When I was twelve, a priest assigned me 300 Hail Marys and 300 Our Fathers for reciting the new Act of Contrition. He didn’t like it. My mother reduced the sentence to 3, reasoning that I must have misheard, and in any case God knew that I had made a proper Act. I remain, many years later, a wary and ambivalent penitent. I don’t find dredging up sin, or even the speed of ol (...)