Highlights

CHAPTER I Through the Narrow Door

  • The only things essential are that you should express your regret for the wrong you have done, that you should be open to the forgiveness and love of God, and that the priest should give you a penance and give absolution in the proper form—and even that is only really necessary if you have been guilty of a serious breach with God. (Location 93)
  • help. If we cannot admit that we are sinners, in other words, admit that there are things we do that offend God and harm our neighbor or ourselves, there really is no hope for us at all. How can God heal those who refuse to believe they need healing? (Location 212)
  • That is the first step we must all take: to realize within ourselves that there are failures in our life, that we are not yet perfect. (Location 213)
  • The priest is a sinner just as much as anyone else: being a professional man of God actually increases the risk of sin; it does not decrease it. (Location 218)
  • Perhaps if I may mention one, it would be the late Abbot of Worth, Dom Victor Farwell, who passed on to me the wisdom he learned from Abbot Chapman of Downside. His advice, more than anything else, was to pray: “Pray as you can and don’t try to pray as you can’t”, and be confident in the love of God. (Location 224)

CHAPTER II Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned

  • I suppose a good working definition is that a sin is any action, word, or thought that causes unhappiness, either in oneself or in others. (Location 284)
  • a material sin is any action, word, or thought that in itself causes unhappiness, whether we are aware of it or not. A formal sin is committed when we are aware of it and intend it. (Location 344)
  • Far too many people now come to adulthood with their capacity for love and true human relationship permanently marred. (Location 354)
  • A formal sin implies a rejection of love and, therefore, alienates us from God and from man. In both cases we need to do something to repair the damage; or rather, we need to allow the grace of God to do something. (Location 369)
  • Law, in other words, implies freedom; it implies rights for the weak and oppressed; a code of law makes the little equal with the great, brings everyone together in the sight of God. That is why the Hebrew poets found the idea of law so attractive. (Location 398)
  • Even if we had never sinned formally, never deliberately gone against God’s law, we would still be aware of countless occasions on which we had failed through carelessness or inadvertence and caused unhappiness to others that we could not heal. (Location 410)

CHAPTER III It Is So Long Since My Last Confession

  • Frequency of confession must be one of the most bewildering areas of disagreement in the Church today. (Location 454)
  • In the early centuries the only sins classed as mortal were murder, adultery, and apostasy from the faith. (Location 527)
  • In contrast, it was a regular feature of Christian life for people to talk openly to a trusted senior Christian about the difficulties they experienced in growing toward perfection. We find this documented particularly in the monastic writers Cassian and Benedict, where the disciple is expected to confess all temptations toward sin, especially distracting thoughts, to his abba, or elder. (Location 541)
  • This form of confession has been called “confession of devotion”, not strictly necessary in that the penitent is not guilty of the sort of sins that exclude one from Communion, but very useful if he really wants to love God. (Location 546)
  • The united sacrament was obviously normal by the time the expanded Rule of Chrodegang was offered to the world as a way of life for pastoral priests in the tenth century. It is suggested there that lay people should confess at least three times a year, priests every three weeks, and monks every week (Location 558)
  • The concept of grave sin was also broadened, so that a much larger range of activities, which had before been considered imperfections or minor faults, came to be seen as gravely sinful. Few, therefore, came through life without serious sin in the new definition of the word, which had the undesirable effect of causing an underestimation of the seriousness of mortal sin. (Location 564)
  • If every schoolboy who misbehaves is told that he is in mortal sin, there does not seem to be much point in refraining from mass murder and genocide. (Location 567)
  • Full consent means that he is not excessively influenced by pressure, persuasion, fear, passion, or mental confusion, but really wills the action wholeheartedly, willing also to separate himself from God and the Church. That must mean in practice that actual mortal sin, which cuts us off from the life of grace, is mercifully rare. Not, sadly, impossible, for it does happen that people commit serious sin callously and in cold blood, but it cannot be a frequent occurrence in the lives of people who are really trying to love God and man. (Location 577)
  • Even if full knowledge or consent is lacking, it is still important to confess such sins, as that is the effective means of getting rid of the guilt and strengthening ourselves for the future. (Location 584)
  • Saint Francis and his followers seem to have followed the old suggestion for lay people of going four times a year. (Location 604)
  • Saint Philip Neri and his followers, four hundred years later, used to go about three times a week. (Location 605)
  • the Pope never intended people to neglect confession, but encouraged more frequent reception of Communion, partly as a reaction to the last dregs of Jansenism (a heresy that taught people more to fear God than to love him and frightened people away from receiving Communion at all). (Location 610)
  • Some who are really struggling against the forces of destruction may need to come more often, but for those in a reasonable equilibrium of life I find once a month is about right. (Location 636)
  • Less frequent confession tends to coarsen people; they may become less sensitive, less caring. (Location 638)

CHAPTER IV My State of Life Is. . .

  • Each of them became a saint because he lived as well as he could in the state of life in which he found himself. (Location 687)
  • If we are married we must take account of our spouse and children first: that is the primary Christian mission. We have no right to decide on behalf of our children that we will abandon everything and go and live as the poorest of the poor or carry the gospel into the midst of a civil war. Our children need the best care and protection we can give them. Nor can we abandon them night after night to go and do churchy things, taking part in endless discussion groups, meetings, and sessions. A few years ago in my former diocese we had a “pastoral program” imposed on us that required every parishioner to be bullied into joining an evening discussion group. Apart from the resentment caused by the bullying, many people were put into the invidious position of having to choose whether to spend the evening with their families, attend the discussion group, or continue working with some other parish group with which they were already involved. Usually it was the last that suffered, and groups like the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, the Legion of Mary, or Life suffered accordingly. But then so did family life: particularly when children are small, our apostolic obligations are best carried out by spending time with them, not with strangers. (Location 696)
  • The secret of being a successful servant of Christ and his Church is knowing just where we will be most useful. (Location 713)
  • on the whole, unless we have very clear indications to the contrary, God intends us to serve him in the position in which we are now. (Location 719)
  • saw an interview with Mother Teresa of Calcutta in which a priest of my diocese asked her exactly that question, and she said that she considered our work much harder than hers, and just as necessary, since we were dealing with the poorest of the poor in spiritual terms, who would never show their gratitude or any appreciation, unlike her people, who responded with love and warmth. (Location 725)
  • The Four Basic Christian Obligations It is in the context, therefore, of our own state of life that we need to reflect on how we fulfill the basic Christian obligations. These are prayer and study, leading to almsgiving and evangelization. Every Christian has an obligation to do something of each of these, but in different proportions. (Location 753)
  • It may come as a surprise to hear that every Christian has an obligation to study, for many of us think we finished all that when we left school and never read anything except the breviary and the newspaper. (Location 791)
  • The fundamental principle of Christian almsgiving is expressed in the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Rule of Saint Benedict, as “from each according to his means, to each according to his needs” (cf. Acts 2:45; Rule, chap. 34). (Location 834)
  • What we may not ever do is to shrug off our responsibilities to others with glib phrases like, “trickle-down effect”, or, “it’s their own fault”, or, “God helps those who help themselves.” (Location 836)
  • God demands that we help each other. (Location 838)
  • The fourth side of the Christian quadrilateral is evangelization, proclaiming the good news to all nations. (Location 841)
  • Contrary to popular opinion, the primary work of evangelization cannot usually be done by priests or religious. (Location 842)
  • That still remains the most important aspect of the Home Mission: the example and instruction that parents give to their children. Only when that has been fulfilled is there time to evangelize other people’s children. (Location 849)
  • To know where we have gone wrong, what mistakes we have made, we must know where we should have been to begin with. (Location 870)
  • Otherwise we will waste effort and anxiety comparing ourselves with the wrong people, lamenting that we have not been doing what are in fact the wrong things, wearing ourselves out in pursuit of the wrong goals. (Location 871)

CHAPTER V And These Are My Sins

  • The sins that we will be aware of, the sins that we can list and tell, are usually only the surface symptoms of the spiritual diseases that are lurking underneath. (Location 892)
  • When we begin to compile our list of symptoms, the first priority must naturally be given to the most important of all things in our life, which is the love of God. (Location 896)
  • We must therefore ask ourselves to what extent we have fulfilled that first and greatest commandment. Fundamentally that means: Have we been faithful in prayer and at Mass, have we received the sacraments, have we tried to be conscious of God during our waking hours, and have we slept at peace with God? (Location 901)
  • The normal obligations of a Catholic are to pray every day and to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation. (Location 903)
  • It has always been understood that the obligation to attend Mass does not bind if you live more than a reasonable distance away from a church. In the days before mechanical transport, that was interpreted as three miles. That would take about an hour to walk, so perhaps an hour’s drive is as much as could be expected nowadays. (Location 905)
  • attendance at Mass on a Saturday does not excuse us from the obligation under divine law of taking a day of rest on Sunday and giving that rest to those who work for us. (Location 917)
  • the Spiritual Letters of Abbot John Chapman. (Location 944)
  • The Rosary of course was designed to minimize distractions by giving us something to occupy the body (beads), the speech faculty (Hail Marys), the imaginative mind (Mysteries), the emotional heart (awareness of our Lady praying with us), and the depths of the soul (consciousness of the presence of God). (Location 949)
  • happens frequently, for example, is that we find we are spending much of our prayer time thinking about food: what to buy (that shopping list!), how to cook it, how to plan a menu. Does that indicate that we have, lurking deep down there, a virus of gluttony? Mention it in confession, then, and let God’s grace heal it. (Location 957)
  • the grace of God can get at it once we have acknowledged it and brought it into our confession. (Location 961)
  • It is the same with (Location 962)
  • the other deadly sins: our distractions in prayer can be a useful indicator of areas of potential weakness that need the attention of grace. (Location 962)
  • The reason for this is that if we really do love God, we will find it impossible not to love other people; conversely, if we find we do not love other people, that proves we do not yet really love God. The way we behave toward others, therefore, must also be examined, and we should bring to the confessional all our failings in charity toward people. The answer (Location 967)
  • Saint Therese tells us how she tried to do little things for the other nuns so discreetly that they were never aware of it, putting things away, folding things up, generally tidying the house. (Location 985)
  • we are all damaged, in one way or another, and the damage usually shows itself in a persistent sin or bad habit that we find almost impossible to break. (Location 997)
  • As we get more accustomed to the spiritual life, more regular in confession, there may well be an improvement that other people can notice, but we ourselves will be becoming more sensitive, so we shall remain equally dissatisfied with ourselves. (Conversely, of course, if we neglect confession, our perception of ourselves will get less sensitive, and we will not notice how we are degenerating, though others around us certainly will.) (Location 1010)
  • Saint Philip warns us that the besetting sin in youth may be lust, in middle age avarice, the love of money, and in old age pride. (Location 1024)

What to Say in Confession

  • When we prepare for our confession, then, we need not be ashamed to list a boring collection of little symptoms, but we should primarily be looking at the way we respond to the great commandments. (Location 1042)
  • other words, most of our sins will be things we have failed to do, rather than things we positively do wrong. (Location 1043)
  • Bring all your sins before the Cross in confession, and leave them there without bothering to analyze the exact degree of sinfulness. God’s grace is quite sufficient to sort them all out; you can leave the confessional confident that you are forgiven and that God loves you. (Location 1060)
  • One of the purposes of confession is to eliminate all worry and anxiety, so we should mention anything that is bothering us, even if we know that it is not really a sin or that it has been forgiven long ago. (Location 1062)

CHAPTER VI O My God, I Am Heartily Sorry. . .

  • No, we should forget all that: the concept of “punishment” in our relationship with God is quite different, and in Latin and Greek the words do not carry any of these unfortunate connotations of arbitrary vindictiveness. The poena resulting from sin is the direct result of the sin itself. God can, and does, work miracles to stop that result happening: he did not design it on purpose. If we sin, the very fact that we are sinning causes the poena, or punishment. (Location 1097)
  • The shallow-minded who have tried to believe that there is no hell have simply been unaware of the nature of the consequences of sin. They seem to think of punishment simply as an arbitrary infliction, and so they (rightly) cannot imagine God continuing to inflict pain eternally in response to a crime committed in a moment of time. Put like that, of course, the idea is indeed monstrous. But once we grasp the fact that hell is what we create by our continuing refusal to love, you can see that it must be potentially eternal. (Location 1117)