Hi, I'm Edwards Sari, and welcome to All Things Catholic, where real faith meets real life.

Welcome to the All Things Catholic podcast. I'm your host, Edward Sree. And in these days, as the church mourns the death of Pope Francis, we pray for the

repose of his soul. We pray also in Thanksgiving for him and the gifts he's given the church.

And as I've been looking back on his pontificate, I want to share with you three things that I appreciated

most about Pope Francis. Three things that I hope will be great lasting gifts for the

church and can help us make sense out of his pontificate. So first point I want to draw out is this.

It's his appreciation for how deep our wounds are. I've loved many times when he writes about

the impact of original sin in our life. And I think it's important

because many people view sin as just like, oh, it's like a stain on our soul. You know, I did something

wrong. I broke the commandment. And now I've got this stain on my soul. I got to go to confession

and get that stain removed from my soul. So I can be cleansed and have that sin wiped away. That's how they think about

sin. And it's a very problematic view because there's so much more to sin if that's all we think.

Or we think of it as like a bad mark, you know, is a bad mistake. I got a bad grade in the

grade book. And, you know, I need God to come in and remove that bad grade, like a teacher might drop the lowest score

and wipe out that bad mark. I think we think that's what confession is all about. I go to confession

and then I get that stain removed. I get that bad grade removed from my soul. And Pope Francis says,

no, no, no, don't treat confession like that. He said, we could treat confession like the dry cleaner. You know, we take our clothes as a dry cleaner to get the stain removed.

He says, no, no, no, the confessional is not meant to be like the dry cleaner.

Yes, there's an element of that, but the heart of it is much more than that, that God wants to get to the roots of our sin.

And when we go to confession, there's a deep healing power that God gives us through his grace.

He doesn't just want to remove the bad grade or remove the stain.

No, no.

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