By Gretchen Keiser, Staff Writer

COLLEGE PARK —Although 12,000 were there, a dialogue took place throughout the day June 16, a remarkable spiritual exchange between speakers and North Georgia Catholics.

Father Raniero Cantalamessa, his eyes twinkling at times as he spoke about forgiveness, said that his conversation was “a pilgrimage” with the audience, not a lecture.

Praying the penitential Psalm 51 aloud, line by line, and asking the audience to echo those lines, he walked the gathering through five steps necessary to repentance, a process he likened to cleansing a jar that held vinegar so that it could be refilled with honey.

Repentance leads to happiness, the brown-robed Italian Franciscan, who normally preaches to the pope and his household, pointed out. It leads to rejoicing and exultation. God is eager to pour sweet honey into our hearts, but we must actively choose to take part in the process of cleansing the jar, where an acrid residue has built up.

“Admitting one’s sin and asking forgiveness for it is the highway to happiness,” said Father Cantalamessa. While “some may wonder what this has to do with the Eucharist,” the theme of the Corpus Christi event, he said that the process of repentance is essential to receiving God’s holy presence in Communion with appropriate awe.

Once, he said, he gave a small book he wrote on the Eucharist to a woman nuclear physicist, who was an atheist, but who was attending Mass just to listen to the Scriptures. After reading the book, she told him, “‘You didn’t put in my hands a book. You put in my hands a bomb. I have read this book sometimes until 2 a.m. . . . Sometimes my legs have trembled’ . . . She looked at me with intensity, in a state of anguish. She said, ‘If this is true, everything changes.’”

Father Cantalamessa said, listening to her, he was ashamed. “I said, Raniero, you have received the body of Christ a few moments ago and your legs do not tremble.” The greatest danger for Catholics who receive the Eucharist, he said, “is we get accustomed to it. Nothing moves inside us.”

In a melodious voice, the white-haired, bearded priest addressed each of the five stages of repentance, using Psalm 32 as a road map and Psalm 51 as a communal prayer for himself and the audience.

“While I am speaking, my heart is praying, invoking the Holy Spirit to come upon us and convince us of sin,” the preacher said. “It is a question of changing our way of thinking for God’s way of thinking, our mentality for God’s mentality, throwing ourselves into the abyss of God’s judgment.”

The first step, he said, is “admitting one’s own sin.” This is made difficult by our immersion in a world that “does not fear sin” even though sin “is open war waged against God, the eternal, the omnipotent.”

“Every effort is made today to free us from the remorse of sin. Instead of struggling against sin, we struggle against” acknowledging it. The first step is to “acknowledge sin in all of its tremendous seriousness.”

Drawing the audience to pray a few verses from Psalm 51, “create in me a clean heart, O God . . .” he continued to the second step, which is to repent of sin. To repent means to accept God’s truth about our actions, rather than our own evaluation and explanation, he said. “God alone can see into the depths of our hearts. God knows all about us, about me.”

Sorrow is an essential part of sincere repentance, he said, and God awaits “our freedom, our yes” asking him to give us contrite hearts. As soon as this repentance begins, God defends the sinner from condemnation, he added, like the father of the prodigal son, who embraced him. “Repentance has nothing to do with feeling like a slave,” he said. “Repentance becomes a constant source of renewed life.”

Reflecting on our own sins we “may not feel cut to the heart” and experience a flood of tears each time we repent, he said. “That requires grace.”

But that profound experience is something to desire in one’s lifetime, Father Cantalamessa said. “What is required is we start straightway to wish, ‘Lord, don’t let me die before experiencing this repentance.’”

Again praying from Psalm 51, and helping the audience with a humorous anecdote or two, he proceeded to the third step which, he said, is to “stop sinning.”

While “none of us will become faultless from one day to the next,” the papal preacher said, what God wants is for us to focus on the one particular sin in our life “to which we are secretly attached.” Go before God, he said, and say that you want to give up that one particular sin.

“This must be very practical,” he said. “At a moment of renunciation, let us kneel down in front of the Blessed Sacrament or (before) God” and say “I no longer want that particular satisfaction, that particular relationship, that particular resentment, that particular sin that I know and you know very well.” Follow up this prayer with immediate action to step away from this sin, he said.

The fourth step is to “destroy the sinful body.”

Speaking emphatically, with both hands raised for emphasis, Father Cantalamessa said it was a “blessed moment” when God allowed him to glimpse his own hardened heart, in which a stalagmite had been created, drop by drop, over time, “like a large column of stone wearing me down.”

“The heart of stone is the heart we ourselves have created through compromise and sin and imperfect repentance . . . When I perceived this I realized only the blood of Jesus is a potent solvent to destroy this heart of stone.”

The remedy is “the gift of the sacrament of reconciliation,” he said, invoking African-American spirituals like “There Is a Balm in Gilead” to express the tremendous freedom and rebirth available through an encounter with Jesus in the sacrament.

“We need Louis Armstrong, not Father Raniero Cantalamessa,” to sing about this, he said. It is essential to tell our sins to someone, he said, and when we go to confession to a priest, “this someone has been appointed by Jesus himself.”

The fifth step is “rejoicing about forgiveness.” Reading the last verses of Psalm 32 and the song of salvation from Exodus, he said this is a time to exult. God “delights in showing mercy and forgiveness,” Father Cantalamessa said. “Those jars are ready to be filled with honey, the body and blood of Jesus Christ!”

All day, “Come To Me” was the thread connecting the talks. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, also a Capuchin Franciscan, like Father Cantalamessa, spoke on an active relationship with Jesus Christ, fed by the Eucharist, bringing the Gospel to the world.

Christian faith is “an encounter with a living person, Jesus Christ,” not just a set of ideas or moral principles, he said. “When we enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ, it has consequences—very big consequences.”

While statistically Americans appear to be overwhelmingly religious, and 63 million are Catholic, the American culture presents a different picture.

“Why is it that pornography is a multibillion dollar industry in our country? Why are a million unborn babies aborted each year? Why are hundreds of thousands of families locked below the poverty line; why are 200 million guns in circulation; and why do we live in one of the most violent countries in the world?” he asked.

Challenging the audience to move beyond words of love to God, Archbishop Chaput said, “being in love with Jesus Christ means being with Him all the way—from the silence we share with Him at Communion, to the work we share with Him in the sanctification of the world.”

The Corpus Christi celebration is important, he said, because “the body of Christ is the bread of life and the food of the Church . . . It’s meant to nourish and strengthen us in the task of bringing others to new life in Jesus Christ.”

Christians are meant to be boat rockers, he said, showing their belief in the Lordship of Jesus Christ in their families, work, laws, music, art, architecture—“everything.” Drawing from the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, he urged listeners to examine their actions regarding the dignity of the human person, loving one’s enemies, teaching children to take responsibility for society and preaching the value of human labor and activity to co-create with God “a truly human world.”

Being Christian means being “agents of change” he said, imitating God’s concern for the poor and entering the political arena when that is needed. “If God loves and serves the poor, then how can we do anything else?” he asked.

Because Satan is the “Father of lies,” Christians need to guard against a popular conception that the Gospel is unrealistic while the “real world” is the cultural conglomeration of philosophies and agendas that operate from a godless point of view. One way to stay on track is to stay close to Christ in the poor—who resemble the scarred body of the crucified, but risen Lord.

“The homeless person, the AIDS patient, the mentally handicapped child . . . The suffering among us are not some kind of embarrassing mistake,” he said. “They’re Christ’s invitation to each of us to really live, to really believe—to be with Him, by serving them.”

“Don’t be afraid of the world,” he said. “Understand the purpose of your life. When you leave here today, you’re going out into a struggle for the soul of the world . . . The age of miracles—the age of faith—is not over. It’s just beginning. And it begins again today in each of you.”

Inviting people to come to a microphone, Archbishop Chaput answered questions from the audience, touching on the needs of ethnic groups in the church and the needs of priests.

Asked if the church is doing enough to bring back Hispanics who are leaving the Catholic Church, he said, “The answer is the church is not doing enough, that is always the answer.”

One need is for Hispanics to be brought more and more into leadership positions. “It is important that everyone have a place,” he said. Another is that those who are not Hispanic adapt to welcome their brothers and sisters. “It is easy to put on a stole that looks like a serape,” he said. “It is harder to learn to speak Spanish.”

On the needs of priests, he encouraged the laity to “pray, love them.”

“Priests need to be loved,” he said. “You (the church) are our spouse. Love us.”