Part 2
Section 2
Chapter2
Article 4
What Is The Sacrament Of Reconciliation
After Baptism?
"You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified
in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God."
One must appreciate the magnitude of the gift God has given us in
the sacrament of Christian initiation in order to grasp the degree
to which sin is excluded from him who has "put on Christ." But the
apostle John also says: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves, and the truth is not in us." And the Lord himself taught
us to pray: "Forgive us our trespass," linking our forgiveness
of one another's offenses to the forgiveness of our sins that
God will grant us.
Conversion to Christ, the new birth of Baptism, the gift of
the Holy Spirit and the Body and Blood of Christ received as food
have made us "holy and without blemish," just as the Church
herself, the Bride of Christ, is "holy and without blemish." Nev-
ertheless the new life received in Christian initiation has not abol-
ished the frailty and weakness of human nature, not the inclination
to sin that tradition calls concupiscence, which remains in the bap-
tized such that with the help of the grace of Christ they may prove
themselves in the struggle of Christian life. This is the struggle of
conversion directed toward holiness and eternal life to which the
Lord never ceases to call us.
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