Whose Soever Sins Ye Shall Remit
The Sacrament of Penance is one of the seven Sacraments of the Church. We were taught the nature and purpose of each sacrament when we were in grade school, and then we go on to receive most of them during the course of our lives. When it comes to the divine institution of these sacraments though, many of us are a little vague about how and when they came to be. Most people tend to think that somehow the twelve Apostles were given the powers to effect all the sacraments at the time of the Last Supper, and this is not entirely wrong. However, they did not even know at that point what most of them were, and as we can see today, it was not until later that our blessed Lord made clear what powers they actually had.
The first part of today’s Gospel takes place on the evening of Easter Sunday, when all the remaining Apostles save one, Thomas, were witness to an apparition of the risen Lord. After proving who he was by showing them the wounds in his hands and side, he “breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye shall remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye shall retain, they are retained.” With this solemn declaration came the institution of the Sacrament of Penance, and a sinful mankind was given the great gift of being able to have their mortal sins forgiven sacramentally by a validly ordained priest.
Where would we be without this sacrament? How would we be able to save our souls without it? This is not an idle speculation in this day and age, where the availability of validly ordained priests may no longer be taken for granted. It is doubtful whether the priests ordained in the new rite of Vatican II are in fact validly ordained. Even the validity of many of our traditional priests can be called into question, when elderly bishops and their assistants often neglect the careful administration of the ancient ordination rites. And with the current lack of vocations, there is the definite possibility that sooner or later the time may come when there are no priests—valid or invalid—that we can turn to with the complacent assumption that we can have our sins forgiven.
One of our first duties as Catholics is to pray for more good priests. It is very difficult today for a young man with a vocation to find his way to the priesthood, and even harder to succeed in the priestly life without the solid support of the Church networks that used to exist. Our prayers must be all the more fervent today than ever they were in the past, because along with the gradual disappearance of the priesthood comes the inevitable problem of how to save our souls without the grace of formal absolution. This is no light matter, and one which puts our eternal salvation in peril.
If the worst should happen and we can find no priest to absolve us, our trust must then be transferred to God alone. An all-merciful Father will not abandon us to our mortal sins without any hope of forgiveness, and he will surely give us the graces at that time to seek and find his forgiveness directly through an Act of Perfect Contrition. His chastisement of mankind is not meant to make salvation impossible, and we must not lose faith in the fact that if it is God who gives to priests the power to forgive sins, then that same God most assuredly has that same power and more. All we need is to be sorry.