Would I be insinuating something if I gave a copy to my priest?

I hope one of the areas that was stressed in the book, was to give a sermon on the Precept of the Catholic Church which calls for the sacrament of Reconciliation and reception of the Eucharist at least once a year. The other point a priest should make in a sermon is this: How can I spend only 15-30 minutes in the confessional each Saturday and only 3 or 4 people come? Yet each Sunday, 99% of the congregation line up to receives the body and blood of Christ.  To receive Communion you MUST be free of mortal sin!

…Unfortunately “new movements” left a foot print in this document (in this case, OD). Spiritual direction by lay is now allowed without specifying how this is to be done. Also, the word prayer now equals the word work. According to this new modernism, “Ora est labora” instead of the traditional, millennia old “Ora et labora”. This is not much different from extreme concepts of liberation theology, but this time it was given a pass because if fits new $$$ driven “orthodoxy”. Prayer and work are both important, but formal prayer supersedes and informs our work. Christ made this distinction very clearly when He chastised Marta. Now some in the hierarchy are using classic double speak method of confusing meaning of words. Why? Simply because this can be manipulated to extract $$$ from lay, by telling lay that when they work and give their labor’s $$$ to a respective “movement’, this is “praying”. This is said under lay movement “spiritual direction”, that all too often serves the movement first, instead of the spiritual well being of the lay individual person. With prayer, this hopefully will be fixed!

I hope this is required reading for all priests. Some confessors I’ve been to need to relearn what is a sin. I’ve had some tell me that what the church clearly defines as a sin isn’t! Then some of them with their three part penance. By the time they get to part three you’ve forgotten what part one was. This is a most important sacrament of healing and priests need to wield a spiritual scalpel to cut away the dead parts and revive the life of our souls.

Just downloaded it.  Can’t wait to read it.  As a new Catholic, I’m learning to LOVE this sacrament!  Goodbye useless psychoanalysis. . . hello confession, penance and virtue development!

I think this is a wonderful document and I hope that a copy is given to every priest in the country.  I am blessed in belonging to a parish where sin is talked about and there are ample confession times available and there are always a lot of people coming.  It is an amazing sacrament. I cannot imagine only going once a year.
Would it be bad form to send a copy to those priests that have several thousand families in their church and offer confession once a week for an hour or to those who still, in defiance of the Church, only offer the fake group absolution twice a year?

As a new RC I can’t wait to read this. I wish there was confession before every Mass, or at least more times than Saturday at 4:30.  While traveling last year, I had the chance to visit a church with a noon Mass M-F confession started at 11:00 by 11:30 a second priest came to open another confessional box, because the line was getting long. Yes it was a confessional box & it was awesome!

“Posted by Marcia on Thursday, Aug 25, 2011 10:32 PM (EDT):

To receive Communion you MUST be free of mortal sin!”

## Maybe thosre who line for the Eucharist on Sundays, are. Why do people seem always to take for granted that people who don’t go to Confessuoion must be in mortal sin ?

As a fairly new priest, I was somewhat excited to hear that an aid for confessors was being published by the Vatican.  Having read this document, I was disappointed because it isn’t really the aid I was looking for.  It does a beautiful job of explaining what the Sacrament of Penance is and who the priest is as confessor.  Yet, I was hoping for something a little more practical - how to help those with scruples, how to help people who have never or rarely been to confession give a good confession, what suggestions to make for various spiritual problems.  I realize that each person is different and one answer to a spiritual problem would not necessarily fit all - but at least it would be a starting point.  I hear many confessions each week, yet in the seminary I never received any training in how to help people or what advice to give.  As part of my seminary training, my class did ‘mock’ confessions once, and we took one semester of ‘pastoral counseling’ (which, again, was more theoretical than practical) and that was it.  There are a few recently published guides for confessors out there now, but they may as well be secular psychologist guides, as they do not deal with vice and virtue, but instead self-esteem and feel-good tidbits that might be better in fortune cookies than the confessional.  As for now, the old Tanquerey is the best out there, but it seems like we should have something that might be a little more recent and deal with some of the current problems people deal with regularly (abortion, pornography, etc).

Most children in Australia do not go to church on a Sunday (let alone other days). Spiritual direction is not there for them, but the television is, instead, along with video and other distractions. When spiritual direction attends to the void among those who attend services on a Sunday, then perhaps there will be a joy there- which will attract the youth, who are the “Barometer of the future” (‘Disciples of Jesus’,Jean Vanier)

This document is an excellent start.  It still needs some work.  In some places, the wonderful Sacrament has become “mechanical.”

I didn’t sift through the entire document. I wonder if it mentions mobile apps that aid in the sacrament of Confession such as

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.web4uonline.confession

and

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/confession-app-catholic-sacrament/id601823513?mt=8