Priests know more about this sort of thing, but they can’t talk about it.
I was in the confession line one Good Friday and the guy next to me seemed really nervous, so I smiled or said hi or something. Then he told me he hadn’t been to confession for 30 years.
30 years–what the priests call, with every precaution for anonymity, catching a “big fish.”
We cannot save ourselves. It is Catholic teaching that we cannot merit the “first grace” of conversion for ourselves.
However, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, we CAN, by prayers and sacrifices, congruently merit the first grace for others.
St. Monica is the obvious example, but there are countless, mostly anonymous others. You or I might have faith because of the prayers and sacrifices of our grandmothers, for example, nailed willingly on the cross with Him for the life of the world.
These are the golden days of opportunity to win souls for Christ in hidden, mystical ways, with love. Let’s take advantage of these days of grace.
I remember a priest, on the staff of a Metropolitan Cathedral, relating this while exhorting us to go to confession.
All through University, and for a while afterwards, he had been resisting a call to offer himself for the priesthood. When he eventually applied, and was accepted, by the diocese he was sent to a seminary in Rome. The first thing he was required to do there was to go to confession. At that point he had not been to confession since his mid teens, and fully expected to be thrown out on his ear.
The transformative experince that followed was such that he was, many years later, much the most assiduous among the cathedral staff at serving in the confessional (which is manned for several hours each day)