Can parishes be schools of forgiveness?

In Parish! (Crossroad, 1997), the Pulitzer-prize-winning story Of a vibrant Catholic community, Robert Keeler reports on the spirituality of St. Brigid's Parish in Westbury, New York. To a great extent, St. Brigid's presents a microcosm of what is occurring throughout the Catholic Church in the U.S. today. In this excerpt from the book, Keeler gives a glimpse of how a "good" Catholic parish, balancing the ideal and the real, struggles to foster a spirit of reconciliation in daily parish life.

The sacrament of Reconciliation is based on a mystery truly to be celebrated: the endless mercy and compassion of God, made visible in Jesus. But many Catholics approach it not as mercy to be celebrated but judgment to be feared. To many, it has been the scariest sacrament: a sweat-inducing ordeal in a dark, closetlike box, where the sinner kneels and waits for the sound of a small panel to be slid back, revealing behind a screen the fuzzy outline of a priest who may or may not act with compassion.

This accretion of dread around a sacrament of mercy has created a whole narrative genre for Catholics of a certain age: Confession Stories. Take Maggie McCartin, who helps to plan the weekly family liturgy at St. Brigid's. She can still recall a Confession she made three decades ago, in fourth grade. She and her younger sister, Eileen, had made chocolate-chip cookies. They'd eaten a lot of the batch as cookie dough, and when the cookies had come out of the oven, they'd set upon them voraciously. That night, their mother asked them to produce the dessert, but they had nothing to show for their labor.

"My mother sat us down and explained to us that this was a sin of gluttony," McCartin says. It was already too late that Saturday night to go to Confession, but the following Saturday, her mother drove them to Notre Dame Church in New Hyde Park and sat there to make sure they went into the box. "My knees were shaking when I was standing in line," McCartin recalls. "This was the worst sin I ever had to confess in my life." When they reached the confessional, Eileen went in on one side of the priest and Maggie on the other.

"I went first," McCartin recalls. She recited a thin litany of pallid childhood sins, then mentioned the gluttony. "He said, `Wait a minute, wait a minute. What was that?' He said, `How exactly did you do that?'" And when she explained, his reaction was swift. "He burst out laughing." At that moment, she might have been a bit humiliated, but he had helped her to put it into perspective. "It didn't harm me. I wasn't scarred by that. That's the way the church was."

But some people do carry away scars. "I can remember having a very bad experience as a child going to Confession," says Mary Kennedy, a co-coordinator of the parish's small Christian communities who still goes to Confession three or four times a year. "It upset me terribly, and it was a long time before I could really go to Confession. The priest was extremely nasty, and he screamed at me and yelled at me. He complained I was not speaking loud enough, and he couldn't hear me, and didn't I realize he had a war disability."

Priests themselves condemn that kind of behavior. When St. Brigid's associate pastor Father Bob Costa was in the seminary, one of his teachers offered this advice to any penitent who encounters an angry, abusive priest in the confessional box: "If a priest yells at you in Confession, get up and walk out. And if he asks you where you're going, tell him, I'm going to find a priest.'"

So, for Costa and many others, there is no excuse for harshness in the sacrament of God's gentle mercy. "If I'm a priest and I'm supposed to be there continuing the mission of Jesus and receiving sinners the way Jesus would receive them, how could I possibly yell at someone?" Costa says. "I also think it's a tragedy that people would deprive themselves of the benefit of the sacrament because one priest had a bad day and yelled at them."

The seriousness of the offense itself is no excuse for yelling. It would be a rare sinner who could present a priest with a sin so heinous that it hasn't come up before. "Within the first year I heard everything," Costa says. "I heard things I never thought I'd hear."

Father Claude D'Souza, who came to St. Brigid's in 1994 after serving in three other parishes since his arrival from India in 1983, approaches the sacrament as a healer--appropriate for the author of a book on Indian country medicine. He likes to tell penitents: "God is our father, not a tyrant." And when people come in after being away from the church, he reminds them about a Francis Thompson poem, "The Hound of Heaven," which depicts God as a relentless, loving pursuer. D'Souza tells them: "`God has caught up with you today. He is the one who has brought you to confess.' And they begin to weep."

Though in recent years the quantity of Confessions has declined, there are some good side effects. "What we call the quality of the Confession is vastly improved," says St. Brigid's pastor Msgr. Francis X. Gaeta. Instead of simply listing a "scorecard" of sins, he says, people are taking a more relational approach, examining more deeply how they have fallen short in their relationships with God, with the people in their lives, and with themselves.

With shorter lines and more use of face-to-face, priests can give more spiritual direction and guidance. "What's happening, I think, is that the rote Confession for many people is a thing of the past," says Father Peter Fink, who teaches sacramental theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology. "With the numbers diminishing, the context is becoming more and more conversational. I, as priest, can react to you according to your needs, not according to the line that's waiting outside." Fink believes that Confession has a significant role to play in a world where forgiveness is in short supply. "The real challenge and the real need of the sacrament is only secondarily that we be forgiven but primarily that it become a school of forgiveness, that we be formed into reconcilers," he says. "The only way I can forgive you is if I'm humble enough in my own life to feel as if I have been forgiven."

By Robert Keeler, religion writer for Newsday. This article is excerpted from his book Parish! Reprinted with permission from Crossroad Publishing. To order copies of the book, call 800-395-0690.