A Good Lenten Message to Priests: Hear Confessions!

“Wait for faithful in the confessional,” Apostolic Penitentiary tells priests

Remember St. Jean Vianney who spent most of his day in the confessional:

My children, we cannot comprehend the goodness of God towards us in instituting this great Sacrament of Penance. If we had had a favour to ask of Our Lord, we should never have thought of asking Him that. But He foresaw our frailty and our inconstancy in well-doing, and His love induced Him to do what we should not have dared to ask. If one said to those poor lost souls that have been so long in Hell, "We are going to place a priest at the gate of Hell: all those who wish to confess have only to go out, " do you think, my children, that a single one would remain? The most guilty would not be afraid of telling their sins, nor even of telling them before all the world. Oh, how soon Hell would be a desert, and how Heaven would be peopled! Well, we have the time and the means, which those poor lost souls have not. And I am quite sure that those wretched ones say in Hell, "O accursed priest! if I had never known you, I should not be so guilty!" (Read more from this great saint here.)

Padre Pio was also a prisoner of the confessional:

"God runs after the most stubborn souls. They cost him too much to abandon them." 

"It is a tremendous responsibility to sit in the tribunal of the confessional." (Read more here.)

Thank God for "The light is on for you" initiative. Every Wednesday evening at every church in the Diocese of Arlington and Washington, D.C. a priest waits to hear confessions.

• Find a convenient Confession time in the Diocese of Arlington
• Find a convenient Confession time in the Archdiocese of Washington  

More Persecution Coming....

D.C.'s same sex marriage law is likely to pass which will herald a new level of persecution against Christians who refuse to kowtow to homosexual privileges. An amendment to protect the rights of Christians failed. The Washington Post reported today:

Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.

Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.

"If the city requires this, we can't do it," Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. "The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem." Read more here...

Let's pray the Archdiocese stands firm. Cooperation with evil is impossible. Better to lose all the government money and close up shop than to marry the devil. The Church in the U.S. has already compromised too much which explains the collapse of Catholic colleges who sold out for the feds thirty pieces of silver. Pray the archdiocese stands firm on this.