The lenten journey includes penance. For Christians, this necessarily involves the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, in obedience to the love and infinite concern of our Savior who instituted it for the sake of his People. It was God's will that his children freely drink of his mercy by confessing their sins to the properly ordained ministers of forgiveness in his Catholic Church, for it was Jesus who breathed on his apostles and said: "Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained" (Jn 20:22-23).
In his apostolic exhortation Reconciliation And Penance, John Paul II notes "that for a Christian the sacrament of penance is the primary way of obtaining forgiveness and the remission of serious sin committed after baptism. Certainly the Savior and his salvific action are not so bound to a sacramental sign as to be unable in any period or area of the history of salvation to work outside and above the sacraments. But in the school of faith we learn that the same Savior desired and provided that the simple and precious sacraments of faith would ordinarily be the effective means through which his redemptive power passes and operates. It would therefore be foolish, as well as presumptuous, to wish arbitrarily to disregard the means of grace and salvation which the Lord has provided and, in the specific case, to claim to receive forgiveness while doing without the sacrament which was instituted by Christ precisely for forgiveness" (31).
Thanks to F. K. Bartels, Catholic Online
See article here.
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