Word: sacrament
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...your article "When to Confess [Sept. 3]." I am 14 and have been raised a Roman Catholic, but I haven't been to confession for a year and a half, purely because I no longer believe in it. The idea that the Vatican disapproves of waiting for the sacrament of penance till a child is nine or ten burns me up. I know the definition of sin; yet I have no sense of sin. I ask God for forgiveness at least once a week for all my sins, consciously or unconsciously committed. When I used to go to confession...
Thus, for roughly half a century, young Catholics were initiated into the sacrament of penance and its promise of forgiveness from God. The results, many Catholic educators agree, were often disastrous. Some young penitents became haunted by the fear of mortal sin and going to hell. Others developed false consciences, accusing themselves of sins that were only the harmless exuberances of a child. Still others dreaded the whole experience so fiercely that they gave it up for good as soon as they were able to. Those who continued to receive the sacrament were sometimes spiritually stunted, unable to go beyond...
Wright's opponents concede-indeed insist-that confession must never be denied to a child who is ready for it. But they also maintain that a child cannot be required to receive the sacrament unless he is conscious of serious sin. Jesuit Francis Buckley of the University of San Francisco points out that canon law itself defines the age of reason differently for the reception of the Eucharist and penance...
...Roman Catholics who have divorced and remarried have rarely had the official sympathy of their church. Indeed, unless the first marriage can somehow be proved invalid, the second union is considered to be no marriage at all, and canon law bars the partners from the sacrament of the Eucharist. Even so, there has been one slight softening in Rome's attitude. A recent letter to the world's bishops promises that the Vatican will soon amend a canon law that forbids Catholic funeral services -or even burial in consecrated ground -to "public sinners," a category that has often...
...believe in the necessity of a personal "Baptism in the Holy Spirit" in order to lead a fully Christian life. The initiate undergoes this "Spirit Baptism" by visiting a Pentecostal meeting at which other participants join in a laying on of hands. For Catholics, this is not a new sacrament, nor does it supersede the rituals of Baptism and Confirmation; rather, as a Charismatic bishop says, it "makes them operative...