The Novus Ordo Rite of Penance finds us awkwardly uncertain

The more it's explained to us, the less convincing it seems

As a convert, a convert in 1979 of all the wretched times to come into a disordered Church, I found the greatest obstacle to my complete assimilation into the Catholic sacramental system was not any doctrine about the Blessed Virgin Mary. I was thankfully not inoculated against her in any way, because I came to the Church as a complete unbeliever, not as a Protestant, though I had brief stops along the way.

Nor did I have a purist’s reluctance to “pray to saints”; though I didn’t know much about them, it was completely obvious to me in principle that the saints are my friends, standing ready in heaven to haul me up out of the deep, flailing about as I was.

No, the worst part, the undoubtedly most dreaded part, was Confession.

Looking back, I see the reason very clearly: it was a lack of form. The would-be penitent had to seek out the sacrament. It was not widely available. My catechesis didn’t even mention it and there was no question the priest preparing me was just as happy to overlook it (he later left the priesthood). Unlike Holy Communion, where you just get in the line and do what the person in front of you does, it is quite a black box, or should I say, all-too-well-lit, yet forgotten reconciliation room.

The precise nature of the void was brought back to me by a video on Confession made by a Franciscan priest, Fr. Casey Cole, accusingly entitled “You're Doing Confession Wrong!”

I’m going to pick on it because what he offers as guidance is explicitly based on the official United States Conference of Bishops’ book, The Rite of Penance, and because therefore, that guidance accentuates the built-in sense of exposure going to Confession represents, in the new dispensation: the danger of being caught out doing the wrong thing in a one-on-one situation, of being put in a false position of having to provide the importance of the occasion all on one’s own.

I admit I’m not talking about the supernatural issue here. I’m talking about a natural disinclination to do something objectively somewhere on a scale from uncomfortable to scary — and quite possibly, humiliating. It’s not even about the sins themselves, though certainly having an embarrassing sin to confess makes it all worse.

It’s about the human need to know what you’re getting into and how the Vatican II urge to eliminate forms doesn’t meet that need.

The intention of the video is, I believe, to set one’s mind at ease about Confession. My experience is that the anxiety caused by this sacrament is alleviated by teaching the penitent exactly what to do, along with instruction on what exactly happens, practically and spiritually.

I’m not sure starting out with the accusation of doing it wrong helps, and of course the title assumes that we are “doing” Confession at all, which the stats on the current state of the Church do not bear out — but in the event, because of Fr. Cole’s explication, this video, and the more general catechetical instruction it represents, cannot set anyone’s mind at ease.

I’ve learned over the years that instruction on “the sacrament of reconciliation” in the contemporary Church results the opposite of what one would hope to receive. I’ve realized that in the new rite, there simply is not much of a pattern to follow.

The video begins with a clip of a penitent (actually Fr. Cole) kneeling at a grille and saying “Bless me Father, for I have sinned” — enacting a paradigmatic scene lurking in the backs of our minds when we think of Confession, as Fr. Cole points out.

For a convert or someone who has grown up in the time after the Council, this clip represents not, as the priest says, everyone’s experience of how Confession “should go,” but rather, and quite specifically (as he also, somewhat contradictorily, says), how it is depicted in Hollywood.

We get it! This penitent-behind-the-grille represents something outdated, if not purposely archaic. Fr. Cole’s dismissive shrug tells the story, and anyway, we are very used to this treatment! Nuns in massive wimples, priests in generously cut cassocks and wide saturnos, candle-bedecked high altars — this is the stuff, we know, purely of our imaginations, fueled by nostalgia alone. No reality detected. Shake it off!

Sure enough, the priest dismisses the scene with a “whatever” and a “maybe a widespread custom” (which it surely is not, having been discarded half a century ago). Turning to the contemporary Rite of Penance book, he proceeds to refer to it over the course of the 10 minutes of the video to show us how it’s meant to be, carefully taking us through every point up until the very end, stopping every so often to point out that one has options (of course — this is the Novus Ordo!).

We intuit that there is a vaguely genial idea here: Should you want to do this awkward thing, it could be good, and it doesn’t really matter how you do it. Things will be said. You still won’t really know what those things are. Good luck!

As I tried to watch with the mind of a truly unsure newcomer (as I had been once upon a time), I am struck by the lack of form in a rite that truly doesn’t need much — but it needs something! To be approachable, to be, in Fr. Cole’s word, doable, it needs to give the penitent a foothold, as it were — a structural means of getting started and continuing, ultimately finding meaning and grace.

The customs smooth the way, actually, and no amount of assurance that bare validity covers all the uncertainties will help the nervous one who would, all things told, rather avoid the whole thing.

If we were wondering if our confession is valid — which we weren’t, not yet, because remember? the subject is supposed to be about how to do it — the video would still not really reassure us, because Fr. Cole doesn’t make distinctions on that point and doesn’t dwell on the often tampered-with necessity of the priest saying “I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Anyway, the main takeaway from this video, because it’s the main takeaway from the changes brought on by Pope Paul VI’s meddling, is, as I say, an insistence on the absence of form. In Confession, and this is my point, no one really knows how it should go and Fr. Cole does nothing to clear the problem up.

The absence of form results in an absence of meaning.

The faithful don’t really go to the sacrament much, for many reasons, some of them having to do with seldom if ever hearing about repentance or the necessity of salvation for eternal happiness and in part because it’s often not available; in short, because it is treated as having low meaning.

Father denigrates the quick confessions of the past in which we “blurt out some sins” and breezily emphasizes “savoring the moment” and other subjective, emotional responses we have come to expect from the upbeat Novus Ordo explainer, when really, what we find in the Church at large at this moment is banality tapering off to inevitable desuetude.

For real insight into how we got to this state of affairs and what motivated me to write about it, I heartily encourage you to read (or listen to) Peter Kwasniewski’s recent post, Why the Traditional Rite of Confession Is Superior to the New Rite: Both are valid, but the old rite is richer in theological and devotional content.

Tears came to my eyes towards the end, not because Dr. Kwasniewski emotes — he doesn’t — but because in a rational way, he opens up the beauties of what the Church offers us in this simple and wonderful sacrament, as found in the usus antiquior.

He says,

I have always been especially fond of the way the old rite closes the confession: instead of sending us off right away, the priest takes a moment to say the following prayer, so rich in meaning. In translation it reads: “May the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, the merits of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of all the Saints, whatever good you shall have done, and evil you shall have endured, be unto you for the remission of sins, an increase of grace, and the reward of eternal life. Amen.”

Dr. K develops the meaning of the old rite and helps us see that it doesn’t rest in the aspirational. It was and is real, tested, and preserved. And that is what makes it, paradoxically, so accessible for the feeble, bruised reed, after all.

Church interior with women at the confessional by Ludwig Passini

Not ready to subscribe, but enjoyed this post? How about this: