Confiteor

In another section of the one-and-a-half pages of German in the letter, he openly wonders if he, as all Catholic do in a prayer known as the Confiteor at Mass, should ask for forgiveness for what they have done and what they have failed to do "by my fault, by my most grievous fault".

God on the borning day and the dying day brought to this single moment past midnight presided over the reenactment of the Christian mystery by an alcoholic priest from Tennessee, a boy bent low to say the confiteor, and a churchful of people praying beside a river in Ravenel, South Carolina.

“Ben, do you remember that time I told Jamie Polk you only spoke Latin and that was the only language Catholic boys were allowed to speak. Every time he would ask Ben a question, Ben would hit him with a line from the Confiteor.”

The priest bowed and recited the Confiteor.

And their most daring harmonic adventures—for example, the otherworldly modulations in the “Confiteor” of the B-Minor Mass—look ahead to Wagner, even to Schoenberg.