SCARED CONGREGATION FOR DIVINE WORSHIPADMONITORY EXHORTATION MINIMA CULPAUpon the dignified celebration of the sacrament of penance or confession or reconciliation or forgiveness or what have youThe council urges the faithful to: "approach the throne of pardon with a deeply humbled sense of unworthiness yet a self-confident assurance of forgiveness perhaps even verging on the slightly cocky" (Signum tempus, XIV). It is to be highly recommended that a special place is set apart for the dignified celebration of the sacrament. The furnishing and adornment of this place should be such as to be conducive to the penitent’s necessary preparatory process of reflection, supplication, obfuscation, abnegation, resignation and self-justification. The penitent must be made to feel completely at home and, for this reason, the room or place might contain a medium-sized dining-table having upon it a plate with a fork sticking into a half-eaten pork-sausage. There might also be an open copy of that morning’s Racing Post as well as an ash-tray (full). There may also optionally be a sideboard covered in antimacassars and a bowl of slightly crinkly fruit left over from Christmas. Undusted framed pictures of the last pope but one and a recently defrocked auxiliary bishop will add a sense of the worldwide communion of saints and the church’s rich penitential tradition. In certain circumstances where there is a particular pastoral need, there may be camp-bed in the corner with accompanying false teeth in a glass. The walls of such a place shall be adorned with those objects that will show the participants in the celebration of the sacrament that they are in a house dedicated to God. These might include suitably devotional group-portraits of the 1956 Co. Sligo hurling-team and/or winners (at odds of at least 33 to 1) of the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Three-dimensional holograms of the Sacred Heart can make a small room seem somehow bigger (if slightly more crowded). Upon arriving unexpectedly in the room set apart for confession, the minister of the sacrament shall greet the penitent and immediately mistake him for someone who has come to see to the cistern in the housekeeper’s lavatory. The penitent shall be duly conducted to that part of the house where the plumbing-work is to be done, whereupon the priest’s error shall be discovered and the two shall return in procession to the special place where the telephone shall be rung. After a suitable interlude while the telephone is answered, the curate summoned to the upstairs extension and the call is inadvertently cut off by the parochus, the celebration proper shall begin. The seal of secrecy and the utter privacy under which this sacrament must be conducted is inviolable and the celebration may only be curtailed or otherwise interrupted for the gravest of reasons. Such reasons shall be strictly confined to:
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