- 14 March, 2026
Vatican City, March 14, 2026: Pope Leo XIV held an audience on Friday with participants in the 36th Course on the Internal Forum, which is organized each year by the Apostolic Penitentiary.
This course provides priests and seminarians with deeper formation on matters related to the Sacrament of Reconciliation and usually ends with an audience with the Pope.
Speaking to future confessors, Pope Leo focused on the power of Confession to promote peace and unity within the human family.
“One might ask: do those Christians who bear serious responsibility in armed conflicts have the humility and courage to make a serious examination of conscience and to go to confession?” he wondered.
He said that the Sacrament of Reconciliation serves as a “laboratory of unity,” because it restores communion with God and fills the penitent with sanctifying grace.
Confession, he continued, also helps people learn to live in harmony with one another and with the Church, building on the inner unity that it restores.
“The dynamic of unity with God, with the Church, and within ourselves is a presupposition for peace among peoples,” said Pope Leo. “Only a reconciled person is capable of living in an unarmed and disarming way!”
He explained that Christians who set aside the weapons of pride and allow themselves to be renewed through God’s forgiveness become instruments of reconciliation in everyday life.
At the same time, those reconciled with God can more easily recognize the “unfulfilled promises of unbridled consumerism and the frustrating experience of a freedom detached from truth.”
Through divine mercy, the Pope said, Christ stirs within people an awareness of their incompleteness, bringing forth existential questions that make them realize that only Christ can truly answer their deepest longings.
“God became man to save us,” he said, “and He does so also by educating our religious sense, our inextinguishable desire for truth and love, so that we may welcome the Mystery in which ‘we live and move and have our being’.”
Turning to the value of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, Pope Leo XIV recalled that the Church’s ancient theological understanding of confession has developed over time and that every Catholic is required to receive the sacrament at least once a year.
At the same time, he noted that many people do not come more often to the “infinite treasure of the Church’s mercy,” instead of approaching the confessional with simple faith and openness of heart to receive the Lord’s gift.
Pope Leo encouraged present and future priests to stay conscious of their great responsibility in offering God’s forgiveness through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
He referred to the many priests who became saints in the confessional, including St. John Mary Vianney, St. Leopold Mandić, and, more recently, St. Pio of Pietrelcina and Blessed Michał Sopoćko.
He said that as sacramental confession strengthens a person’s inner unity, it also strengthens the Church herself, giving her renewed energy to engage society and the wider world.
In conclusion, Pope Leo urged confessors to receive the Sacrament of forgiveness themselves “with faithful constancy,” so that they may become ministers of divine mercy, of which they are the first beneficiaries.
Courtesy: Vatican News
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