Word: confessionally
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...first things Roman Catholics do when they enter the confessional is utter how long it has been since their last confession. But Franca Gargiulo can't remember the last time. Gargiulo is a spiritually thoughtful woman who went to Catholic school as a girl and at 44 still attends Mass at St. Dominic Catholic Church in San Francisco. Confession--telling your sins to a priest and receiving absolution--is one of her faith's seven sacraments, but for Gargiulo it now seems as anachronistic as prayer veils and meatless Fridays. "It lost its efficacy for me," says Gargiulo...
Increasingly, it seems the only thing U.S. Catholics confess these days is that they rarely if ever confess. In a 2005 survey by the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate at Georgetown University, 42% said they never go to confession. Only 14% said they go once a year, and...
...revival effort has a long way to go. Confession has been in steady decline for decades. Reasons range from long-standing doubts about church teachings to the current obsession with public mea culpas that have largely supplanted the confessional booth. One oft mentioned cause is Vatican II, the 1960s church council whose reforms stressed what Pope John XXIII called "the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity." Since confession, with its accompanying penances, is all too often associated with the latter, many Catholics use Vatican II as a cue to scratch the sacrament from their to-do list. Some...
He has not been shy about admitting to his crimes. Pichuzkin detailed his exploits in a televised confession that aired shortly after his arrest in June 2006, following a five-year stretch of killings that plagued the neighborhoods around Moscow's vast Bitzevsky Park. "For me, a life without murder...
The police, who arranged for the airing of the confession, were at first skeptical of Pichuzkin's stories. But three of the homeless men he chucked into the sewer survived; and one was lucid enough to identify Pichuzkin and to corroborate his modus operandi. And Pichuzkin's final victim - a...