recall that we have discussed several times over the last two months the phenomenon of the “unforgivable sin”, that loss of the sense of sin and the requirement of the Holy Spirit to re-introduce a sense of sin to the world, convincing it of sin and teaching man to call sin by its proper name.  It is no wonder, then, that Pope Pius XII lamented that the great sin is the loss of sense of sin.  We recall that Pope Saint John Paul II attested to this in Dominum et Vivificantem, claiming that every sin of modern man is, while distinct from that original sin of Adam, still an assent to the original motivation and inspiration for that sin, of trying to re-create reality in the likeness of Man and an attempt to live as if Man himself were in fact God.  But man is not left to wallow indefinitely in his sin, lost to himself and separated from God: the Holy Spirit inspires Man towards conversion, which in turn causes him to seek reconciliation with God and thereby retreat from the edge of the abyss that is the only thing Man is able to create for himself.

Man is most fully himself when he is oriented towards God, encountering Him in the specific ways which God manifests Himself to the human actor through the senses.  Our intellects and our wills, darkened and weakened respectively through original sin no longer easily see our path towards God and constantly veer away from Him, resulting in habits which do nothing but prolong our exile from grace.  Within the state of sin Man cannot find God and ultimately seeks to set himself up as a replacement of the God he can no longer find.  The longer he keeps himself away from God’s grace, the harder it is to remember what that grace looks like.  Man at this stage is in grave danger of forever losing the possibility of reuniting himself with God or ever seeking a reconciliation with his Father.

The word Reconciliation can sometimes be tricky for Roman Catholics, for without the proper context it is unclear if we are talking about the formal Sacrament called the Sacrament of Reconciliation, or if we are talking about the general re-unification or re-institution of a connection, bond, or relationship previously existing but has since been broken or separated by some event or another.  At this time, we are specifically talking about the concept of reconciliation in general as it relates to the bond between Man and God.  And reconciliation is only possible if a recollection of sin occurs within the heart of Man, a conversion which is a revolution within the soul to cease moving in one direction and become oriented towards the opposite, back towards God Himself.  Only then, when man is convinced of his own wrongdoing and of the reunion with God that he desperately needs and longs for, can he seek to rebind himself with God: “Reconciliation, therefore, in order to be complete necessarily requires liberation from sin, which is to be rejected in its deepest roots. Thus a close internal link unites conversion and reconciliation. It is impossible to split these two realities or to speak of one and say nothing of the other (John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, paragraph 4)”.

This intrinsic link between conversion and reconciliation is attested to within the Sacrament of Reconciliation, specifically in the Act of Contrition.  For the dispensed grace and forgiveness the Sacrament offers to be received by the penitent, a conversion and rejection of that sin is the required prerequisite: without the conversion there can truly be no reconciliation.  Through this Sacrament we attest to our own conversion, that we are convinced our sins are sins because they are an offense and disobedience to God, who is deserving of all our love.  Through our resolve to sin no more and to amend our ways, we open ourselves up to reconciliation, but only through removing ourselves from the source of sin in the first place.  And it is here that we see the profound appropriateness to refer to the Sacrament as Reconciliation as opposed to Confession: for the telos of this Sacrament is one of reconciliation between God and Man: the confession part of the Sacrament, physically manifest within the confessional must already be present and be a spiritual reality on the part of the penitent.  The conversion must precede the reconciliation, but it is the reconciliation which returns Man to the state of grace.