NEWS STORY: Vatican Issues Guidelines for Priests Hearing Confessions

c. 2000 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ The Vatican issued some advice Tuesday (June 13) on comportment straight from the pen of Pope John Paul II to help priests attract more Roman Catholics back to the confessional. A Vatican official also disclosed that during Holy Year many priests hearing confession have been empowered to […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ The Vatican issued some advice Tuesday (June 13) on comportment straight from the pen of Pope John Paul II to help priests attract more Roman Catholics back to the confessional.

A Vatican official also disclosed that during Holy Year many priests hearing confession have been empowered to lift the automatic excommunication imposed on Catholics for having or aiding an abortion.


A confessor, the Rev. Ivan Fucek told a Vatican news conference, “must never pronounce words with the ring of condemnation of the person or the sin, never inculcate terror or fear, never investigate aspects of the life of the penitent the knowledge of which is not necessary for evaluating his or her acts, and never use terms that might injure even the most delicate of feelings.

“A priest must never show impatience or jealousy of his time, mortifying the penitent with an invitation to be quick, except when he expects to be faced with useless verbosity,” Fucek said.

The Jesuit theologian spoke at the presentation of a newly issued Italian-language handbook, “The Sacrament of Penitence in the Messages of the Pontiff John Paul II to the Apostolic Penitentiary.” It will be issued shortly in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish.

Fucek and other members of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican tribunal that decides questions of conscience in the church and is empowered to grant absolutions and dispensations, acknowledged that fewer Catholics have been going to confession in the decades following the Second Vatican Council held in the 1960s.

The Rev. Ubano Navarrete, a Jesuit who also serves as a consultor to the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, said the council spurred renewal in the church “but also provoked a progressive disaffection with the practice of confession.”

“Our epoch lacks the sense of sin because it lacks the sense of God,” the prelate said.

Catholics are required to make a “sacramental confession” to a priest at least once a year if they are in need of the remission of serious sins, but the church urges more frequent “devotional confessions” in order to “grow in sanctity.”


The church allows general absolution of groups of penitents only in extreme circumstances. A penitent cannot receive general absolution a second time without having made a confession.

Navarrete said that as the crisis over the abandonment of the sacrament of penitence grew, the pope increased his exhortations to Catholics to continue to make their confessions “and do it frequently.”

The handbook contains 12 documents on the subject of confession that John Paul sent to the Apostolic Penitentiary, starting in 1981, the third year of his papacy.

Navarrete said that in writing about confession, the pope considered first of all the priest, who “must feel called to willingly carry out the delicate and fecund ministry of hearing confessions.”

Fucek said priests themselves must share the blame for the falloff in confession because they often have left the confessional empty and did not use their sermons to encourage parishioners to come to confession.

But he said that the Holy Year has seen the start of a reversal of the trend. “With the Jubilee there has been an increase in confessions in all dioceses,” he said.


Luigi De Magistris, regent of the Apostolic Penitentiary, said this “noticeable increase” may be due to the fact that for Holy Year a larger number of priests are on hand to hear confessions.

Fucek said that where no priest is on duty, transportation usually is available to take a penitent to a church or monastery where a confessor is available. “Don’t exaggerate and say there is no possibility. I say without exaggeration that it is possible every day,” the priest said.

De Magistris said the pope has authorized bishops throughout the world to empower priests to lift the immediate excommunication the church imposes for undergoing or aiding an abortion.

“In conceding this faculty the bishops must, however, take care that it does not go to young priests without the necessary experience,” De Magistris said.

The church considers abortion among the most serious of mortal sins, ranking with heresy, schism and apostasy. Normally only a bishop, canonical penitentiary or a prelate of some mendicant orders can remove the excommunication it carries.

DEA END POLK

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