RECONCILIATION

When Christ's faithful strive to confess all the sins

that they can remember, they undoubtedly place all

of them before the divine mercy for pardon.

But those who fail to do so and knowingly withhold

some, place nothing before the divine goodness for remission through the mediation of the priest,

"for if the sick person is too ashamed to show his wound

to the doctor, the medicine cannot heal what it does not know."

 

Council of Trent (1551): DS 1680 (ND 1626); cf. St. Jerome, In Eccl. 10,11:PL 23:1096.