Dear Parishioners,

This Thursday March 31st, I am offering confessions at 6 pm (until 7 pm) in the confessionals that can be found in the chapel of the Church. Eucharistic Adoration also happens on Thursday. So, feel free to come worship Our Lord in the Church.

I know some of you do not like coming to confession because you have trouble discerning what your sins are. So, in order to help you, I would like to offer you a different kind of examination of conscience based around the seven capital sins. These sins are the tendencies (or vices) which cause all the other sins to happen.

• Pride is an excessive love of your own excellence. It can manifest as an inability to admit a weakness, a dwelling on the failings of others, refusing to learn from others, arrogance or contempt. If you react negatively to ever being questioned, you may suffer from pride. Another expression of pride is vanity. It is an excessive concern with what other people think of you. It manifests as making decisions based on how they appear, lying or exaggerating one’s goodness, or wasting time on appearances.
• Lust is a disordered desire for sexual pleasure, isolated from procreation and unity with ones spouse. People have this vice if they look at people lustfully, use them as objects of pleasure, view inappropriate material or engage in masturbation.
• Wrath is an undue desire for vengeance. A wrathful person harbors grudges and hatreds, is slow to forgive and easily loses their temper.
• Greed is an excessive love for possessions. It can appear in many forms, such as an unwillingness to give to others who need it, being resentful of those who have more resources, or wasting money.
• Envy is sadness over the happiness of others. It might lead to damaging the reputations of others in gossip, revealing secrets or despising others because of something good about them.
• Sloth is laziness, especially towards the things of God. It makes you not want to engage in your faith. If someone does not make knowing and loving God a priority in their life, misses Mass or daily prayer, purposefully distracts oneself from Mass, receives communion in a state of serious sin, neglects duties or doubts trust in God in times of difficulty, that person definitely suffers from sloth. Sometimes this vice is hidden by an industriousness in things that ultimately don’t matter.
• Lastly, Gluttony is the inordinate desire or focus, on food and drink. Someone may exercise this vice when they eat more than they need to, consume drink that is damaging, or fail to keep days of fasting or abstinence from meat.

If reading this list makes you feel guilty, then I have done my job as a pastor to point out what sins are. However, it is useless to feel guilty if you do not plan to do anything about it. So, please make time to come to confession either this Thursday or some other time in the future. Mercy is available to all who ask for it in the Sacrament of Confession.

God bless!

Fr. Carter