Vatican City, Mar 11, 2010 / 09:32 am
Participants in this week’s course on the hearing Confessions met with the Holy Father in audience on Thursday morning. To the group of priests, Pope Benedict XVI underlined the importance of guiding their flocks "not to conform itself to this world" and the necessity of opening a “dialogue of salvation” with those who seek forgiveness.
Remembering the Cure of Ars, St. Jean Vianney, as having “exercised heroically and fertilely the ministry of reconciliation,” the Holy Father said that priests can learn “not only an inexhaustible trust in the Sacrament of Penance... but also the method of the ‘dialogue of salvation’ that must be carried out in it.”
The roots of this “heroicism and fecundity,” explained the Holy Father, are found “above all, in an intense personal penitential dimension.”
"Awareness of one's own limits and the need to turn to Divine Mercy in order to ask forgiveness, to convert the heart and to find support on the path of saintliness, are fundamentals in the life of priests. Only someone who has himself experienced greatness can convincingly announce and administer the Mercy of God," the Holy Father explained.