Parishes Report Busy Reconciliation Monday

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For the fourth straight year, parishes across the archdiocese opened their doors during Holy Week to welcome Catholics on Reconciliation Monday, April 14.

Priests were available to hear confessions from 3 to 9 p.m. And all indications are that Catholics once again took advantage of the opportunity.

“Here it went surprisingly well,” said Father Gregory Chisholm, S.J., pastor of St. Charles Borromeo parish in Harlem. “We’d already done a number of things to encourage the sacrament during Lent and even had a penance service earlier in Lent. But still we were busy from 4 until 8 continuously.”

Father Chisholm noted that the confessions he heard indicated that people had given a lot of thought to what they were going to say. “They weren’t stumbling around at all,” he said. “They were really good.”

In Times Square, St. Malachy’s–The Actors’ Chapel hung a sign that attracted a steady stream of penitents into the parish from busy 49th Street.

“We have confessions all the time here, so the pressure wasn’t as intense as when we first started this a couple of years ago,” explained Father Richard Baker, the pastor. “But we certainly had a wonderful day and awesome confessions. Some hadn’t been to the sacrament in 20 years, 40 years so it was very nourishing to me I can tell you that much!

In an area of the city awash in huge and often garish advertising Father Baker said St. Malachy’s modest sign did its job well.

“Many people passing the church saw the sign and decided to pop in. And they said that. They were like, ‘I saw the sign and said I’m going to do it. I was going to do it a year ago when I saw the sign and I didn’t. But I saw the sign again and I came in.’ So that makes it worth it right there, right?”

At St. Ann’s parish in Nyack, Father Rees Doughty, the pastor, said business was steady if not overly busy. “We didn’t have huge crowds but we weren’t idle either,” he said.

At St. Lucy’s in the Bronx, Father Nikolin Pergjini told CNY lines began forming before 3 p.m. “From the very beginning they were waiting outside,” he said. “And we finished at 10 o’clock, not 9.”

Father Pergjini said the parish had been promoting Reconciliation Monday in its bulletin throughout Lent and had included Cardinal Dolan’s column and a picture of Pope Francis kneeling at confession from CNY’s April 3 issue. “It was powerful tool to convince them to come to confession,” he said.