Angelus News | January 14, 2022 | Vol. 7 No. 1

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Making mercy accessible St. Pope John Paul II and the apostolate of confession. BY MIKE AQUILINA A couple of years ago — when there were Catholic conferences attended by many people — I volunteered to man the book table at one in my city. It was a wonderful event, attended by hundreds. And the organizers made sure that priests were available for confession throughout the day. My table was the last, nearest to a conference room that had been repurposed as a confessional. Well, soon after the conference began, a woman came out Pope John Paul II gives confession at St Peter’s Basilica on April 9, 2004, in Vatican City. | ARTURO MARI/VATICAN POOL, GETTY of the room, and she stopped at my table. She leaned in as if she had a secret. She said, “There are no lines right now. You can go right into confession!” I thanked her. Then I saw her go to the next table and repeat the big secret: “There are no lines. …” And then she went to the next table. And the next. 10 • ANGELUS • January 14, 2022
By the time she got to the end, there was a line. St. Pope John Paul would have approved. He loved the sacrament of confession. He loved it as a penitent. He loved it as a confessor. As a penitent he loved it by going frequently. He went at least once a week, his secretary, Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz recounted. “He would also confess before major feast days and special liturgical seasons.” As a priest, he knew that the confessional was important to his life and ministry. He said, “It is in the confessional that [a priest’s] spiritual fatherhood is realized in the fullest way. It is in the confessional that every priest becomes aware of the great miracles which divine mercy works in souls which receive the grace of conversion.” We can trace Pope John Paul’s love for confession to a special grace he received when he was young. It happened in 1947, less than a year after his priestly ordination. His bishop, Cardinal Adam Sapieha, assigned him to pursue studies in Rome, and gave him extra money for travel in Europe. So, before classes started, Father Wojtyła (as he was then known) St. John Vianney, pictured in a stained-glass window, is widely known to Catholics as the Curé of Ars, who won over the hearts of his villagers in France by visiting with them, teaching them about God, and reconciling people to the Lord in the confessional. | CNS/CROSIERS made a pilgrimage to France and stopped in the town of Ars, where St. John Vianney had served as parish priest in the 19th century. There he saw the small confessional where the Curé of Ars would sit sometimes for 18 hours a day. He heard the story of the tens of thousands who traveled to the rural parish to confess their sins — 80,000 came in the year 1858 alone. Trains had to accommodate the priest’s popularity by adding a stop in the middle of nowhere. The local government had to build a new station to accommodate the trains. The young priest was so deeply moved that he resolved to be like St. John Vianney. He would make himself a “prisoner of the confessional,” always available to penitents. And he would awaken in his congregations a strong desire for the graces available in the sacrament. In less than two years Father Wojtyła received his first parish assignment back in the Archdiocese of Kraków, and he made good on his resolution. His biographer George Weigel said that Father Wojtyła “was, by the testimony of his penitents, a ‘fantastic confessor.’ ” Confession with Father Wojtyła “could last as long as an hour, sometimes even longer.” Father Wojtyła came across not as a judge but rather a guide and friend. This ran contrary to his training. In seminary, he had been schooled in manuals that were juridical in their approach and deliberately positioned the priest-confessor as a judge. But he concentrated on the human person rather than the transgression. He was attentive and prayerfully involved in the sacrament. He was, Weigel said, “a demanding confessor but in a very different way.” “The goal was to deepen one’s Christian conviction and insight, not simply to internalize a checklist of moral prohibitions. The rules were there; they were real; they were to be obeyed. But the rules were not arbitrary. They defined the drama because they illuminated the dramatic tension in life, the tension between the person-I-am and the person-I-oughtto-be. The confessor was to be a counselor in the practice of the virtues.” Unfortunately for his congregation, Father Wojtyła did not remain a parish priest for long. Pope Pius XII appointed him an auxiliary bishop at a very young age — only 38. And January 14, 2022 • ANGELUS • 11
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Angelus News | January 14, 2022 | Vol. 7 No. 1

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