Reconciled Numbers

by Fr. Roger Landry - March 27, 2009

Last Friday and Saturday, the Diocese of Fall River held its first ever Diocesan Reconciliation Weekend. As priests stepped into their confessionals and reconciliation rooms across the Diocese, none of us really knew what to expect.

I had high hopes because we had put in a lot of effort in preparation for it. At St. Anthony's in New Bedford, we put up posters at all the entrances two months ago. We printed an examination of conscience and lots of other material in the bulletin. We showed a video at all the Masses. I mentioned it in several homilies. We prayed for its success during the Sunday and weekday Prayers of the Faithful. We encouraged and tried to equip parishioners to go out to those who had been away from this sacrament or all the sacraments and invite them back. The Diocesan organizing team ran ads on radio stations and set up a website with various resources. Convents and monasteries were recruited to pray for those in need of the sacrament as well as for the priests God would want to use as instruments of his merciful love.

Since we had never tried such an outreach as a Diocese, however, no one really knew what the response would be.

At St. Anthony's, the Reconciliation Weekend began on Friday night after the Way of the Cross. Once the Stations were done, the Blessed Sacrament was exposed and the Chaplet of Divine Mercy was prayed. This is the great prayer that explicitly unites the sacraments of the Eucharist and Confession, as we offer to God the Father the body, blood, soul and divinity of his Son in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world. When Fr. Herbert Nichols and I entered the confessionals just before 7 pm, there were already about 20 people in line.

We were busy almost the entire two hours, hearing confessions in English, Portuguese, Spanish and French. It's no violation of the sacred seal of confession — which strictly prohibits a priest from revealing, even indirectly, the sins a person has confessed in the sacrament — to say that a sizeable number of the people we welcomed to the sacrament that first night hadn't been to confession in decades. I was privileged several times that first night to be the quiet witness of the torrent of tears that rained down on the other side of the screen, tears initially of sorrow that were transformed into irresistibly contagious tears of joy.

In order to help the Diocese determine whether we should repeat such Reconciliation Weekends in the future, the organizing committee had asked priests to keep a count of how many had come to receive the sacrament in each of the three two-hour sessions. The first night, Fr. Nick and I had been God's instruments to reconcile 52 of his sons and daughters.

The following morning I exposed the Blessed Sacrament about 10 am and began to pray back by the confessionals in case someone came early not wishing to be seen. At 10:25, the only people with me in the Church were those who had committed to come to pray for priests and penitents during the two-hour session and those who had volunteered to welcome people to the Church, help them with any questions and guide them toward the confessionals. I had begun to think that Friday night was a fluke. When Fr. Nick arrived a couple of minutes later, we both entered the confessionals. I had brought plenty of spiritual reading with me and it seemed that I might have a chance to get some of it done.

I actually didn't even have the chance to get through the first page.

Right after we entered the confessionals, the doors to the Church started opening. — and they continued to open until 12:27. It was a similar experience to Friday night with regard to the percentage of penitents who had been away from the practice of the faith and the sacrament of confession for many years. Several mentioned they had come to the sacrament because a family member or friend had encouraged them to take advantage of the Reconciliation Weekend. A few from a neighboring parish said it was their priest's powerful homily the weekend before. A couple of my own parishioners thanked me for showing the Reconciliation Weekend video the previous Sunday, which they said showed them that there was no reason to be afraid of the Sacrament. Between us, Fr. Nick and I heard 53 confessions in that second session.

After running over to the rectory for a quick sandwich while finishing my Sunday homily, I returned for the last two-hour period. When I got to Church, there were already a dozen people waiting. Fr. Nick and I went back to work. Most of my confessions in the afternoon were in Portuguese, which means that they were briefer, since most older Portuguese Catholics are experts in making a clear, contrite and complete confession in a very concise way. That meant that during the afternoon I actually had the time to pray Evening Prayer during the few times I could come up for air. Fr. Nick and I heard 48 in the final session.

Before the 4 pm Mass began, a parishioner approached me in the sacristy to ask how the Reconciliation Weekend had gone. She could tell I was exhausted but wondered whether I was a little dispirited. She had seen big numbers and expected me to be ebullient.

I replied that, on the one hand, I couldn't be happier because I had heard some of the most beautiful confessions of my priesthood and was thrilled for and because of the approximately 150 people who had come. On the other hand, I continued, I said I couldn't help but feel a little sadness that so many more had not come to receive the incredible wealth of God's forgiving love.

The analogy that immediately sprung to mind was that I was like a doctor with a cure for malaria in the midst of a malaria-infected people. I longed for everyone to come to be cured by the costly-acquired but freely-dispensed medicine, but only a fraction of the people who needed the remedy came.

I remained in a somewhat bittersweet mood until the following morning when, still thinking about the weekend during the early morning Mass when I should have been praying the responsorial psalm, I calculated the total numbers for the weekend at my parish. When I realized that the sum of 52, 53 and 48 was 153, the joy of Laetare Sunday and the Lord's great sense of humor quickly enveloped me.

153 is one of the most symbolic numbers of the New Testament. After the Resurrection, when St. Peter and six other apostles went fishing all night long on the Sea of Galilee but caught nothing, an incognito Jesus from the shore told them to cast their nets on the right side of the boat. They did and they caught such a haul of fish that they were not able to bring it on board. After dragging the contents ashore, they counted 153 fish.

The early saints of the Church saw great signficance in this number, because there were at the time of Jesus 153 nations in the world and, according to the Greeks, 153 different species of fish. To those who had been called to be fishers of men, this miraculous draught of fish, after much toil, was a symbol of an even greater catch that awaited them on a much larger sea.

Despite the fact that as a pastor and spiritual father, I still long for the day when all of my parishioners will come to receive the lavish riches of God's merciful love, I saw in the 153 who came a message of hope that this is just the beginning, that bigger catches await, and that we should, at the Lord's command, keep putting out into the deep.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.