Word: sacrament
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...receive it with a pure heart." Again he offered his empathy for "those who cannot have Communion due to their situation," and urged them to nonetheless "find strength" in attending Mass, even if they must stay in the pews when their fellow parishioners approach the pulpit for the sacrament...
...value as a receptacle of culture - and we cherish its quieter value as a place to ponder deeper questions than our inane media consider, and to mark life from baptism to burial. Perhaps most important, it's where and how Catholics receive the redemptive tonic of the Eucharist, a sacrament that so palpably but transcendentally expresses Christianity's faith that in the end, despite life's suffering, light always defeats darkness...
...best-known traditions has finally gotten alarming enough that bishops have begun turning to modern marketing tools to reverse it. "Confession isn't about rationalizing or explaining away the wrongs we do," says Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl, who has used radio commercials and billboard ads to promote the sacrament in his archdiocese. "It's about having the courage to admit them and experience the healing forgiveness that's waiting...
...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 also cite Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), which reaffirmed the church's ban on contraception. Because few U.S. Catholics consider birth control immoral, Humanae Vitae has led to a wider re-evaluation of what constitutes sin--and whether confession...
...church's sexual-abuse scandal has also taken its toll. Catholics felt that the bishops--many of them accused of enabling pedophile priests--were arrogantly evading the same kind of penance they demand from their flocks. "The very teachers of the sacrament of confession seemed to be ignoring a constitutive part of that sacrament," says the Rev. James Martin, associate editor of the Jesuit-run magazine America. "It made the confession crisis worse." Wuerl, who in fact was praised for taking a hard line on abusive priests, concedes that those are "significant issues." But he also believes that Catholics...