QuickPod: How to Make a General Confession
How do you make a lifetime confession? Start with sorrow for your sins.
How do you make a lifetime confession? Start with sorrow for your sins.
This was an email I received from out of country. He gave me permission to reproduce it below under condition of anonymity. I changed his name and retracted the country of origin: Dear Father Nix, Here in COUNTRY-X, the government have banned all baptisms, and, by extension, all receptions into the Church. The bishops'conference have followed suit issuing their own edicts to this effect. There is, at the time of writing, no end date in sight for these measures, or even a vague time frame. Two catechumens, one whom was being prepared for unconditional Baptism, and the other who was being prepared to be received (with conditional Baptism), have asked [...]
On tonight's podcast, I am joined by a nurse working in an ICU treating many coronavirus patients and a physician elsewhere who probably has coronavirus himself. We put into layman's terms COVID-19's common symptoms and treatments. Dr. Matt mentions the dashboard map of Johns Hopkins University.
The ABCs of Salvation is: A) Ask for Faith. B) Baptize. C) Confess. This is what a priest needs to think of every time he goes outside, every time he faces an emergency, every time he thinks of COVID-19.
Part I: A Night on the AmbulanceN.B. You can skip Part I if you do not want my real-life account of EMS from 20 years ago that got me thinking about the mystical body of Christ’s “anatomy.” The theology of this blog post is found exclusively in Part II: An Analogy In the Mystical Body. But Part I here does describe an epic fail in my life... While pre-med at Boston College, I worked as an EMT at night. Upon graduation, I returned back to Denver and went to paramedic school while discerning if I should continue in medicine or if I was in fact called to the Holy Priesthood. [...]
For probably over 1000 years, these are the last prayers any Catholic would hear at the moment of death, prayed by the priest after both extreme unction and the Apostolic Pardon. These prayers are known as the Commendation of the Soul, the Litany for the Dying, The Three Prayers for Mercy and the Prayers at the moment of Expiration. P/C Fr. Richard Heilman.
In the photo above, a priest baptizes a baby that will be raised by two women. This took place at St. Cecilia’s in California on 7 May 2017. P/C USA Today’s Desert Sun. When a large homeschooling family brings their 9th baby to be baptized, that infant, at the moment of baptism, dies to the original sin in which it was born, comes out of the water risen with Jesus Christ and is a tabernacle of the Blessed Trinity, now beginning life as a son or daughter of God. When two same-sex guardians bring an infant to be baptized, that infant, at the moment of baptism, dies to the original [...]
The sacrament of penance, also called the sacrament of reconciliation (or confession) has four necessary parts, three of which are on the part of the penitent: 1) contrition (sorrow) 2) confession of sins (to a priest, in person) and satisfaction (also called your penance, done outside the confessional.) The one aspect of a good confession executed by the priest is absolution (provided the priest has judged the penitent worthy of absolution.) Last year during Lent, I gave a sermon called How to Make a Good Confession found on both my podcast and Sensus Fidelium's YouTube on these external parts of confession. Since then, I have started to read the Catechism of Pope [...]
Sermon for the 15th Sunday After Pentecost.
Any species of animal must have a formation commensurate to its nature. We are humans with a human nature, but we are called to participate in the Divine Nature through baptism. How can our formation equal the grace already transmitted in the sacraments? Two ways: 1)To live according to the spirit, not the flesh (Romans 8) and 2) To go to the mother who singularly formed the human nature of the God-man.