What More Can I Tell You?

Stéphane Desmazières, the ninth child of a family from northern France, was a priest in the diocese of Lille and, for thirteen years, bishop of Beauvais. At retirement, he chose to live at L'Arche. He spent two years in the "foyer" at the Hermitage in Trosly-Breuil, then moved to St-Rémy-les-Chevreuse, where he founded a new L'Arche community.
This holy year of Redemption, and with the Synod of Bishops in Rome on Reconciliation and the Sacrament of Penance, we are—thank God—hearing more and more about this personal practice of the Christian who comes before the Redeemer to receive the grace of forgiveness.
I was asked: You have such vast experience of the sacrament of Penance, and you now live with mentally handicapped adults. What do you think about confession for them? Do you believe they can receive this sacrament "in truth"?
The answer I can give today is altogether different from what I would have given years ago.
Then I would have answered without hesitation: "Clearly, you cannot give a sacrament to someone who understands nothing and does not know what he is doing." Today I can no longer speak that way.
One day, a boy profoundly handicapped, after leaving the Mass he had attended, made clear to me, in his own way, that he wanted to receive Communion. I called him to me and began to speak to him about Jesus. I had spoken with his parents about it. His mother said to me: "You're wasting your time; he understands nothing anyway!" It was true—he understood nothing with his poor, wounded mind. He could not have repeated back to me—not even in his own way—what I was trying to tell him.

What happens in that moment in the heart of that woman, that man, kneeling to receive forgiveness?

Yet I saw that boy change...
What happens in that moment in the heart of that woman, that man, kneeling to receive forgiveness?
And on the day of his First Communion, he was visibly moved. What had happened?
I have made no special study of this. I approach people with my heart and try to understand. I have discovered that when a person is deprived of a limb or faculty, he spontaneously creates another to replace it. Someone who loses his legs in an accident uses his arms to move about. The blind person sees with his ears and hands. I believe something similar happens with the mentally handicapped: unable to communicate normally through reason—which is closed off—or through words, which he cannot find naturally, his whole body comes into play, animated by his heart.
We read him a passage from the Gospel and try to explain it in the simplest way. He may be incapable of expressing in rational language—as we would—what he has understood. But if we try to express the passage through mime, he will do it better than we do, because he feels things deeply through his heart. The fingers of a blind person are more gifted than those of someone who sees. The heart of the mentally handicapped person holds riches we do not possess.

This long preamble does not take me away from the subject that concerns us, but it allows me to attempt a stammering answer to the question posed.
I must first make a confession. I received the sacrament of Holy Orders 56 years ago; I have therefore heard confession many times. When, having retired to live at L'Arche, I saw men and women come toward me at a penitential celebration, asking for the Lord's forgiveness and its absolution, men and women who looked at me without speaking and waited—I suddenly found myself lost, reduced almost to radical poverty.
Ask questions? Try to get answers? To see, as every confessor must, whether the penitent truly repents his errors and is worthy of forgiveness? A waste of time. The gaze is there before you, sinking into yours... A gaze that expects far more than questions he is wholly incapable of answering. It seems to say: "What are you waiting for? Give me God's forgiveness that I have come to seek." This face-to-face encounter, prolonged in silence, is almost painful.

God alone knows. It is a mystery of love that will be revealed to us only in heaven.

God alone knows. It is a mystery of love that will be revealed to us only in heaven.
Then the priest, illuminated by the Spirit, understands very well that he stands there in the name of Jesus, a witness to his merciful tenderness. It is in the name of Jesus that he dares break the silence. Not so much with words as with his face, his smile, his gaze. With a touch of solemnity, he announces that in the name of Jesus he will grant forgiveness, and gently speaks the sacramental words of absolution, making a large sign of the cross over the penitent. "Go in peace now, my child! God has forgiven your sins!"
What happens in that moment in the heart of that woman, that man, kneeling to receive forgiveness? God alone knows. It is a mystery of love that will be revealed to us only in heaven.

Once, with a young man of twenty-two, things went more or less as I have just described. But when I began to pronounce the words of absolution—he was kneeling—he prostrated himself, his face to the ground. And when at the end I said to him:
"Now, C., go in peace. All your sins are forgiven!" he jumped to his feet, opened his arms to embrace me, his face radiant, and left.