With conversion I recovered fervor. Now I have lost it. What should I do to regain it?

Dear Father Angelo,

first of all I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the service you do for all of us by helping us on our journey of conversion, your answers so many times have been oil on my spiritual wounds. I wanted to put to you a dilemma of mine that does not fail to bring me pain daily.

I am a 39-year-old man, and after receiving the sacrament of Confirmation, I slowly drifted away from God and lived in mortal sin for many, many years. Six years ago I accepted God’s call and sought true conversion, for two years I was again a fervent and zealous believer, but the world still caught me in its net and I became lazy in prayer.

For a little over two months now, I have felt the call deep down again and have resumed praying and attending Mass daily. However, it often happens to me that I feel a weakening in prayer, I can’t even concentrate in Church and this gives me enormous pain; I offer all this pain to our Heavenly Mother, but I happen to think whether mine is a true conversion, all my prayers dead works on my lips and whether God is deaf to my prayers.

Thank you for your availability, I remember you in my prayers.

Regards 

Alessio

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The priest’s answer

Dear Alessio, 
1. you had recovered fervor with the conversion.

How come you could not maintain it?

Probably because you lacked confession done on a regular and frequent basis.

Many people, unfortunately, after conversion, are not helped to keep fervor alive through regular and frequent confession.

2. “Regular manner” does not mean when it happens or when one needs it, because one is in mortal sin. 

Rather, it means on a rhythmic cadence, in the same way one goes to the barber or does bulk shopping.

In a  family one generally knows when it is necessary to go for these chores and therefore schedules their life by sparing some time precisely for such needs.

This should also be the case for sacramental confession.

3. Approaching confession is a constant necessity for our soul to maintain itself in fervor.

It is a common experience that when it begins to pass a few more days after the last confession, one feels less ready to correspond to the divine inspirations. 

And so the weariness or even the dragging in the spiritual life fatally returns.

When it happens that months or even a year pass, one no longer feels anything, especially if one remains in mortal sin.

4. Grave sin is called mortal precisely because it causes the death of something in our soul. What dies in our soul?

The inhabitation of God within us through grace.

When we live in mortal sin, we feel nothing, just like a dead body.

5. And even if one does not live in mortal sin, but reduces sacramental confession to once or twice a year is still insufficient to keep the fervor alive.

It is true that the precept of the Church commands us to go to confession at least once a year. But this precept is made for the minimum, to say that if one does not go to confession even once a year one is inwardly extinguishing oneself.

6. In addition to being made regularly, that is, rhythmically, at a set cadence, confession must also be made frequently.

The Church defines frequent confession as confession that is made at least twice a month, that is every 15 days.

Even better is a confession made once a week.

It should not be forgotten that confession is one of the two sacraments of Christian healing. And that confession even of venial sins alone is always most useful because it confers an increase in grace and fervor. 

Incidentally, confession should never be drawn out for a long time because it tires the confessor and induces the penitent to go to confession more rarely knowing that he has to devote much time to it.

7.  I like to recall what the great and holy Pope John Paul II said prophetically in the programmatic encyclical of his pontificate, Redemptor hominis: ” it is certain that the Church of the new Advent, the Church that is continually preparing for the new coming of the Lord, must be the Church of the Eucharist and of Penance. Only when viewed in this spiritual aspect of her life and activity is she seen to be the Church of the divine mission, the Church in statu missionis, as the Second Vatican Council has shown her to be”. (RH 20).

“Without this constant and ever-renewed effort at conversion, participation in the Eucharist would be deprived of its full redemptive efficacy, that particular readiness to render to God the spiritual sacrifice, in which our participation in Christ’s priesthood is expressed in an essential and universal way, would be diminished or, at any rate, weakened in it” (Ib.)

With the hope that you will resolve to confess regularly and frequently, I bless you and remember you in prayer.

Father Angelo

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