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MAKING SENSE OF CONFESSION by

MAKING SENSE OF CONFESSION

By

Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 1968
Publisher: Franciscan Herald Press

At a moment when the practice of individual auricular confession itself is being attacked, it hardly seems appropriate to publish a book purporting to be ""a new approach for parents, teachers, and clergy"" to confession. Yet, the fact is that this is not ""a new approach"" at all, but rather an attempt to revive what must have been the original approach to the sacrament of penance; that is, to regard penance not as a rite of either symbolic or sympathetic magic, whereby the soul is purified by virtue of a special incantation, but as a joyful experience through which the Christian, by his own volition and through the mediation of the priest, is reconciled to God. The authors are concerned particularly with the formation in the young of a correct attitude toward confession, an attitude in which the abuses -- e.g., the push-button classification of sins, the ""compulsory"" confession, etc. -- are eliminated so that individual confession becomes what it must be: a healthful, psychologically tranquilizing, and spiritually strengthening encounter with a personal God. An excellent little book for Catholic parents with children of primary-school age.