Repentance: All Are Called

Our Salvation Depends On It!

Every Christian has heard, at some point, the call  to repentance. Whether our conscience has been prodded by a sermon, a good book or even a movie.

Asked to define it, most of us would say something like “that is where we tell God we are sorry for our sins and promise to be good in future”.

Hmm. Let’s explore a little further.

The other word we hear in connection with this topic is ‘contrition’.

St Thomas Aquinas has, as always, great insights for us on contrition in the Summa Theologica:

• Contrition is sorrow for sin. It is not grief by reason of punishment due to sin, but grief for the sin itself which deserves punishment.

• Contrition is sorrow in the will for what the will has done amiss. Hence, contrition does not include in its scope the original sin which the sinner has not committed by bad use of will, but has inherited by infected nature.

• Contrition is a word which means a crushing of what is hard and evil out of the will. Every actual sin is a kind of hardness in the will, and this must be crushed out. Hence, we have need of contrition for every actual sin.

• Contrition as a part of the virtue of penance looks to the past. A person must have contrition for the sins he has already committed, for it is these that have caused the hardness in his will which contrition crushes out. Contrition as such does not refer to future sins, yet it disposes a person to watchfulness against them. Contrition belongs to the virtue of penance; caution with regard to future sins belongs to the virtue of prudence as conjoined with penance.

• We cannot have contrition for the sins of others, but only for our own sins. We should, indeed, grieve for the sins of others, but this grief is not contrition.

• A person must have contrition for each mortal sin he has committed; he must confess each one and therefore he must have contrition for each one.

St Thomas instructs us further on the degrees of contrition:

1. Contrition is the greatest sorrow, for it is based on the greatest charity, that is, the soul’s supernatural love and friendship with God. Sin is the greatest of evils; the sorrow which crushes it out of the soul is the greatest sorrow. Contrition is, indeed, not felt as the keenest sorrow in the sensitive part of a man, but as an act of the penitent’s will it is the deepest sorrow of all.

2. In the sentient order, grief for sin may be excessive. It is not right or reasonable to become emotionally distrait, even over sin. True contrition is in the will; here, it cannot be too great. But its sentient reaction must be regulated by reason, so that the sinner retains calmness and patience.

3. Sins have degrees of evil in them; one is worse than another. Therefore sorrow for one sin may, and sometimes should, be greater than sorrow for another.

So we understand better what it must mean for us to be sorry for our sins, to be contrite of heart, to make an act of contrition.

So what is ‘repentance’ and how is it different from ‘contrition’?

Let us reflect for a moment on the following extracts from a sermon by St John Vianney on Passion Sunday:

To make you fully understand what repentance, i.e. the pain which our sins should cause our conscience, means, I would have to show you on the one hand the abhorrence which the Lord has for them, and the torments which He had to suffer to gain pardon for them from God the Father, and on the other hand the blessings we lose by committing sin, and the evils which we bring down upon ourselves in the next world; but no man will ever be able to understand this fully.

…

Yes, my Lord, I know whence it comes and who bestows it. It comes from heaven, and Thou dost bestow it, O Lord. Oh, my Lord, we implore Thee, bestow it upon us, the repentance which crushes and devours our heart; this beautiful repentance which disarms God’s justice and changes an eternity of misery into eternal bliss.

Oh, beautiful virtue, how necessary thou art, and how seldom to be found! And yet, without it there can be no pardon, no heaven, and more than that, without it all is in vain: penance, charity, alms, or anything else we might do to gain the eternal reward.

…

If you ask me what repentance is, I tell you that it is an anguish of the soul, and a detestation for past sin, and a firm resolve never to sin again.

Yes, my brethren, this is the foremost of all conditions which God makes before pardoning our sins, and it can never be dispensed with. A sickness which deprives us of speech, may dispense us from confession; a sudden death may dispense us from the necessity of giving satisfaction for our sins during life, but with repentance it is different. Without it, it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to obtain forgiveness.

Yes, my brethren, I must say with deep regret that the want of repentance is the cause of a great number of sacrilegious confessions and communions, and what is still more to be regretted is the circumstance that many do not realize what a sad state they are in, and live and die in it.

Now, my friends, if we had the misfortune to conceal a sin in confession, this sin is constantly before our eyes like a monster which threatens to devour us, and it causes us to soon go to confession again, so as to free ourselves from it.

But it is different with repentance; we confess, but our heart does not take part in the accusation which we make against ourselves. We approach the Holy Sacrament with as cold, unfeeling, and indifferent a heart as if performing an indifferent act of no consequence. Thus we live from day to day, from year to year, until we approach death, when we expect to find that we have done something to our credit, only to discover nothing but sacrileges, which we have committed by our confessions and communions.

Oh, my God, how many Christians there are who will discover at the hour of their death nothing but invalid confessions! But I will not go further into this matter, for fear that I may frighten you, and yet you ought really to be brought to the verge of despair, so that you may stop immediately, and improve your condition right now, instead of waiting until that moment when you will recognize your condition, and when it will be too late to improve it.

…

The reason why our sorrow must be so great, is because it must be equivalent to the loss it will cause us, and the misfortune it will bring us after our death. Imagine, then, how great an anguish ought to be ours over a sin which deprives us of all the glories of heaven, alienates our dear Lord from us, and casts us into hell, which is the greatest of all misfortunes. But, you may ask, how are we to know whether we possess this true repentance?

Nothing is easier.

If you have real repentance, you will neither act, nor think, as you did before, and you will change your mode of life completely; you will hate what you have loved and you will love what you have despised and avoided. 

For instance, if you had to confess that in action and speech you were of a hasty temper, you would hereafter be remarkable for your gentleness of behavior, and your consideration for all. You need not trouble yourself whether you have made a perfect confession, as errors are easily committed, but the consequence of your confession should be that the people say of you: ” How he has changed; he is not the same man. A wonderful change has taken place in him!” Oh, my Lord, how rare are the confessions which cause such a great change!

…

Now, let me tell you that this anguish of soul must have four qualities. If either one of these qualities is wanting, we cannot obtain forgiveness for our sins. 

1. The first quality is that it must come from the bottom of the heart. Why does God require that our heart should feel this anguish? Because it is in the heart where we commit our sins.

2. The second quality of this anguish which we must feel over our sins, is that it must be supernatural; that means, that the Holy Ghost and not natural causes must call it forth. He who, in his repentance, thinks only of God, feels a perfect repentance, which, from its very inception, purifies the sinner even before the reception of absolution. But he who only repents of his sins merely on account of the temporal punishments which they will bring with them, has no proper repentance, and is not justified in expecting forgiveness of his sins.

3. The third quality of repentance is that it must be unlimited, that is, the anguish it calls forth must be greater than any other sorrow, as, for instance, at the loss of our parents, or our health, or in general at the loss of anything that is dearest to us in this life. The reason why our sorrow must be so great, is because it must be equivalent to the loss it will cause us, and the misfortune it will bring us after our death.

4. The fourth and last quality is that repentance must be comprehensive. We see in the lives of the saints, in regard to the comprehensiveness of repentance, that we can not receive pardon for one sin, even if we have properly repented the same, if we do not feel the same repentance for all our sins.

To sum up:

• Contrition is a specific type of sorrow for sin that arises from love for God and a hatred of sin. It’s a deep-seated regret that comes from recognizing the offense one has committed against God.  

• Repentance is a broader term that encompasses both sorrow for one’s sins and a firm resolution to avoid them in the future. It’s a conscious and deliberate turning away from sin towards God. It involves a change in the way we live our lives going forward.

Repentance calls us to a radical reorientation of our lives. Not easy. No wonder ‘few will be saved’!