f
the grace of God and merits eternal punishment" as well as "to slay
and to steal something of value." For all these crimes, unforgivable in
themselves, there is but one pardon, the absolution given by the
priest, that is to say, confession beforehand, itself being one of the
observances to which we are bound by strict obligation and at the very
least once a year.

Through this office the Catholic priest rises above human conditions to
an immeasurable height; for, in the confessional, he exercises
supreme power, that which God is to exercise at the Last Judgment,
the formidable power of punishing or remitting sins, of judgment or
of absolution, and, if he intervenes on the death-bed, the faculty of
consigning the impenitent or repentant soul to an eternity of rewards
or to an eternity of damnation.[5337] No creature, terrestrial or
celestial, not even the highest of archangels, or St. Joseph or the
Virgin,[5338] possesses this veritably divine prerogative. He alone
holds it through exclusive delegation, by virtue of a special sacrament,
the order which assigns to him the privilege of conferring five others,
and which endows him for life with a character apart, ineffaceable and
supernatural.--To render himself worthy of it, he has taken a vow of
chastity, he undertakes to root out from his flesh and his heart the
consequences of sex; he debars himself from marriage and paternity;
through isolation, he escapes all family influences, curiosities and
indiscretions; he belongs wholly to his office. He has prepared himself
for it long beforehand, he has studied moral theology together with
casuistry and become a criminal jurist; and his sentence is not a vague
pardon bestowed on penitents after having admitted in general terms that
they are sinners. He is bound to weigh the gravity of their errors and
the strength of their repentance, to know the facts and details of
the fall and the number of relapses, the aggravating or extenuating
circumstances, and, therefore, to interrogate in order to sound the soul
to its depths. If some souls are timorous, they surrender themselves to
him spontaneously and, more than this, they have recourse to him outside
of his tribunal; he marks out for them the path they must follow, he
guides them at every turn; he interferes daily, he becomes a director as
was said in the seventeenth century, the titular and permanent director
of one or of many lives.[5339] This is still the case at the present