Bishop advises against frequent confession

A reader sent me a link to this article.

Bishop Kieran Conry of Arundel and Brighton has suggested it is not a good idea to go to Confession regularly.

The bishop made the comment in a frank interview with The Catholic Herald in which he defended “green” youth liturgies and said Humanae Vitae, the encyclical that forbade married couples from using contraception, “could be” wrong because it was not infallible teaching.

Doesn’t it just warm your hearts to know that there are bishops who doesn’t know the difference between the Ordinary and the Extraordinary Magisterium? Hey the Church has never made an infallible definition on infanticide, racism, or genocide so your thinking that these are immoral “might be” wrong.

When asked if he thought regular Confession was a good idea, the bishop said: “No, because my own experience when we had Confession every day at St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham was that regular penitents came back with exactly the same words week after week. So there you would say, actually, there is no conversion taking place.”

Concerning the grace you receive in sacramental confession – fuggetaboutit! If you are not instantly cured from habitual sin there is no reason to keep trying. We should be able to give a good confession, receive absolution, and then be canonized! Otherwise no conversion is taking place and we should just give up if we have the same laundry list of sins from week to week.

Now we certainly require the proper disposition to more fully receive the fruits of the sacrament of confession. That certainly even with frequent reception of this sacrament that we can block grace and being complacent by not really preparing ourselves for grace and acting on the grace given.

I do find it odd that those who seem to have a problem with frequent reception of the Sacrament of Reconciliation at the same time don’t seem to have a problem with everyone going to Communion. The Eucharist is a power hose of the sacraments and since the world isn’t brimming with saints I guess “no conversion” is taking place and we should stop having frequent reception of the Eucharist by this logic.

I also noticed he mentioning of using to have daily confession. I guess there like so many places in the world now that I guess people are not sinning anymore and so don’t need more access to the sacrament.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church encourages regular Confession but says that Catholics are only required to confess once a year.

Bishop Conry also suggested that there should be a greater emphasis on charity rather than on contraception.

“The birth control issue becomes easy because it’s measurable. You do it or you don’t do it. But love: you do it or you don’t do it, how can you measure that? We fight the easy battles but we ignore the bigger ones,” he said.

How about both/and here and beside contraception is not opposed to charity. It is a lack of charity that leads to contraception in the first place. The view that a potential child is a nuisance is about as uncharitable as they come. Being open to the gift of children is both charitable and an act of responding to God’s will. And as for “a greater emphasis on charity rather than on contraception” – it would be hard to have a lesser emphasis on something than contraception from the pulpit. Contraception has become the Lord Voldemort of sins. “The-Sin-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

But Bishop Conry criticised environmentalists who attacked the Church’s teaching on contraception.
He said: “You get people like George Monbiot saying: ‘If the Pope changes his position tomorrow, the world would be rid of the scourge of Aids.’ He’s talking nonsense.”

Exactly right.

On the traditional Latin Mass the bishop said he thought it was “a bit over the top” but that he had never tried to restrict it in any way.

He said that traditionalists in England and Wales were “a small group of very vocal people” and that Summorum Pontificum, which allowed priests to celebrate the traditional Mass without the permission of a bishop, did not introduce “significant change”.

Bishop Conry, who is supervising youth ministry after the closure of Catholic Youth Services, also said the Church had to speak to young people in their own language.

He argued that talking about faith in the context of climate change was likely to be more effective than addressing salvation or repentance.

“You can’t talk to young people about salvation,” he said. “What does salvation mean? My eternal soul? You can only talk to young people in young people’s language. If you’re going to talk to them about salvation, the first thing they will understand is saving the planet.”

Yeah young people can’t handle the Gospel. This is exactly the type of thinking that has worked so well in the last 40 years! 40 years of catechetical desert. Sure as St. Paul said we have to be fed milk first, but milk is substantive and you are nourished by it. Preaching the Gospel in the context of climate change is one of the sillier statements I have run across. What exactly is the context? That saving your soul is related to saving the planet? Call me a soulamentalist, but I believe saving your soul is the most important thing, While being a good steward of the environment is being thankful to God for his creation I don’t think climate change hysteria (the new Millenialists) is the proper context for teaching Christ crucified. Pope Benedict has talked about using the context of ecology to explain how respecting the inherent laws of creation as a way of what is seeing what is good or bad. On the occasion he made these remarks on teaching young people he first started with a philosophical explanation of conscience and natural law. We can certainly pull examples from the world around us to explain the moral law and our need for redemption, but we must explain the moral law. Young people deserve the respect to be talked to seriously and not talked down to.