The Lenten period for penance started this week with Ash Wednesday and Catholic priests are happily bracing for long lines outside the confessional.

We are fractured sinners in need of a Savior. Prone to wander and slack in virtue, we may feel like the frailty of our flesh fails to match the zeal in our hearts. We are constantly invited to be made ...

I took my older children to Confession this afternoon. The lines were long with well over 100 people in attendance, and our wait for the Confessional was way beyond an hour and a half. The kids (ages ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. As a medieval historian, I study ways that community leaders used Catholic practices and institutions to respond to war and plague ...

For the Church’s first seven centuries, penance could be received no more than once in a lifetime. That policy dated back to the time of St. Peter. The New Testament tells us... - Published on August ...

On Sept. 14, Bishop Barry Knestout of Richmond, Va., celebrated a Mass of atonement in reparation for the sexual abuse and its cover-up by Catholic priests and prelates. In his homily, the bishop ...

One of the many deeply disturbing aspects of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has been the lack of discussion about penance. While public apologies from bishops who protected abusive ...

The penance called for in the Christian life, and accentuated during Lent, can help us make sense of the sacrifices we have been called on to make during the coronavirus pandemic, a Vatican cardinal ...