TORONTO – There they were, sitting or standing under the trees in Coronation Park along Lake Ontario, speaking quietly with a solitary person, then offering prayers and a blessing.

Priests from 170 nations heard confession in the most informal of circumstances during this week’s World Youth Day events.

The focus of the global celebration, which has drawn at least 350 Mainers, has deliberately shifted through the week from a “You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world” theme to reconciliation.

Also called penance and confession, reconciliation is a church sacrament in which a priest listens to a person’s confession and grants forgiveness in the name of Jesus Christ.

About 1,000 priests, including the Rev. Robert Vaillancourt, pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Madawaska, heard confessions during the event. Vaillancourt is the spiritual director for the Mainers.

Priests from around the globe could be seen praying and blessing young people the priests had never met before. Confessions were heard in about 25 different languages, according to WYD organizers.

A priest for 20 years, Vaillancourt remembers the days when a person stepped into a wooden confessional box and spoke through a screen to a supposedly anonymous priest. He said that today’s face-to-face confessions offer priests, especially in their home parishes, opportunities to counsel people as well as grant them forgiveness.

“Reconciliation is a gift from God, like a gentle rain,” said one Catholic cardinal at a Friday morning catechesis, or teaching session, before a Mass. “I suggest that when you go to a priest that you not go with a great long list, but just the things that are weighing most heavily on you. Then, lay them down and let go of them.”

Ryan Bernard of Old Town attended the World Youth Day 2000 gathering in Rome. He said that going to confession before the long pilgrimage walk in Italy helped him get in the proper frame of mind for the overnight vigil and made the journey easier.

“The walk seemed like less of a hassle,” said the 19-year-old member of Holy Family Catholic Church. “I was more myself and I was more there. I urge every young person here to go because it makes you feel so much happier.”

Bernard said he goes to confession just a few times a year – not weekly, as his parents were expected to do when they were youngsters.

The University of Maine sophomore speculated that many young people don’t go to confession for fear that priests will judge them rather than their behavior. He said that Vaillancourt, a former pastor at Holy Family, convinced him a few years ago that priests are trained not to be judgmental and to forget what they hear in confession.