Each year, the Church presents Catholics with a time of penance and conversion. But what need is there of converting those who are already baptized? Does not a Church that calls itself holy, and always seeks penance, incur a contradiction in the need to purify itself?

Newsroom (14/03/2022 17:35, Gaudium Press) Each year, the Church dons purple vestments twice to indicate times of preparation, penance and forgiveness. Preparation for the Birth of Our Lord, with Advent; and preparation for the Passion, Death and Resurrection, with Lent.

Lent is the liturgical season of the Church’s penitential practice.[1] During this period, “the appeal is made, in the first place, to those who do not yet know Christ and his Gospel”[2] and, on the other hand, to those already baptized: Christ’s appeal for continual conversion, a second conversion, is also made.[3]

In this regard, the best example comes to us from the first Pope: St. Peter, after his first conversion. Having lived daily with Our Lord for some years, he would still deny Him three times. Peter’s second conversion begins with the exchange of two gazes: the merciful gaze of Christ meets the tearful eyes of His Apostle.

Faced with this double conversion, St. Ambrose says: in the Church “there are water and tears: the water of baptism and the tears of penance“[4].

Penance is therefore an indispensable factor for our “daily conversion”.

True Penance

The Gospels tell us how much Our Lord reproached the Pharisees and doctors of the law for the lack of interiority in religious acts. Thus, faithful to the teaching of Her Founder, the Church prescribes the primacy of “interior penance” over exteriorities. Without interior penance, “works of penance remain sterile and deceptive: interior conversion, on the contrary, urges one to express this attitude by visible signs, gestures, and works of penance.”[5]

Thus, although fasting, prayer, almsgiving, and pilgrimage are acts of penance recommended by the Church, they are but an expression of interior penance, and are of no value without it.

Interior Penance

What, then, does interior penance consist of?

“Interior penance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our heart, a break with sin, an aversion to evil and a repugnance to the evil deeds we have committed. At the same time, it is the desire and resolution to change our lives with the hope of divine mercy and trust in the help of His grace.“[6]

So let us take advantage of this Lent to – besides fasting or giving alms – orient our lives towards God.

By Fernando Mesquita

[1] Cf. CEC 1438.

[2] CEC 1427.

[Cf. CEC 1428.

[ST. AMBROSE. Ep. 41, 12: PL 16, 1116B.

[5] ECG 1430.

[6] CEC 1431.

Compiled by Sandra Chisholm