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Show I A COMMON SENSE VIEW I OF THE CONFESSIONAL The Rev. Father Fidelis (James Kent Stone), C. P., during a recent mission to non-Catholics in Philadelphia, said: ''Protestants so often think confession was invented in-vented by the priests in order to have the people under un-der their thumbs "the poor priest-ridden people.', What bunglers these priests must have been to. put this practice on Catholics and forget to leave the burden off themselves! Even the Pope has to -o down on his knees before some humble J'riar or monk. and. if he makes a bad confession, and doesn't repent of it and make a good one, he is damned. Oh. if you only knew it. that burden of hearing confessions is the most terrible thing a priest has to do ! Sitting day after day. week after week, year after year, listening to tales of sorrow and crime, and doing the marvelous work of loosing loos-ing from sin ! "There is another objection, and' I am almost ashamed to touch publicly upon it the outcry against the iniinoralitv of the confessional. Well. I was a Protestant once, my. dear brethren, but i thank God 1 never said anything of that kind. There is something so low. so incredibly vulgar, not to say malicious, in respectable, well-educated and cultured ladies and gentlemen listening to the vile tales of so-called escaped nuns and unfrocked j priests and friars ! I "1 am speaking to you as an honest convert. When 1 was going to my first confession, previous to being received into the Church. I stopped off at Xewark to visit Rishop Bayley, afterward archbishop arch-bishop of Baltimore, himself a convert and former Episcopalian minister. 1 told him I was going to confession. 4 Von a-v going to the real thing now," he said; and I thought of that general confession .1 had so often' read when a Protestant: 'We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and there is no health in us.' etc. 1 thought of that sweet, familiar prayer. It is upon my mind now and it all comes back to me. How delightfully general that confession was! But now I had to go into my conscience and seek out the weeds of thirty years that had grown in the garden. When I got through I found it was the Teal thing;' and 1 felt so light and so happy that I might, with a good run. have jumped across the Schuylkill river." |