Sins – Restless Pilgrim

Quick Apology: The authority to forgive sins…

August 9, 2015 pilgrim 5 comments

One of my favourite things about having a blog is that, every now and then, I’ll get an email out of the blue from someone I don’t know. I love getting emails from people I’ve never met. There’s something quite wonderful in having an interaction with someone from across the continent or even the world, all because of something you’ve written!

Very often when I get emails they contain questions of an apologetics nature. I’m trying to get better at converting these email exchanges into posts. So, in light of that, I would like to share a response I gave to an email I received a few weeks ago. The gentleman asked the following question:

While discussing Christ’s establishment of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, I brought up John 20:21-23. My Protestant friends said that this is Jesus’ way of warning everyone not to hold a grudge against someone by retaining their sin. I know what Jesus was doing here, but I lack the bomb-proof Catholic response to this interpretation; can you help?

I’m not sure if my response qualifies as “bomb-proof”, but here was my reply…

Catholicism

Baptism Matters: Part 2 (Forgiveness of sin)

January 14, 2014 pilgrim 2 comments

Yesterday I began to look at the question of infant baptism. We saw how, although we don’t have explicit references to infant baptism in the New Testament, that there are passages which strongly suggest that infants and children were baptized. Today I would like to continue looking at this issue, but from a slightly different angle…

Desert Fathers: Our sins and the sins of others

February 21, 2013 pilgrim Leave a comment

Once there was a meeting of monks in Scetis, and they discussed the case of a guilty brother but Pior said nothing.

Afterwards he got up and went out, took a sack, filled it with sand, and carried it on his shoulders. He put a little sand in a basket and carried it in front of him.

The monks asked him, “What are you doing?” He answered, “The sack with a lot of sand is my sins; they are many, so I put them on my back and then I shall not weep for them. The basket with a little sand is the sins of our brother and they are in front of me, and I see them and judge them. This is not right. I ought to have my own sins in front of me, and think about them, and ask God to forgive me.”

When the monks heard this, they said, “This is the true way of salvation”

– De vitis Patrum, Sive Verba Seniorum, Liber V

Quotation

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
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3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30