Pope Leo XIV has urged Christian faithful to self-examine themselves towards deepening global peace amid ongoing wars.
“Only a reconciled person is capable of living in an unarmed and disarming way,” he stated on Friday in an audience with participants of the 36th course on the Internal Forum, organised annually by the Apostolic Penitentiary.
According to the Vatican, the course offers priests and seminarians extended training regarding issues connected with the Sacrament of Reconciliation, concludes with a papal audience.
Pope Leo invited Christians who bear responsibility for war to make a serious examination of their conscience.
“One might ask: do those Christians who bear serious responsibility in armed conflicts have the humility and courage to make a serious examination of conscience and to go to confession?”
The Sacrament of Reconciliation offers a laboratory of unity, and restores unity with God and infuses the penitent with sanctifying grace.
Confession also teaches people to live in unity with each other and with the Church, building on the interior unity which it restores to professing Catholics.
“The dynamic of unity with God, with the Church, and within ourselves is a presupposition for peace among peoples,” Pope Leo stated.
According to him, Christians who lay down the arms of pride and allow themselves to be renewed by God’s forgiveness become agents of reconciliation in their daily lives.
“Unfulfilled promises of unbridled consumerism and the frustrating experience of a freedom detached from truth,” Pope Leo stated, adding that people reconciled with God recognize more easily.
Pope stated that Christ awakens within Christians by divine mercy a sense of self incompleteness, bringing to the surface existential questions that help us realize that only Christ Himself can fully respond to our deepest desires.
“God became man to save us, and He does so also by educating our religious sense, our inextinguishable desire for truth and love, so that we may welcome the Mystery in which ‘we live and move and have our being’.”
Pope Leo invited current and future priests to remain aware of their great responsibility to offer God’s forgiveness through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
He pointed to the many priests who became saints in the confessional, including St. John Mary Vianney, St. Leopold Mandić, and more recently, St. Pio of Pietrelcina and Blessed Michał Sopoćko.
As sacramental confession builds up a person’s interior unity, it also builds up the Church herself, giving her new energies to engage with society and the world.
Pope Leo urged Catholics to receive the Sacrament of forgiveness themselves “with faithful constancy,” so that they may become ministers of divine mercy, of which they are the first beneficiaries.
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