• The words, “I absolve you…” are essential!
  • Rite of Penance
  • Rediscovering the Rite of Penance – Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments

• Is Judas in Hell? by Fr. Hugh Barbour O. Praem.

• Lighting Up is Not a Sin by Fr. Hugh Barbour O. Praem.

The Sacrament of Penance as the “second plank”

The Roman Catechism cites St. Jerome who called the Sacrament of Penance the “second plank” after Baptism. Several of the Church Fathers said the same thing, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

1446 Christ instituted the sacrament of Penance for all sinful members of his Church: above all for those who, since Baptism, have fallen into grave sin, and have thus lost their baptismal grace and wounded ecclesial communion. It is to them that the sacrament of Penance offers a new possibility to convert and to recover the grace of justification. The Fathers of the Church present this sacrament as “the second plank [of salvation] after the shipwreck which is the loss of grace.”

St. Thomas Aquinas summarized this idea in his Summa Theologiae:

Jerome says (Ep. cxxx) that “Penance is a second plank after shipwreck.”…it is called metaphorically “a second plank after shipwreck.” For just as the first help for those who cross the sea is to be safeguarded in a whole ship, while the second help when the ship is wrecked, is to cling to a plank; so too the first help in this life’s ocean is that man safeguard his integrity, while the second help is, if he lose his integrity through sin, that he regain it by means of Penance. [S.T. 3rd Part, Q. 84, Art. 6]

Examination of Conscience in the Spiritual Exercises

Examination of Conscience for Adults and Teens (Fathers of Mercy)

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