Word: confessionals
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...sacrament of penance, known more familiarly to Roman Catholics as "confession," has fallen on lean days. Where quiet lines of penitents once gathered to wait near the confessional boxes on a Saturday, a priest may now sit on the church steps waiting wistfully for even one sinner to show up. The reasons for the sacrament's neglect are probably many: a severe drop in church attendance, a new theology of sin that does not stress the damning "mortal" sins of pre-Vatican II days, an avoidance of confession by some who practice contraception, or an increasing reluctance to enter...
...entire group. A variation sanctioned by the church-a combination of a communal celebration of the sacrament with brief individual confessions and absolution -has won wide acceptance in many U.S. parishes. As for more leisurely individual confessions that require some counseling, many penitents have in recent years shunned the confessional to meet their priest in more normal surroundings-in a parish office, for instance-for a face-to-face talk...
The document approves warmly of communal rites, which the Vatican seems to want to establish as the basic, most common form of the sacrament. But those congregational celebrations, the rules insist, must incorporate individual confession and individual absolution for each penitent-a somewhat cumbersome procedure. General absolution is in most...
The humor Wright injects into his five cartoons a week is chiefly black. His work schedule is no laughing matter either. He gets to the office each day by 10 a.m., hoping to settle on a subject by noon and an idea of treatment by midafternoon. After showing a preliminary...
Meeting with Republican Congressmen at the White House last week, the President of the U.S. made a painful confession. As a "political realist." Richard Nixon acknowledged, "I might be a liability and not necessarily an asset in the [1974] election."