The Priest, The Woman and The Confessional | Page 9

answered, "were I free to follow the voice of my own feelings I would be too happy to grant you your request; but I am here only as the minister of our holy Church, and bound to obey her laws. Through her most holy popes and theologians, she tells me that I cannot forgive you your sins, if you do not confess them all just as you have committed them. The Church tells me also that you must give the details which may add to the malice or change the nature of your sins. I am also sorry to tell you that our most holy theologians make it a duty of the confessor to question his penitent on the sins which he has good reason to suspect have been voluntarily or involuntarily omitted."
With a piercing, cry she exclaimed, "Then, O my God, I am lost--for ever lost!"
This cry fell upon me as a thunderbolt; but I was still more terror-stricken when, looking through the aperture, I saw she was fainting; and I heard the noise of her body falling upon the floor, and of her head striking against the sides of the confessional-box.
Quick as lightning, I ran to help her, took her in my arms, and called a couple of men, who were at a little distance, to assist me in laying her on a bench. I washed her face with some cold water and vinegar. She was as pale as death, but her lips were moving, and she was saying something which nobody but I could understand,--
"I am lost--lost for ever!"
We took her to her disconsolate family, where, during a month, she lingered between life and death.
Her two first confessors came to visit her: but, having asked every one to go out of the room, she politely but absolutely requested them to go away and never come again. She asked me to visit her everyday, "for," she said, "I have only a few more days to live. Help me to prepare myself for the solemn hour which will open to me the gates of eternity!"
Every day I visited her, and I prayed and I wept with her.
Many times, with tears, I requested her, when alone, to finish her confession; but, with a firmness which then seemed to me mysterious and inexplicable, she politely rebuked me.
One day when, alone with her, I was kneeling by the side of her bed to pray, I was unable to articulate a single word, because of the inexpressible anguish of my soul on her account; she asked me, "Dear Father, why do you weep?"
I answered, "How can you put such a question to your murderer? I weep because I have killed you, dear friend."
This answer seemed to trouble her exceedingly. She was very weak that day. After she had wept and prayed in silence, she said, "Do not weep for me, but weep for so many priests who destroy their penitents in the confessional. I believe in the holiness of the sacrament of penitence, since our holy Church has established it. But there is, somewhere, something exceedingly wrong in the confessional. Twice I have been destroyed, and I know many girls who have also been destroyed by the confessional. This is a secret, but will that secret be kept for ever? I pity the poor priests the day that our fathers will know what becomes of the purity of their daughters in the hands of their confessors. Father would surely kill my two last confessors, if he could know how they have destroyed his poor child."
I could not answer except by weeping.
We remained mute for a long time; then she said, "It is true that I was not prepared for the rebuke you have given me, but you acted conscientiously as a good and honest priest. I know you must be bound by certain laws."
She then pressed my hand with her cold hand and said, "Weep not, dear Father, because that sudden storm has wrecked my too fragile back. This storm was to take me out from the bottomless sea of my iniquities to the shore where Jesus was waiting to receive and pardon me. The night after you brought me, half dead, here to father's house, I had a dream. Oh, no, it was not a dream, it was a reality. My Jesus came to me; He was bleeding. His crown of thorns was on His head, the heavy cross was bruising His shoulders. He said to me, with a voice so sweet that no human tongue can imitate it, "I have seen thy tears, I have heard thy cries, and I know thy love for Me: thy sins are forgiven. Take courage; in a few days thou shalt be with Me!'"
She had hardly finished her last word when she fainted, and I