The Sacrament of Mercy

If you ask a Protestant who has no more than the ordinary popular knowledge of the Catholic Church – ‘What are Catholics? What do they do?’ – he may very well answer the question something like this – ‘Oh yes, Catholics obey the Pope; they go to Mass; they’ve got a “thing” about meat on Fridays; they go to Confession. . . .’

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These four marks of the practice of the Catholic Faith would certainly never satisfy a theologian. Yet they are very likely what a Protestant would notice about us. And if you asked the same Protestant – ‘Are there any of these things that you would like to do?’ – in five cases out of ten he might say something like this – ‘I can’t see why the Pope should be so important; as for the Mass, no doubt it’s all right, but I could never believe that Christ is present in a piece of bread; and fish has never been my favourite meal – not even Bluff oysters. . . . But ah, Confession – I do honestly envy you that – it must be a great relief sometimes to get the whole tangle of this and that off your mind and put it in the hands of a priest. . . .’

The popular, perhaps even sentimental, Protestant view of a Catholic priest as a humane, generous, merciful figure, a friend of the human race, may embody a buried nostalgia for the Sacrament of Mercy itself. It is as if the ordinary Protestant felt that whatever good the Reformers had done, they did not do well in getting rid of the confessional and throwing Bill Smith or Mary Jones back on his or her real or imaginary private contact with God in the matter of the forgiveness of sins.

People are not too sanguine in their views of their own ability to develop a mature relationship with their Creator and Redeemer, involving an honest self-examination, a full contrition for their faults, and an absolution asked for and received without any visible sign whatever. I have heard that even those Greek Orthodox peasants who for various reasons do not make use of the Sacrament of Penance still feel the need to approach an actual ikon of Our Lady – the visible contact with the image of a person other than themselves is still necessary before they can feel certain they are forgiven. No doubt she does infallibly restore them to friendship with God, since she is herself the refuge of sinners. But I wish to examine, however imperfectly and unconventionally, not the local deviations of the faithful but the necessity and use of the Sacrament of Penance itself – which is equally the Sacrament of Mercy.

Let us suppose, by natural analogy, that a man has eaten food which disagrees with him. That excellent dish of canned sea food seemed well worth having at the time, even though he had been warned about it. But a few hours later he is doubled up in the grip of ptomaine poisoning. What does he want then? A kind word? A hand on the forehead? A selected repetition of the Psalms? No; he needs first of all to vomit.

I trust I will not be counted irreverent if I refer to the Sacrament of Penance, in one of its aspects, as the vomitorium provided by the Church. The delicate-minded man or woman may shy away from Confession, because they feel there is something gross about it – an exposure of private evils – something primitive, almost barbaric, something out of place in a smoothly hygienic age. Personally I am glad that I do not possess a delicate mind. If my soul has eaten bad food and wishes to vomit, I am grateful beyond measure page 371 that Christ through His Church has provided for precisely that eventuality, I cannot get to Confession fast enough.

Of course the biological analogy covers only one aspect of the Sacrament – the relief of suffering of the penitent – though I am inclined to think that this relief may have been what an infinitely merciful God had first in mind, rather than the rescuing of His own honour.

Perhaps I have an illogical approach to the matter, in mentally putting the Sacrament of Penance before the Mass, but it is fairly certain that for many of the faithful the Sacrament of Penance is a doorway to the Mass, and that without it they would be cut off from reception of Our Lord’s Body and Blood. Furthermore, God gives to each of us a particular emotional appreciation of particular aspects of the life of the Church; and in my own case it has always been in the Confession that I have personally encountered the Passion of Our Lord in a way that is absolutely real to my heart and imagination.

In public or private discussion of auricular Confession, it has seemed to me that not nearly enough stress is laid on the merciful meaning of the provision that a penitent need only possess attrition – a fear of Hell, or a predominantly selfish sorrow at the consequences of having broken God’s laws – in order to receive an effective absolution. This seems to me the crux of all the matter – that while by means of that inner and spiritual Confession of sins which many Protestants favour, a man can certainly receive God’s forgiveness if he is genuinely sorry for having offended a good and loving God, for us hoboes, poor men, reprobates, no-hopers, habitual criminals as it were, God has lowered the doorstep almost to nothing and asked only that we should have a supernatural sorrow for ourselves. It is as if He were determined that not one human creature should ever fail to obtain His forgiveness on account of congenital selfishness and spiritual incapability. To my mind, the fact that only attrition is necessary for a penitent to obtain an effective absolution from a priest is God’s great charter of rights for the moral deadbeats of this world – the furthest and perhaps the greatest reach of His salvific will – the most direct and visible fruit of His Passion. It should inspire in us a burning and everlasting gratitude.

As we know, the practical effects of the Sacrament can be enormous. With due respect to Protestant belief and practice, I often felt – in the days when I was myself a struggling Protestant – that all denominations outside the Visible Church implicitly require that one should already be a good man before one approaches God. There is an unwritten entrance ticket of at least minimal virtue. I remember the sense of despair that invaded me once, when an excellent Anglican clergyman said to me – ‘You know, Jim, it would be a good thing if you were a different kind of person – if you were just not the kind of person who did these kinds of things. . . .’

I thought – ‘Do you know who you’re dealing with – a constitutional psychopath who might take it into his head tomorrow to burn your house down! God help me, I am the kind of person I am. . . .’

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It is my strongly held opinion that, because of the institution by Our Lord of the Sacrament of Penance, a man does not require any virtue at all to be received into the Catholic Church, apart from the virtue of Faith which is itself a free gift from God.

The Church is sometimes regarded as a kind of rough, uncouth tavern or house of ill fame by the unperceptive Protestant.

‘Look,’ he may say, ‘I don’t want to sound harsh. But your Church has included some pretty peculiar specimens. Every second child-raper or murderer claims to be a Catholic. What does it mean? Surely a man has to be ethical as well as religious. . . .’

No, I think not, or at least not in the way the question would imply.

Hope of the hopeless, light of the blind, life of the dying mother of deadbeats and cripples closer to us than our own hearts – we can say to this Miracle, this Church of ours:

‘If I forget you, my Mother, may I forget my own existence, my reason for being alive! Yet if I did forget you, you would not forget me, but with all your vast love and patience you would try to restore me to life again – since you embody the infinite mercy of God and require of your members not virtue but simply the recognition that they are your naked children. . . .’

Do I speak like a Lutheran? I think not. With infinite care the Church does plant virtues in us and nourish them, but she does not require that we should come to her with an entrance ticket of virtue; and if we fall, she will never refuse to restore us. I have written, perhaps clumsily, about the Sacrament of Penance as it affects those who are frequently in a state of mortal sin. To appreciate the enormous power of the Sacrament, one has only to look outside the Church.

There people drown every day in puddles; they cut their throats on account of faults that we are able to get rid of, by the directly applied power of Christ’s Passion; they form attachments that exhaust and destroy them. Often hating the situation, they drag behind them an ever-lengthening chain of moral misfortune till at last they are stalled in their tracks.

The breakdown of marriages is perhaps the most obvious fruit of it. Let us suppose that a man or woman outside the Church has entered into an extra-marital liaison. He or she is probably aware of wrongdoing – it is naïve to underestimate the moral insights of the ordinary person who does not explicitly believe – but has nevertheless a sense of powerlessness. A discussion of the matter with the wronged spouse may only add petrol to a fire already blazing. There is a sense of dual obligation to the spouse and to the other person – for all judgments are subjective and coloured by immediate emotions. In particular, the act of adultery may be seen, from one angle, as a protest reaction against long-standing areas of humiliation in the marriage itself. In a fallen world it seems very doubtful to me that any marriage can continue page 373 without inflicting some deep humiliations on both partners. Even in our divorces there are no wholly innocent or wholly guilty parties. Yet adultery, which reasonable people should see as being quite often the equivalent of a shout of protest, is also a grave breach of the marital laws that Christ Himself codified. A wise priest would deplore the fault and show the utmost sympathy to the sinner, following Our Lord’s example regarding the woman who was to be stoned. But this supposes that the one who has broken the marital laws is able to go to Confession, or at least to seek counsel of a priest. What if he or she has no such tradition?

To whom shall this unfortunate turn for guidance, let alone absolution? To a God whom he or she may see only as a childhood memory? To other people whom he or she may be ashamed to approach, and who may in any case have conflicting advice to offer? The position is one of terrible solitude. And our society, so soft in principle, so harsh when its members have offended, stands only in what seems to be an attitude of rejection – ‘Well, you’re an adult. You’ve made your own bed. Now you’ll have to lie on it.’

In similar circumstances the position of a Catholic is quite different. If he or she has been thoroughly wise, they will have sought counsel from a priest as soon as the first signs of an illicit attachment showed themselves. But if they have been stubborn or foolish – still the counsel of a priest is available – Confession, absolution, practical advice, an objective view of a subjective situation – perhaps daily Confession for a week or a fortnight, painful to the soul, yet having the irresistible effect of a rope thrown from a tractor to a person being smothered in a bog. The gentleness of priests to people who are in this kind of moral dilemma is already well known to us – their blessed unshockability, their capacity to give encouragement. The Holy Spirit has begun to calm directly the troubled waters of the soul.

The spouse, however, may know nothing about this kind of interior struggle; and the penitent knows that in this regard he or she is safe, that the priest will never break the seal of Confession which is the Church’s maternal guarantee of the total privacy of the sinner. To a Protestant mind this might seem deceitful; but to the Catholic mind it is not so, since the Person primarily offended by sin is not another creature, however close that individual’s relation may be to the sinner, but God Himself, and the restoration of friendship with God comes prior to and in fact can usually bring about a restoration of suitable relationships with one’s fellows. In the event, without priestly help, one marriage has been destroyed, and another marriage, with priestly help, has been saved, and the difference lay essentially not in the virtue of the people concerned but in the availability of the Sacrament of Penance. Without the Sacrament of Penance we would drown in puddles. With the Sacrament we may learn to avoid the danger of drowning.

The Sacrament is essential for those in mortal sin. The Church teaches us that we would be grossly unwise, however, to neglect it simply because we do page 374 not sin mortally. The first time I went to a priest and said, ‘Father, I have no actual sins to confess. This may of course be because of my incapacity to see myself clearly. But I wish to receive the graces of the Sacrament. In the past I have committed . . .’. When I first did this, I thought I was in real danger of becoming a saint, which was mere nonsense since I had hardly begun to love God or my fellows at all.

But if I were to learn, where could I learn better than from the Sacrament which had already brought me out of the bog? It was not a ladder to be kicked away as soon as one had used it to climb out. It was equally a ladder for the Purgative and the Illuminative Way – first a ladder from sin to ordinary selfhood, then a ladder from selfhood to God. The Creator is economical in the means He gives us for use in our journey towards Him. The child, the old person, the peasant, the university professor, the moral hobo, the person who has acquired by God’s mercy the beginning of moral integration – all these can use with equal spiritual profit the great Sacrament of Penance and Mercy. To each it will mean something different. For each it is a new encounter with the mercy of Christ. There are people who have difficulty in persuading themselves that they have a real contribution. To them I can recommend what seems to me an infallible method of acquiring peace of soul on this issue. If I feel any such disturbance in myself, I pay a visit to the Blessed Virgin before going to Confession, and say, ‘Mother, give me a true and real contrition. . . .’ I cannot imagine that the Mother of God would deny to me or to any other believer a thing most necessary for our salvation. It is plain enough that contrition is not something which we ourselves personally invent, but itself a gift of the Holy Spirit – thus it is suitable to ask for this gift from the spouse and daughter of the Holy Spirit with an absolute confidence of receiving it. And thus one can go to Confession with a heart at peace.

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