God's Mercy in Reconciliation

A Wonderful Story of God's Mercy!

This is a beautiful story of how God in His mercy, loves us so much! He will continue to call us to seek Him in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

by Deacon Greg Kandra as printed in the Jesuit magazine - America



Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

I spoke the words clearly, firmly, just as I had been taught by Sister St. Margaret. This wasn’t my first confession, but it was close to it. And on this particular Saturday afternoon, my mother had decided to take me to confession for reasons I can’t remember; but since I was a 7-year-old with a cranky temper and a disobedient streak, I’m sure they were valid.

Now here I was alone in the dark, whispering my sins. I was kneeling on a piece of cracked vinyl padding, speaking into a frayed scrap of velvet cloth that covered a metal grate. Behind that cloth sat a stranger, a priest with his ear bent and his shadowy head nodding. I smelled mothballs and after-shave and something like cigarettes. Or was it incense?

I told him my sins, and he gave me my penance. And in just a few moments, it was over. I prayed the act of contrition—“O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee...”—then crossed myself, pulled aside the heavy curtain and went to the altar rail, knelt and prayed.

I had done it. The secrets in my heart had been shared with another and God, in his mercy, had forgiven me. I was a new man! (O.K., a new 7-year-old.)

The slate was clean.

I could begin again.After finishing the prayers I had been given, I returned to my mother’s pew and we went out into the parking lot. As she started the station wagon and backed out of her space, she had a word of advice. “Gregory,” she said, “you’ve got to learn to keep your voice down. I could hear you all over the church.”

My ears turned crimson. And early on, before I had barely gotten my feet wet in the sacrament of confession, I wanted to shake them dry and have nothing to do with it again. Ever.

My early experience with confession may be one reason why for many years I avoided it, as a man with a cavity avoids the dentist. I was afraid it would hurt. Even when “confession” underwent a make-over and became “reconciliation,” and the small dark boxes were replaced with wide-open rooms, I was reluctant. I would go once or twice a year—a perfunctory, had-to-do-it practice. My heart wasn’t in it. My head, certainly, was elsewhere.

In the interim, when I did go, there may have been flashes of forgiveness, moments of grace. If so, they were accidental. I didn’t do much to help matters. Neither, for that matter, did some priests.

I remember once, in college, going to confession to talk over a family problem. It was a Saturday afternoon, just before the 5 p.m. Mass. The priest, fully vested for Mass, was standing outside the confessional, hands clasped behind his back. He looked like a barber waiting for his next customer. People were arriving for Mass, taking their pews. Nobody else was there for confession, so I approached the priest.“You open for business?” I asked. He said sure, and ushered me into the confessional—actually more like a small office, complete with a desk and two chairs. I sat down, took a deep breath and told him my troubles and why I felt I needed forgiveness. He nodded sympathetically and said he thought he might be able to help. Then he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a pamphlet, offered it to me, and smiled. It was a brochure about communication.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but thanked him. He patted my shoulder and said he would pray for me. With that, he stood up to point me back into the church. He had to begin Mass. I didn’t pray the act of contrition. I don’t think he gave me absolution. He told me to have a nice day.

I didn’t. Somehow, I left the confessional feeling worse than when I went in.

I remained skeptical of the sacrament for years after that. I drifted away from regular Mass attendance, and went for years without darkening the door of a reconciliation room or slipping behind the velvet curtain of a confessional. What was the point? In my mind, I was right with God: He knew where I was coming from (and, no doubt, where I was going) and I apologized to him, privately, when it seemed like the right thing to do. End of discussion.

But no.

Returning HomeYears later, the twisting road of my life led me back to the church and the sacraments, and it plunged me more deeply into my faith than I had ever imagined possible.

There were many reasons for my return: the deaths of my parents, the prayers of my wife and a growing sense that there had to be more to life than just getting up and going to work and planning where to go out for dinner or when to take the next cruise. I became a daily communicant. I served in my parish as an usher and, later, as an extraordinary minister of Communion.

And as part of my journey, when the time became right and my heart became ready, I found myself on yet another Saturday in yet another church, preparing to catalogue my sins yet again.

I was going to give confession another chance.

I had wandered into the basement chapel of St. Francis of Assisi in Manhattan, a place whose lifeblood is the endless stream of commuters from Penn Station and the Long Island Railroad, who find their way there for confession at all hours of the day. There is always a line. As I soon discovered, it is easy to understand why.

After entering the small confessional/reconciliation room and closing the door, I found myself seated opposite a kindly old friar wearing the familiar brown robe and, oddly enough, sneakers. I cleared my throat and began: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been (quick tally in my mind) 10 years since my last confession.”

He broke into a small smile. “Welcome back,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”

He had never seen me before in my life. But I knew what he meant.And with that, I began my confession. I spoke. He listened. He nodded. He had heard it all before, umpteen times, from the quivering lips of countless sinners like me. When it was over he gave me a mild penance and some gentle advice: “Just live the Gospel,” he said softly. “Just live the Gospel.”

He sighed and smiled. “There you are. Good as new. God bless you.”

It was the first time in a long time that those words stuck. And when I left that little room I felt, in fact, “good as new.” So I went back a few weeks later, and a few weeks after that—again and again and again. It became a habit. Uplifted and Given Grace I can’t quite explain it.

Why does this sacrament exert such force?

Some of it, I’m sure, is that it just feels good to let the weight of all our wrongs roll off our shoulders. It is comforting to be told that we are going to be okay and that what was wrong can be set right.

Everybody needs a second chance. Or a third.

Of course, it isn’t easy. It requires reflection, observation, scrutiny. For a few moments we are asked to be moral anthropologists. We seek out our sins. We capture them, name them, tag them and put them under glass to study, like wildly exotic fauna. What on earth is that?

The Chinese have a saying: “The beginning of wisdom is to call something by its correct name.” Perhaps that is part of it, too: we name what we are—proud, greedy, lustful, petty, selfish, untruthful—and become aware.

With penance and practice, we strive to be better. Wisdom begins.Or so we hope. And so we pray:

“I firmly resolve with the help of thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life, Amen.”

Those final words of the Act of Contrition put it so succinctly and clearly.

The purpose of the sacrament, really, is to amend life. To improve on what is there.

And with that improvement, I think, comes this beautiful promise at the heart of our faith: the promise that we will rise. We can be uplifted.

Resurrection is available. All of us can roll aside the stone of our personal tomb and stagger, blinking, into the sun. As more than a few preachers have proclaimed: the paschal mystery didn’t end on Good Friday but on Easter Sunday.

So it can be with each of us, too.T he profound act of being reconciled with God enables us to live Easter every time we emerge from that confessional.

We breathe again. We see light again. We hope again. We are given grace.

At bottom, what begins with seven short words—“Bless me, father, for I have sinned”—ends in transformation. It may last only an hour or a day.

But the fact that it happens at all is miraculous. And that gives me reason enough to keep going back.

Greg Kandra was ordained a deacon for the Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y. A writer and producer for “The CBS Evening News With Katie Couric,” he also writes and edits his own blog at deacbench.blogspot.com.

The Year of the Priests

A Time to Thank Our Priests
From the editors of the National Catholic Register

As the Year of the Priest begins, we lay editors of the Register want to take a moment to thank priests.

We want to thank not only the priests who have been our friends, but also those we barely knew, who did more for us than our friends ever could.

We want to thank not only the priests who inspire us with their words, but also those who moved us more deeply with the daily work of their priesthood than they ever could with words.We want to thank not only those men who gave up their retirement, and their well-deserved rest, to enter the priesthood as late vocations, but also — especially — those who as young men saw their whole life ahead of them and handed all of it to Christ.

We want to reassure them that the attacks on the priesthood will not prevail, because Christ doesn’t take their kind of generosity lightly.

We know that there have been terrible, scandalous priests. This has been true from the beginning — from the original Twelve Apostles through the early Christian heresies, from the scandals before the Reformation to the scandals of the 20th century.But we also know that the priesthood is under attack.

Priests know it, too.

Whenever someone looks at them suspiciously, whenever a mother hurries her children away from them, whenever they read an antagonistic article about how the life of a priest makes them prone to become monsters, they know it.

Their noble, loving sacrifice is so often made to look ugly and twisted — the opposite of what it is. The whole group is too often defined by the exceptions in a way few of us ever have to deal with.But the priesthood will survive, and grow stronger. In fact, it is already growing stronger. There are more new priests than we have seen in a long time, and the new generation of priests is more committed to the Church’s mission than any in memory.

We want to tell the faithful priests who unjustly suffer from these attacks that we’re on their side and, more importantly, remind them what Christ said: Rejoice and be glad on this day, for your name is great in heaven.

Thank you, priests, for sacrificing the fulfillment of “making it in the world” in order to give us a chance to make it in the next world. You don’t take on jobs — they are appointed to you. You put your own will at the disposal of the Church, for us.

We are grateful.

Thank you for bringing our children into the Church, and sustaining their souls with the sacraments. And thank you for welcoming them into the Church informally, as well. We see them look at you like celebrities, and we’re glad the first “celebrity” they got to meet was a man of God. Thank you for patiently listening to them, for taking such joy in teasing them, and for showing them the true face of Christ: the gentle one who said “Let the children come to me.”

Thank you, priests, for presiding at our marriages, even while you yourselves live such that you can be ready to serve your people at a moment’s notice. Sometimes married people sigh and think envious thoughts about living alone. But in the end, it’s hard for us to imagine how you do it. Thank you for risking loneliness to serve us and our families.

Thank you, priests, for putting yourself in the unenviable position of dealing with us at our worst moments — when we’re anxious, upset, depressed, even a little out of our minds, focused on our own problems to the exclusion of all else.

When we see the care you have to take in listening to the problems of so many kinds of people, we can’t imagine how you do it. How do you listen to angry people, whining people, weeping people, nervous people, suspicious people and clueless people? How do you listen to us?

Thank you, priests, for sitting in empty confessionals on Saturday afternoons. You wait there, not even knowing if we’ll come, like the Prodigal Son’s father on the road. Thank you for all the times we hear “I absolve you from your sins” and feel a great burden lifted from our hearts. This gift of God’s forgiveness brings the greatest joy back into our lives. We can give you nothing in return that even comes close to that.

And thank you, priests, most of all, for bringing Christ himself into our lives. Where would we be without your astonishing ability to make the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ present on our altars and in our tabernacles?

You are there for us every Sunday, every morning, giving us this infinite gift. Thank you.

In the end, that’s what is so great about you: not you, in yourself, but who you bring us — Christ.People call from the hospital and say, “I need a priest.” They point to the confessional and ask, “Is there a priest in there?” They approach in the airport and ask, “Are you a Catholic priest?”When people need a priest, any priest will do.

Because a priest is nothing but a representative of Christ. Christ is the main actor in the consecration at Mass. It is Christ who forgives sins. It is in Christ that we are baptized.

“The story of my priestly vocation?” wrote Pope John Paul II. “It is known above all to God. At its deepest level, every vocation to the priesthood is a great mystery; it is a gift which infinitely transcends the individual. Every priest experiences this clearly throughout the course of his life.
Faced with the greatness of the gift, we sense our own inadequacy.”

Your inadequacy is your secret weapon.

You aren’t acting on your own behalf or through your own powers. You are acting for Christ. And that’s why, despite all the attacks, the priesthood will prevail. We depend too much on you to ever let you go.

Thank you, Father, for being Christ for us.

Posted by Kathy ~ TOG

Why did Jesus rise with Wounds?

The Sunday Homily
by Fr. James Farfaglia

Did you ever stop to think why Jesus rose from the dead with wounds?

Jesus rose from the dead with a glorified body. The barriers of time and space no longer apply to him. The Lord appears and disappears with shocking suddenness. He continually demonstrates his physical reality.

The Apostles and the disciples see him, hear him, and eat with him. Thomas is told to touch his wounds. The stone rolled away from the entrance, and the carefully folded burial cloths direct our gaze to the physical.

He has truly risen.

The disbelief and uncertainty evidenced by those who saw him testify to an apparent strangeness in the appearance of the newly risen Christ. Slowly they came to recognize him, but they still struggled with doubt.

We are accustomed to an annual celebration of Easter. However, for the first disciples of Jesus, resurrection was totally new. Let us remember, that the son of the widow of Nain, Jairus' daughter, and Lazarus were all brought back to life by Jesus, but not one of them continued their lives with a glorified body.

Although the risen Jesus is the same Jesus that died on Calvary, his physical reality is now different than before. The body of the risen Lord is indeed his physical body, but he now moves about with a glorified body.

Each of us will have a glorified body also at the resurrection of the dead if we persevere and are faithful.

Over and over again the gospels stress that something extraordinary has occurred. The Lord is tangible, but he has been transformed. His life is different from what it once was. His glorified body transcends the limitations of time and space. For this reason he can pass through the closed door of the Upper Room, and appear and disappear as he desires.

At times his disciples cannot recognize him precisely because their physical reality moves within time and space, and the Lord's physical reality is no longer subject to time and space, although he exists within time and space.The empty tomb and the neatly folded burial cloths point to us that Jesus is physically alive. His crucified body has been transformed.

What lesson is he teaching us by keeping his wounds intact?

We can answer this question by turning to our own wounds.

What are our wounds?

First, we all experience the large wound caused by original sin. Although we are baptized and original sin has been cleansed from our soul, our human nature has been wounded. Our sinful condition manifests itself in different ways and we struggle with those manifestations of fallen human nature.

And then there are the other wounds, the wounds that are smaller. We have wounds that are caused by sickness and the wounds that are caused by problems, adversities, challenges and the disappointments of life.

All of us are wounded.

Even Jesus is wounded. By retaining the wounds of his passion, the glorified Jesus is showing us that we can find hope and strength by taking our wounds and uniting them to his wounds.

The eleven apostles of today's gospel passage were discouraged and filled with fear. They had lost all hope. They did not understand that Jesus had to first die on the cross in order to rise on Easter Sunday. They did not understand that the risen Jesus would bear his five wounds as an eternal reminder that when our wounds are united to his wounds we will find true peace.

"Peace be with you".

These are the first words of the risen Jesus. He dispels the darkness of discouragement, despair and fear by showing the eleven his glorified and wounded body.

Thomas places his finger in the wounds of Jesus and he believes. "Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe". (John 20: 27)

Many call Thomas the doubting Thomas. All of the Apostles doubted. All of the Apostles ran away and abandoned Jesus. In reality, he is not the doubting Thomas, but the courageous Thomas. He is the only apostle who knows where to find Jesus. By touching the wounds of Jesus, he begins to understand that the risen Jesus is not a ghost, but that he is truly real. By encountering Jesus in his woundedness, he is able to encounter the authentic Jesus, the real Jesus, the whole Jesus.

Because he is able to encounter the Jesus that shed his blood on the cross, he falls to the ground and pronounces a profound act of faith: "My Lord and my God".

Thomas is able to encounter Jesus in all of his humanity and all of his divinity. He comes to grasp the reality that the risen Jesus is the same Jesus that died on Calvary.

But, where is the risen and wounded Jesus? Where can we encounter him? As Jesus hung on the cross, all of his blood flowed from his wounds. The eternal reminder of his wounds reminds us that we are to experience him in the Eucharist and in the Sacrament of Confession.

By coming to Jesus every day at Mass, for visits and adoration; by encountering the God of mercy through the awesome gift of the sacrament of forgiveness, we can dispel the despair, the discouragement and the fear that may fill our lives.

It is in the Eucharist that we encounter peace because we truly encounter the Lord. We need to bring our wounds to the risen and wounded Jesus every day in the Eucharist. It is there, at the tabernacle, that his wounds will heal us.

On this feast of Divine Mercy, let us remember the words that John Paul II wrote in his second encyclical letter: “Believing in the crucified Son means ‘seeing the Father,’ means believing that love is present in the world and that this love is more powerful than any kind of evil in which individuals, humanity, or the world are involved.

Believing in this love means believing in mercy.

For mercy is an indispensable dimension of love; it is as it were love's second name and, at the same time, the specific manner in which love is revealed and effected vis-a-vis the reality of the evil that is in the world, affecting and besieging man, insinuating itself even into his heart and capable of causing him to perish in Gehenna” (Dives in Misericordia).

Written by Father James Farfaglia

Posted by Kathy ~ TOG

Spreading God's Mercy

Tenth Anniversary of My Mother's Death

As I reflect on the 10th anniversary of my mother's passing, I thank God that He used her beautiful death to "open my eyes" to see God's mercy. In ten years, we have been able to reach so many people who needed the knowledge of God's love for them.

What a great gift this was for my entire family! To be witnesses to the greatness of God and His love for all His children.

This woman, even though she was small in stature, represented great strength throughout her entire lifetime.

She is sadly missed but her memory lives in all who where fortunate to know and love her.

As our Divine Mercy prayer group continues to take this prayer (The Chaplet of Divine Mercy) to the bedside of the sick and dying, we ask for your support through prayer. It is only by means of your prayers and God's good grace that we are able to continue this ministry.

Pray for those who will die today, especially those who have no one to pray for them, that God will be their merciful Saviour.

May God, Who is rich in mercy, continue to inspire all His children to be great apostles of Divine Mercy!

Jesus, I Trust in You!

"At the beginning of my religious life, suffering and adversities frightened and disheartened me. So I prayed continuously, asking Jesus to strengthen me and to grant me the power of His Holy Spirit that I might carry out His holy will in all things, because from the beginning I have been aware of my weakness. I know very well what I am of myself, because for this purpose Jesus has opened the eyes of my soul." ~ Diary of St. Faustina Kowalska

God bless you always,

Be Merciful

"Be merciful, as your Father is also merciful."
Lk. 6,36


Jesus reveals this mystery of God's love for us in order that He may teach us to be merciful to others.

The more we contemplate God's mercy, the more we will be able to imitate it.

If we should feel annoyed with someone, we ought to attempt to dive into the inexhaustible mercy of God. This will help extinguish all resentment in ourselves.

Could we try to show others only a small image of God's mercy in our actions?

The world would certainly be a better place.

God has such a desire to shower His mercy upon all souls. And yet, we in return are so quick to act the opposite towards our neighbor.

"O Lord, You so easily pardon us of all our sins. May we also easily forgive those who trespass against us."

One act of mercy performed everyday makes God smile!

Have a very blessed week,

Now is the Time for God's Mercy

God's Mercy and The Chaplet

God wants to see fruits in our lives. He wants us to make it known to all those we love that His mercy is endless!

At the time of my mother's death, I was not totally aware of the mercy of God and the Chaplet of Divine Mercy.

A friend introduced the chaplet to me and I prayed it at my dying mother's bedside. She opened her eyes and shared with us her amazing visions of Heaven.

My mother's death opened my eyes to the reality that Our Heavenly Father is waiting for us.

Heaven is real and God wants all of us to live with Him for all eternity!

But God needs our help.

We can be great apostles of His mercy by:

A) Performing acts of mercy everyday through deeds of kindness to others
B) Spreading the Mercy of God to our family and friends through word
C) Praying for God's Mercy for ourselves and the whole world

By doing this, God can and will work miracles!

Now is the time.

God needs us to help Him embrace our world with His mercy.

May we all delight ourselves in the healing rays of God's mercy!

God's blessings,

At Time of Death, God's Mercy is Greater!

The Gift of God's Mercy

A friend of mine's husband passed away very suddenly a few days ago and she said to me...

"Kathy, I am worried. I don't know where his soul is? Is he in Purgatory? Is he suffering terribly?"

My answer to her was this, "God's mercy is greater!"

We do not know for sure, where our loved one's soul is upon their death, but we should be rest assured of one thing...God's mercy is unfathomable!

God's mercy is beyond our comprehension!

If we completely trust in God's love for us, then when we die His mercy will be endless!

God knows all things. He see's all of our prayers for all of time!

Pray for those who have gone before you.

Pray for your parents.

Pray for your spouses or children.

Pray for your friends or relatives who may have gone before you.

When you are united to them again, they will thank you!

Ask God to have mercy on their souls.

God wants all of us with Him in Heaven.

Pray a Chaplet of Divine Mercy for those souls who may die suddenly today...that God may be their Merciful Savior.

Then trust in His mercy, for it is great!

God bless you always,