Conditions for a good confession

God's mercy is infinite; inexhaustible "is the promptness of the Father in welcoming the prodigal children who return home. Infinite are the promptness and the power of forgiveness that continually flow from the sacrifice of his Son. No human sin can prevail over this power or even limit it. On the part of man, it can only be limited by his lack of good will, his lack of promptness in conversion and penance, that is to say, his persistence in obstinacy, opposing grace and truth " Only we can prevent that gaze of Jesus, which heals and liberates, from reaching the depths of our souls.

As we come to know the Lord better and follow in his footsteps, we feel a greater need to purify our souls. For this we must take care of each confession, avoiding routine, deepening our love and pain. To delve as if each confession, always unique, were the last one; keeping away from haste and superficiality. For that we will keep in mind those five necessary conditions for a good confession, that perhaps we learned when we were small: examination of conscience, humble, made in the presence of God, discovering the causes, and perhaps the habits, that have motivated those faults; the pain of sins, contrition, fruit of a deep and humble examination, with a deeper sense of what is a sin: An offense to the Lord, and not only a human error or a lack of efficacy; a concrete and firm purpose of amendment, which is intimately united to the sorrow of sins and which is often the index of a good confession; confession of sins, which consists of a true accusation of the fault committed, with the desire to be forgiven, and not a more or less general account of the situation of the soul or of the things that concern us. Meditating on the fact that it is the Lord himself who, through the priest, forgives us, will lead us to be very sincere, as much as we would like to be at the last moment of our life; to fulfill the penance, by which we associate ourselves to Christ's infinite sacrifice of atonement. This penance imposed on us by the priest - so maternally mitigated by the Church - is not simply a work of piety, but atonement, reparation and satisfaction for the guilt contracted.


Let us not fail to have frequent recourse to this source of divine mercy, for often, perhaps in small ways, we separate ourselves from the Lord. Let us ask Our Lady, the refuge of sinners - our refuge - to help us to confess ever better. And let us also think of the great work of mercy that we carry out when we help a friend, a relative or an acquaintance to recover or increase, through the reception of this sacrament, the supernatural life of his or her soul.

Hablar con Dios