There has been a lot in the news the past week and even more in blogs written about confession, both the Sacrament and the basic concept. In the news there have been two stories which have caught my eye. The first was that horrible misreporting of the Vatican announcing new, more culturally relevant sins and the second was a report on the trend to confess sins online. The Catholic Blog world has been much more rich with a variety of articles being written about Confession, first confession, the practice of the Sacrament, the renewed interest so many people are having with the act of just going in reciting sins and receiving absolution.
Now as most Catholics have picked up by now the main-stream news media is horribly out of touch when it comes to reporting on anything having to do with the Catholic Church. When it is the British Press just triple that. Amy Welbourn and Deacon Kandra had insightful things to say about this crossing of bad reporting and the secular media’s natural inclination to get fuzzy headed, silly, giddy any time they think they found something interesting to say about the Catholic faith. Dullards.
Almost as stupid is the CNN.com report on online “confession”. I wish I could say I was surprised that a national news source reported on the trend of “true confession” sites with such a religious sounding angle but at the same time showed little respect or understanding of the significance of confession in religion. It isn’t shocking simply because the press so often gets religion wrong. At least in this article they bother to actually talk to religious leaders about the sacrament vrs the online confession fad.
Around the blogs I read there has been a trend of some very fine writing about Confession in the Sacramental sense. Julie at Happy Catholic has a wonderful post and round-up of some of the best of these articles. I really encourage everyone to read them.
Simply Catholic 
There were newstories that came out closely together that I thought were interesting… As yet I have not seen them linked or anyone talk about the correlation.
Namely in one story that came out over Zenit it was reported that Poles (78%+) go to confession at least once a month…. (The greatest frequency in the world…)
A few weeks before it had been noted that seminarians from Poland – a nation of >38M account for 7% of the worldwide seminarian population in a church covering all nations with 1.1B people.
Coincidence?
We won’t have vocations if we don’t have confession.
Keep writing about this!