Word: sinner
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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...
...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...
...views on these issues would be interesting, and he should keep his nexus in mind. After all, there's more joy in heaven for one sinner who repents than for 99 who were right all along...
...tight-bunched look of Charles Bronson, but it is more than tough. The face shows weathered tension burying pure fear. You see him first kneeling at the altar, dwarfed in the dizzying bowels of the Catholic church. It is after confession, and Charlie is clealy no ordinary sinner, looking grimly pained as he repeats his dozen Hail Marys. The interior monologue begins: "They're just words, it's all bullshit, it's not for me," etc. The cliches are telling--in reality he is tyrannized by the church, tormented by guilt, terrified of hell. He thinks he's fighting back...
...reduce them to simple rules, and as quickly as possible to adopt these rules so as to be pleasing to everyone ... to become so pleasing that in the end I might openly act out my inherent baseness before the eyes of the world without forfeiting its love-the only sinner not to be roasted...