Pope John Paul II's new encyclical on the Eucharist, Ecclesia de Eucharistia is his latest and most powerful response to the crisis in the Church. Though its aim is much broader, it is in part an answer to the root causes of the Church's sex-abuse scandal, the only kind of answer that can have a truly lasting result.

In it, he says several times that Catholics conscious of serious sin—anything from needlessly missing Sunday Mass to sexual sins to slander—must receive the sacrament of reconciliation before they can receive Communion.

The strength of his language is striking: “I therefore desire to reaf-firm that in the Church there remains in force, now and in the future, the rule by which the Council of Trent gave concrete expression to the Apostle Paul's stern warning when it affirmed that, in order to receive the Eucharist in a worthy manner, ‘one must first confess one's sins, when one is aware of mortal sin’” (No. 36).

The Holy Father knows that the sex-abuse crisis is just one example of a much larger crisis in the Church: The loss of the sense of sin.

C.S. Lewis understood how frightening sin is. He wrote that, when we meet someone, we should be conscious that, 100 years from now, that person will either be so ugly and disfigured by his own sin in hell that we would be tempted to flee from him in horror or so beautiful and transfigured by glory in heaven that we would be tempted to worship him.

The Church, particularly through the sacrament of forgiveness of sins, is the guardian of that vision of the person's potential. The Catechism teaches that “[m]ortal sin, unconfessed, causes exclusion from Christ's Kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices forever, with no turning back” (No. 1861).

The lifetime of hurt that sex abuse causes is terrible. The eternity of hurt that sin can cause is much, much worse. Both the abuser and those he drives away from the Church by his behavior are endangered. Christ says that it's better that a millstone be tied around a man's neck than he “lead a little one to sin.”

It's no wonder the Holy Father, again and again, has urgently called for a renewal of the sacrament of confession.

Last year, in his Holy Thursday letter, John Paul pleaded for priests to return to the confessional, saying twice that Catholics must confess serious sins before receiving Communion. He then linked the confession crisis to the Church's sex-abuse crisis. He even followed up that letter on the feast of Divine Mercy last year with a motu proprio apostolic letter on confession.

The consequence of his argument is clear: If you are not providing confession to your flock, you are allowing serious offenses to the Blessed Sacrament to become commonplace. You are signaling that sin either doesn' exist, or it doesn' matter. And where the sin's horror is forgotten, horrible sins follow.

It is a tragic irony that many of the critics who say the Pope has failed to address the Church's sex abuse crisis are undermining his efforts to solve it.

First, they cast suspicion on the public figure who has shown the clearest understanding of its solution. Second, they risk making the crisis worse by undermining the sacrament of confession. By exaggerating the number of priests involved in the sex-abuse crisis, they scare people away from confession and have helped create a climate where states have even taken action against the sacrament of confession's secrecy.

John Paul has given the Church a call for the renewal of the sacrament of confession that couldn' be any clearer or any more urgent.

“The two sacraments of the Eucharist and penance are very closely connected,” he writes in the new encylical (No. 35). The renewal of the sacrament of penance must occur side by side with the renewal of the Eucharist in the Church. After all, as the first sentence of the encyclical reminds us: “The Church draws her life from the Eucharist.”