June 18, 2005
There are some things that I have a hard time talking about. Though I never shy away from religion or politics, since it usually leads to a deep conversation, there is something that I am quite shy about: confession penances. It seems that most people are like me. It takes a certain boldness that I have always been lacking to speak openly about such things. Maybe we don’t talk about it for the same reason we don’t talk about how we wash our laundry or the exciting details of taking out the trash.
I remember when I first started going to confession, wondering with great curiosity what my penance would be. When I received the normal “three Hail Mary’s”, I did not always know how to interpret it. Did Father think I couldn’t take a tougher penance? Did he think that I was delicate? Maybe my sins weren’t so bad after all. Other times I remember receiving some penances that I found quite curious. In fact, I wondered where some of them came from. After these penances (e.g. “smile at those you meet today,”) I found that I quite often wondered if I had accomplished the penance. I was once told by a priest that the penance must always be “do-able.” So if one was to receive one that was, for lack of a better word, bizarre, we could ask the priest to give us something more “normal.”
St Leopold Mandic was a Capuchin priest who spent 12 hours a day in the confessional for forty years! He was an apostle of God’s Mercy. At times he was criticized for being too lenient with his penances. A few Hail Mary’s would often be all he would give. I wondered many times if it was not so much that the penance was not being done, but that it was being done by the confessor. In our Franciscan tradition we freely take on the role of “eating the sins of the world”; but I know that this is not an exclusive vocation. The life of penance spoken of by Saint Francis is simply to live a life given to Jesus Christ – and this is something that I can always talk about.
Br. Agostino Miguel Torres, CFR
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