← The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
Day 198: Reconciliation with God (2025)
00:15:35
We continue our examination of the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. Fr. Mike emphasizes that sin, above all else, is an offense against God and his Church. It damages our communion with both. He also unpacks how important it is that God has extended his ability to forgive sins to his apostles and their successors. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 1440-1445.
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Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us revealed in scripture and passed down through the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a Year is brought to you by ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity in God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is day 198. You guys were reading paragraph 1440-1445. As always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the Foundations of Faith approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own Catechism in a Year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com ciy and you can also click Follow and also. Also you can click follow or subscribe to your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications. Today it's day 198. 200 is right around the corner. Reading paragraphs 1440 to 1445, what do we talk about today? We talked about penance, conversion, the last couple days. Today we're talking about the actual sacrament of penance and reconciliation. And so it's just only a couple paragraphs, right? 1440-1445. Well, tomorrow and the following days we'll talk about, okay, how, where did the sacrament come from? We'll talk about today where it comes from. But how did it develop over the course of the years? And what does a person do when it comes to confession? That's coming up in. In the future, tomorrow, the next day, the next day. Today we're just going to talk about, okay, what is sin? Only God forgives sins. And that when he reconciles us, when he forgives us, he brings us back to his heart, but he also brings us reconciliation with the Church. Now we're going to talk about that today. So let's just call upon our Father, call up in Jesus name and pray. In power of the Holy Spirit, Father in heaven, we give you praise and we thank you. We thank you for the fact that while we wander away from you, while, while we sin, while we say no to you, you never say no to us. You never reject us, you never stop calling us back to your heart. You never stop loving us. You always want us to receive your forgiveness. You always want to receive us back into your heart. Help us. Help us to. In our sins, to never stay away for long to never stay far from you. But in our sin, we ask that you please break through with the power of your spirit. Breakthrough with the your voice of grace, your voice that calls us home, that calls us back to you. Help us always say yes to you, especially after we have wandered far away. Call us home today. Bring us back now. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. It is day 198. We are reading paragraphs 1440 to 1445. The sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation Sin is before all else an offense against God, a rupture of communion with Him. At the same time it damages communion with the Church. For this reason, conversion entails both God's forgiveness and reconciliation with the Church, which are expressed and accomplished liturgically by the sacrament of penance and reconciliation. Only God forgives sin. Only God forgives sins, since he is the Son of God. Jesus says of himself, the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins and exercises this divine power, saying, your sins are forgiven. Further, by virtue of his divine authority, he gives this power to men to exercise in his name. Christ has willed that in her prayer and life and action, his whole Church should be the sign and instrument for the forgiveness and reconciliation that he acquired for us at the price of his blood. But he entrusted the exercise of the power of absolution to the apostolic ministry, which he charged with the ministry of reconciliation. The apostle is sent out on behalf of Christ with God, making his appeal through him and pleading be reconciled to God. Reconciliation with the Church during his public life, Jesus not only forgave sins, but also made plain the effect of this forgiveness. He reintegrated forgiven sinners into the community of the people of God, from which sin had alienated or even excluded them. A remarkable sign of this is the fact that Jesus receives sinners at his table, a gesture that expresses in an astonishing way both God's forgiveness and and the return to the bosom of the people of God. In imparting to his apostles his own power to forgive sins, the Lord also gives them the authority to reconcile sinners with the Church. This ecclesial dimension of their task is expressed most notably in Christ's solemn words to Simon, I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. The office of binding and loosing, which was given to Peter, was also assigned to the College of the Apostles, united to its Head, the words bind and loose. Whomever you exclude from your communion will be excluded from communion with God. Whomever you receive anew into your communion, God will welcome back into his. Reconciliation with the Church is inseparable from reconciliation with God. All right, there we are, paragraphs 1440-1445, talking about what sin is. Only God forgives sins. Reconciliation with the Church. Challenging at the same time, so consoling. Let's look at this. Okay, so it says here, sin is above all an offense against God, a rupture of communion with him. Of course, at the same time, it damages communion with the Church. Let's pause on this for just one second. One of the things that. Here the Church gives us this definition, sin above all else. It's not someone got hurt. You know, sometimes you have people who say things like, well, no one was hurt. How can that be wrong? It didn't affect you. Why does it matter? At the same time, we know that something isn't wrong because someone got hurt. A thing is a sin is not because someone was damaged. The thing is a sin above all else because it was prohibited by God or commanded by God, and I didn't do it. So sin is above all else, an offense against God. It's relationship. It's relational. That's one of the reasons why I will always come back to my. I guess maybe it's my personal definition of sin or my personal expression of what a sin is. Sin is saying. Basically saying to God, God, I know what you want. I don't care. I want what I want. God, I know what you want, but I want what I want. And just choosing, I'm going to do what I want to do. Why is that? The heart? I think it's the heart because it's an offense against God. It's the sense of. I know it's not an accident. Right? It's not a mistake. It's not. I was. I had to. It's. It's. I ha. I know what you want. And I'm gonna choose my will over your will. I'm gonna choose me over you. I'm gonna choose myself over love. And so it's a rupture of communion with God. I turn away from him and say, me, not you. I think it was CS Lewis who had said that those in heaven will forever. Will forever sing the words to the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, thy will be done. And those in hell are the ones to whom the Father says, okay, thy will be done. It's either us saying to the Father, thy will Be done. Or it's God saying, yeah, you get what you want, you got what you've chosen, your will. But it's not only an offense against God, it also at the same time damages communion with the Church. This is one of those things, things that I think it's mostly. It's so helpful for us if we could wrap our minds around this reality, so much would change. I mean, our approach to the church would change. Our approach to reconciliation would change. If we could understand that when you were. When you were baptized, you and I were baptized, we were brought not only into this incredible relationship with God the Father, we're made into God's sons and daughters, his adopted sons and daughters. We have temples of the Holy Spirit. We partake of the divine nature, all these transformations, but also we're brought into the family of God, brought into the body of Christ. We were made members of the church, which is truly a family and is truly a body. Therefore, when I sin, particularly when I sin in a mortal way, not only am I causing a rupture in my relationship with God, I am also causing a rupture in my relationship, my communion with the church. And both are incredibly serious. And both requirements forgiveness, and they require reconciliation. And I think. I think that, you know, there's a grace where. Of knowing the depths of my sin. There's a. There's a grace of knowing, yes, I've said no to the Lord, and here's what I've done. I've separated myself from God. I've cut myself off from the source of all life. There's. There's a grace of knowing that and letting that pierce our hearts. There's also an incredible grace of knowing that God, I don't belong to myself. Not only do I belong to God himself, but I'm a member of his family. I'm a part of his body, I'm a part of this church. And when I say no to the Father and I say no to the Church, I'm creating a division with me and God and me and the Church. Therefore, I need reconciliation with the church as well as reconciliation with the Lord. And that comes through who? That comes from God. As it says in 1441 and 1442, only God forgives sins. And yet what Jesus has done, we know this in 1442, we know this through Scripture. What Jesus has done, he has extended his power to forgive to human beings. He's given his apostles and their successors the power to exercise this ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation to the apostles and their successors, which is Remarkable. Remember we talked about how forgiveness is? I release you from your debt. So just by way of review, if I forgive someone, what we're saying is, okay, you owe me X, whatever X is, I forgive you. Meaning, not like I'm going to trust you completely again. Not that we're all good in the sense of our relationship has been restored, but in the sense that I'm not going to wait for you to pay me back. You owe me something and justice demands that you would pay that. But since you are either maybe unwilling, maybe unable of paying me back, I'm just going to release you from your debt. I'm not going to wait around waiting for you to pay me back. Therefore, I release you from your debt. Great. That's forgiveness. There is another step, and that step of reconciliation is now our relationship has been restored. Our relationship has been made new in an incredible way. So the example I think I had given is someone borrows your car, and when they borrow your car, they get in a wreck and the wreck costs you $1,500. And they say, I can't pay it. Okay, I'll pay that. I'll pay what you owe. And then I'm not going to make you pay me back because I release you from your debt, but I'm also not going to let you borrow my car again like that. There's such a thing as forgiveness without reconciliation. Same kind of thing. Like someone could have hurt you, gossip by gossiping. Maybe they hurt you, maybe even hurt you physically. You can say, okay, I release you from your debt because of what you said. There's a damage that justice would demand that you pay me back or what you did, you know, physically there's justice would demand that you pay me back. If I forgive you, I release you from what you owe me, but I'm not going to trust you again. I'm not going to have a relationship with you. You said those things about me. You did that thing to me. I don't need to have a relationship with you. And also, when we're not called necessarily to reconcile with everyone in that same sense where we bring them back into our trust, what the church does, and this is incredible, because what God does, though, what God does is he does bring us back into reconciliation. He does bring us back into relationship with him. That God, when He forgives us, he also restores us in our place in his body. He restores us in our place in his family. And he does this through the ministry of the sacrament of reconciliation and penance, which is just remarkable. Of course. Why can we even say that? Why can we even claim this? Well, Matthew, chapter 16. Jesus makes it very clear that he hands over to Simon Peter this office. I give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. What you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. And. And also gives that to the college of apostles, the other apostles, with Peter at its head. And that ability was given to the other apostles too, as well as to their successors. What's that mean? What does it mean to bind and loose? In paragraph 1445, it says the words bind and loose mean, whomever you exclude from your communion will be excluded from communion with God. Whomever you receive anew into your communion, God will welcome back into His. This is so important for us because it highlights the fact that. That God has not only extended the ability, the power that he alone can do, right? He alone can forgive sins, but he gives this ministry of forgiveness, this ministry of reconciliation to the apostles and their successors, right, the bishops and priests, but also that he gives them this authority. That is, if we've ever. I don't know if you've ever thought about this. The authority of whomever you exclude from your communion will be excluded from communion with God. And whomever you receive anew into your communion, God will welcome back into His. There's something so powerful about the authority that Jesus Christ has given to his Church. It's a scary authority, right? It is. I think any kind of authority in some ways can be intimidating. It can be. Can be scary because the more authority one has, the more responsibility to use that, well, a person has been given. But the last line of the entire reading for today, reconciliation with the Church is inseparable from reconciliation with God. You were brought into the Church at your baptism. You were brought into right relationship with God at your baptism. Therefore, to be brought into right relationship with God again after sin would also entail being brought into right relationship with the Church. This is so important for us to understand and to interiorize. It is easy. It's easy to say, I sinned against God, I'm going to go to God. It is more difficult to say, I've sinned against God and against the body of Christ on earth and against His Church on earth. Therefore, I will go to God, and I will also go to His Church. Yet this is how Jesus established this. Tomorrow we're going to talk about how do we actually do this? How does this get exercised? How do we take those steps? But right now, I just invite all of us to open our hearts to this reality that when God gives us his forgiveness, he gives us forgiveness through his church, and he gives us forgiveness in order to reconcile us not only to him and his heart, but also to his body, the church on earth. I hope that makes sense. Hope this wasn't like a totally chaotic and confusing day. It was one of those kind of days for me. I'm just like, well, let's. Let's try to muddle through the best we can. And here we are, the end of day 198. You guys, I am praying for you. Please pray for me. My name is Father Mike. I cannot wait to see you tomorrow. God bless.