Day 197: Forms of Penance (2026)
episode
The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
18 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
transcribed 2 months ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in Scripture and passed down through the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a Year is brought to you by Ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity in God's family. As we journey together toward our heavenly home, it's day 197. We're reading paragraphs 1434 to 1439. As always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes a Foundations of Faith approach, But you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own Catechism in a Year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com slash C-I-Y.
And you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications today, day 197. You know, we've been talking, well, paragraphs 1434, 1439. We've been talking about conversion. And not only the conversion of the baptized that Jesus calls all to conversion, calls us to conversion, and conversion is a process. We talked about this yesterday. It's an interior repentance, is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our heart, an end of sin, all these things, incredible. And so today we're talking about the many forms of penance in Christian life. And so we know that prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we know that those three tasks, those three movements, those three elements of conversion
They are the things that scripture presents to us as ways to turn to the Lord. At the same time, we know, because we heard yesterday, that they're not just tasks that remain on the surface. They're not meant to be just simply external things. They're actually meant to reach our hearts. We're talking about that today, as well as the fact that conversion is accomplished in daily life. There's gestures of reconciliation. There's reaching out to our brothers and sisters.
What forms of penance does the Catechism introduce in paragraphs 1434–1439?
There's concern for the poor. There's fighting for justice and fighting for the right. There's all these. Okay, let me just tell you, today, We're going to go through a list of things, a list of, I don't want to say tasks because that's too shallow, a list of movements, a list of things that people can do essentially that orient them more and more towards conversion. And all of these come from scripture. So this is kind of your input treat today from paragraph 1434 to 1439. There's going to be all these ways in which here's seasons of penance. Here's what reading sacred scripture can do. Here is the Eucharist and penance. And here's what taking up one's cross can do on a daily basis. It all is oriented towards giving our hearts or making our hearts more like Christ, because ultimately this is going to be the goal.
Yes, we turn away from sin. Yes, we turn more fully toward the Lord. But the goal in so many ways, well, the goal is God. God's always the goal. He himself. But the goal in our hearts is to have a heart like Jesus. The goal in our hearts is to become like Christ. That's the goal. That's the goal of conversion. That's the goal of repentance. That's the goal of holiness. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. So let's begin our prayer. Father in heaven, we praise you. We glorify your name. We thank you for not giving up on us. We thank you for constantly, constantly calling us to turn from sin, to turn towards your heart, towards your love, towards your mercy, towards your grace. Help us, Lord, each day to become more and more like you, to become more and more like your son, Jesus Christ, who has a heart that hates sin, a heart that loves you, a heart that loves us.
Jesus has a heart that loves the poor and those others forget. God, give us a heart like his. Help us. Help us to hate what he hates. Help us to love what he loves. And help us to become like our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We make this prayer in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
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