The best way to prepare our souls for the coming of the Lord is to prepare well for Confession. The need for this sacrament, a source of grace and mercy throughout our lives, is especially evident at this time when the Church's liturgy urges and encourages us to await Christmas.
She helps us to pray, asking: Lord God, who sent your Son into this world to free mankind from the ancient slavery of sin, grant us who devoutly await his coming the grace of your sovereign forgiveness and the reward of true freedom.
Confession is also the sacrament, together with the Holy Eucharist, that prepares us for the final encounter with Christ at the end of our existence. Our whole life is a continuous Advent, a waiting for the final moment for which we never cease to prepare ourselves day after day. We are comforted by the thought that it is the Lord himself who ardently desires us to be with him in the new earth and the new heaven that he has prepared for us.
Every well-made Confession is an impulse we receive from the Lord to move forward, without discouragement, without sadness, free from our miseries. And Christ tells us again: Have confidence, your sins are forgiven, my child, start again..
It is He Himself who forgives us after we humbly confess our sins. We confess our sins “to God Himself, even though in the confessional it is a man-priest who hears them. This man is the humble and faithful servant of that great mystery which has been realized between the returning son and the Father.”
"The causes of evil are not to be sought outside of man, but above all within his heart. The remedy also comes from the heart. Therefore, Christians, through sincerity in their own commitment to conversion, must rebel against the flattening of man and proclaim with their own lives the joy of true liberation from sin (...) through sincere repentance, a firm resolution to amend their lives, and a firm confession of their faults."
For those who have fallen into mortal sin after Baptism, this sacrament is as necessary for salvation as Baptism is for those who have not yet been regenerated to supernatural life: “it is the means of satisfying man with the justice that comes from the Redeemer himself.” And it is so important to the Church that “priests may be obliged to postpone or even abandon other activities for lack of time, but never the confessional.”
All mortal sins committed after Baptism, and the circumstances that modify their species, must pass through the tribunal of Penance, in an auricular and secret Confession with individual absolution.
The Holy Father JPII asked us all to do everything in our power “to help the ecclesial community fully appreciate the value of individual Confession as a personal encounter with the merciful Savior who loves us, and to be faithful to the Church's guidelines on a matter of such importance.”
“We cannot forget that conversion is an interior act of special depth, in which man cannot be substituted by others, cannot be ‘replaced’ by the community.”