Tract 14: ConfessionConfession as Natural

When it comes to sacramental participation, the bad news is everywhere. For example, a poll for 2007 determined that 75 percent of American Catholic went to the sacrament of reconciliation less than once a year, or never.1 Given the sacrament's bad press-"Catholic guilt-tripping!"-and the universal mental barrier against discussing personal failings with someone else, it is not surprising that people have fled the confessional. Indeed, the wonder may be that people approached it in such numbers for so long.

And yet there is a great irony in our abandonment of this sacrament that seems so unnatural. The irony is that we are made to confess; it is built into our nature. In this sense, we are all daily confessants. These ordinary confessions happen in two ways: bodily and verbally.

Our bodies manifest ourselves constantly, whether asleep or awake. In fact, this constant confession is the one thing our bodies do perfectly, all the time, no matter our health or fitness. From the first moment of our life to our last breaths, our bodies continually make visible the persons that we are. While keeping us alive, and therefore in being-as Aristotle tells us, the "being" of living things "is to live"-the larger reason for our bodies is precisely this constant, personal confession.2 As Pope John Paul II argued, "The body expresses the person."3 The body's constant determination to reveal the invisible is one reason why the Pope said that the human body has a "quasi-sacramental" character.

1 Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, "Fewer Catholics Participating in Reconciliation," The Cara Report 12, no. 4 (Spring 2007).2 De anima 2.4.415b13.3 John Paul II, General Audience of October 31, 1979, in Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006), 154.

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Tract 14: Confession

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