The Sacrament of Confession, Reconciliation, Penance or Christian Conversion is a wonderful opportunity to experience God's forgiveness and mercy. All Catholics should celebrate this sacrament frequently.
If you want to learn more about the sacrament please scroll down and read the three articles provided below.

Children celebrate this sacrament for the first time before their First Holy Communion. The preparation for First Reconciliation takes place each year during on November 20th, 2021 at 10:30 a.m. at Holy Cross Church and consists of 4-6 meetings. If you want to have your children celebrate First Reconciliation, or you are an adult and would like to celebrate this sacrament for the first time please contact Mary Ann Kozak to [email protected] for Holy Cross and Saint Anthony and Andra Benson to [email protected] for All Saints.

If you are looking for opportunities to celebrate the Sacrament:

Please contact Fr. Jorge by phone call or text at (607) 288-2350 or by email [email protected]. He will gently guide you through the process. 

If you are preparing for the sacrament:

and are looking for some guidance, please use the following: The Reconciliation Dialogue,  Steps to confession, Examination of conscience option 1 and Examination of conscience option 2

If you want to learn more about the Sacrament: of Confession or Christian Conversion, read the three articles below,

The image is the Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt.

God's Mercy a Call to Conversion

We are all called to be prophets, this is to be the presence of God’s love and mercy to those around us.
We are always being called to conversion. A good way to examine our lives would be to ask ourselves:
Do my family, friends, and coworkers see the God of Mercy when they see me? What would happen if I asked my spouse or that person that shares the most amount of time with me if they see the God of Love when they see me? 
And then, in what concrete ways can I change so others can see God (Love/Mercy) when they see me?

Act of Contrition (#90 Rite of Penance, USCCB, 2010)

Lord Jesus,
you chose to be called the friend of sinners.
By your saving death and resurrection
free me from my sins.
May your peace take root in my heart
and bring forth a harvest
of love, holiness, and truth.
Amen.

"In contemplating God’s Mercy and forgiveness, we begin with a very basic premise: We are God’s noblest creation conceived by His perfect love for us. In this love by which He binds Himself to us, He lifts us up again and again when we sin. We experience this mercy and forgiveness most perfectly in the Sacrament of Confession.
Pope Francis said: “Even the Pope confesses every fifteen days, because the Pope is also a sinner”. A journalist once asked Mother Teresa: “Do you have to go to Confession?, She responded: Yes, I go to Confession every week.” This shocked the man and frightened him. Then God must be very demanding if you have to go to confession.” Mother Teresa shook her head and explained, “Your own child sometimes does something wrong. What happens when your child comes to you and says, ‘Daddy I am sorry’? What do you do? You put both of your arms around your child and kiss him. Why? Because that is your way of telling him that you love him. God does the same thing. He loves you tenderly” (adapted from a letter by Bishop Matano).

It is with these thoughts in mind that we are encouraged to celebrate this sacrament of Mercy often.
 

The Beauty and Wisdom of the Sacrament of Confession

If we look at the way Jesus spent his time in the Gospel we will find that his time was spent mostly with 5 groups of people: 1) The public sinners, such as the prostitutes and the tax collectors, 2) Foreigners, who were also considered sinners because they did not follow the Law, 3) The Sick, who were also considered sinners because of the Jewish understanding of the relationship between sickness and sin, 4) Instructing his disciples, who by their own account where sinners and finally 5) arguing with the Pharisees and Sadducees, who as the Gospel shows again and again were the worst kind of sinners, the self-righteous, who sin against the Holy Spirit (sent for the forgiveness of sin, this is to heal us and complete in us the work of santification) by thinking they can save themselves. This shows us how committed God is to reconciling all to him, no matter what our sin of choice is.  As we constantly hear in the liturgy: Jesus came to call sinners and to heal the contrite of heart.
The Mission of the Church is to continue the Mission of Christ, and since so much of Christ’s time and mission was the forgiveness of sins, we continue this ministry most especially through the Sacrament of Confession, and by the power given by Christ himself to the Apostles to forgive sins we continue to fulfill his Will every time we welcome sinners back, rejoice with them and grant them absolution through this most beautiful sacrament.
The Sacrament of Confession then is in no way the church’s “criminal system” and it certainly does not come from the scarcity of understanding God as the great accountant that is keeping track of every sin, but from the abundance of understanding that God’s mercy is extended to all, always, again and again and again, that as Pope Francis said: “God never gets tired of forgiving us, all we have to do is ask”. The wisdom of the Sacrament developed through the centuries under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to have the components that it has today. These components are: 1) The warm welcome of the Priest and the recalling of God’s work of Mercy in the Scriptures, this resembles the way the father welcomed back the Prodigal Son; 2) The confession of sins, this step has a profound healing power. It forces us to examine our lives and become aware of the ways in which the Evil One works in us, in this way giving us tools to resist temptations in the future. It allows us to become aware of the ugliness of our sins and to feel true sorrow and the desire to change. It helps us to humble ourselves by having to confess to a priest. It reminds us that our sin is not simply a personal matter but that every moral action has consequences on those around us and on the whole community of the Church. It allows us the opportunity to bear our whole beings in honesty before the saving love of Christ in whose person the Priest is present at the Sacrament. Psychology has become aware of the healing power of self-disclosure, how much is there to be said of the healing power of honest confession before the Priest in whom I receive the embrace, understanding, care and forgiveness of the whole community and of Christ who loves me and died for me. 3) Penance: Conversion is a journey in which in our freedom we cooperate with the Holy Spirit within us that is working to create us into the likeness of Christ, by opposing and defeating the Evil One that moves us to selfishness and pride. The Sacrament of Confession honors these two realities: 1) that conversion is a process and, 2) that it happens in a cooperation between God’s grace and human nature by giving us penance. The penance will usually be some prayers, or actions we can perform that will help us be open to the work of the Spirit and overturn the work of sin in our lives, so we can become more like Christ. Finally, 4) Absolution: Through the absolution we are granted once again the grace to live according to our Baptism, offered the unconditional love of God and called to truly accept that forgiveness that restores is to our dignity of children of God and frees God’s creative power within us to make us new in Christ.


The image is "The Merciful Trinity" by Sister Caritas Muller).

The Beauty of the Trinity’s Creative Forgiveness expressed in the Sacrament of Confession
 
In JN 8:1-11, we are reminded that God does not condemn us and that knowing our own sinfulness we should not condemn or judge others. It is not easy for us to accept God’s forgiveness and so it is not easy to forgive others either. We can be discouraged by the repetitiveness of our sins and think that we will never change, but God says to us, do not linger on your past sins and trust that I am doing something new (IS 43:16-21), trust that you belong to Christ (PHIL 3:8-14), that you have been reconciled through his sacrifice and that the Holy Spirit is working within you the forgiveness of sins, this is, your conversion, your healing, your growing into who you really are. And keep striving for holiness.

The words of absolution pronounced by Christ through the priest in the Sacrament of Confession beautifully express this reality of God’s creative mercy that constantly recreates us and heals us, and gives us a mission to sin no more.
Let us take a look at those words part by part. The formula says: God the Father of Mercies has reconciled the world to himself, the forgiveness of sins stems from the mercy of the Father, from his free and firm will of salvation for the whole world. The person receives forgiveness because he or she is part of this History of Salvation. Forgiveness tends towards reconciliation and communion with God and others. The forgiveness given to the individual is not only for his sake, but for the whole world and commits him to bring salvation, forgiveness and reconciliation to those around him.  In the Death and Resurrection of His Son, “the repetition of the celebration of this sacrament of healing shows all the renewing power of the dynamism of salvation, which God set irreversibly into human history with the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus. Reconciled with God in Christ the baptized is thus constantly transfigured by the Passover of the Lord. The relationship with Christ thus constitutes his existence, and from it he understands himself, humanity, the world, history. Enlivened by the love that comes from the Cross of the Lord, the believer learns not only to see Christ in human beings so as to be open to charity and solidarity, but also to see human beings in Christ in order to understand them and commit to their full development.” And he sent the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins, through the resurrection of Christ the Holy Spirit is active in the church and in every believer and is constantly working that redemptive action of the Father and the Son that transforms the hearts. It is by this presence of the Holy Spirit that the Church forgives sins and supports its members in being open to this transformative work of God in them. Through the Ministry of the Church, the forgiveness of sins happens within the context of the church and not simply as an individual experience. By our sins we hurt the community and by the church’s ministry of forgiveness we are reconciled to the community. As human beings we cannot experience God’s forgiveness individually and magically, this forgiveness and healing for us embodies beings happens through the palpable process of healing through examination of conscience, confession of sins and actually hearing the effective words of forgiveness from Christ through the priest. May God grant you pardon and peace, peace is the final outcome of the saving action arising from the mercy of the Father, accomplished in the Passover of the Son and continually made new through the work of the Holy Spirit. Peace is the greeting of the Risen Christ and the fruit of reconciliation with God, self and others. Peace is the true identity of the Christian that in facing the painful reality of sin, yet lives in profound trust of God’s power over sin. I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, “the gesture of laying on of hands that accompanies these words signifies the outpouring of the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins, reconciliation and communion with the Lord. The sacrament of penance, aims to arouse in the one who receives it the will to change his mentality and orientation of life, a way of conversion that only the Holy Spirit can initiate and support. Through the minister, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are acting and the penitent is truly immersed in the saving action of God that regenerates him to the grace of Baptism. The broken human being is at the center of the Trinity and the constant work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is eternally committed to serving him, healing him, forgiving him and saving him as we see in the image above and as we experience in the beautiful Sacrament of Confession. (Based on: “Confession: The Sacrament of Mercy”, PCFNE pp.53-64.