Word: priestly
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Despite church disapproval, some Catholics have chosen to think of the new penitential prayers in the Mass as their "confession." Others, particularly on college campuses and in progressive parishes, have been taking part in unauthorized communal rites of penance, acknowledging their sins inwardly while a priest gives "general absolution"-a sort of blanket forgiveness-for the 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...
Last week the Vatican issued a long set of new rules formalizing some of the experiments but sharply limiting others. For individual confessions, the rules encourage the use of a room set aside for the purpose, require that the priest greet the penitent warmly with a reminder of God's forgiving nature, and read a passage of Scripture with a reconciliation theme. The new norms stress the sacrament as a rite of "reconciliation" between the sinner, his neighbor and his God, and try to give that conciliatory flavor to the encounter between priest and penitent...
...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 cases forbidden. To the disappointment of liberals, it will be largely confined to mission areas, where a single priest may have to deal with large crowds of penitents in limited time...
...take a different line: recent C.O.G. immigrants to France, where their name is les Enfants de Dieu, have taken Berg's advice to woo Roman Catholics, whom he admires as doctrinaire soul mates. ("Kiss the Pope's foot if necessary," he advises.) It has apparently worked: a priest at Notre Dame found them lodgings near the famed cathedral, and Le Monde's religion writer lauded the spontaneity and faith of "the missionaries in blue jeans...
...putative monarchs include a Jesuit teacher-priest, a publisher, a salesman for Lockheed Aircraft and the nephew of Terence O'Neill, the former Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. Most are businessmen, bankers or gentlemen farmers, living, if not in castles in Spain, on the palpable hope of restoration as well as on decent incomes. Not one appears to be a dimwit, a dinosaur or a debauchee or even a gossip-column item. Perhaps the one who conies closest to being a gay blade is Prince Louis-Ferdinand, 66, grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II and claimant to the empire...