Going to Confession: How it Works (Part 5 of Becoming Catholic)
Jan 24th, 2012 | By Taylor Marshall | Category: Blog PostsFor Protestants, the most unknown aspect of Catholic devotional life is confession. Unless you’re Catholic, you cannot experience it. A Protestant can attend a Catholic baptism, confirmation, wedding, ordination, and Holy Mass; however, he cannot attend a confession or know what it’s like until he actually makes one for the first time.
Now most Protestants have seen it in movies. You go into the wooden box, a door slides behind a screen, and the Catholic says, “Bless me Father for I have sinned, etc.”
Okay, that’s pretty much how it begins, but let’s look at it from a devotional point of view – how it really goes for a Catholic.
Ideally, a Catholic makes a nightly examination of conscience every evening. This means that he prays to the Holy Spirit in order to remember his faults during the past day. He then prays an act of contrition at this moment with the intent of confessing these faults in confession.
Before entering the confessional (that is, the box), he prays to the Holy Spirit (and other saints) that he might make a good confession and be given the gift of true repentance and contrition. My practice is to ask the Holy Spirit for the light to see all my sins. Then I ask the Blessed Virgin Mary to obtain for me the grace to be truly sorry for my sins. You see, confession isn’t just about forgiveness of sins, it’s also about growing in sacramental grace.
In the confessional, there is sometimes the option to go behind the screen or face to face (I always choose the screen). The priest will recite a prayer and then you say, “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it has been # weeks since my last confession and I accuse myself of the following sins.”
Next you list all your sins in kind and number. If the priest cannot hear you or understand you, he’ll stop and ask questions. When you get to the end, you say, “For these sins and all those that I cannot remember, I humbly repent and ask for absolution, counsel, and penance.”
The priest will then give you some advice or encouragement. He may make a general judgment that your struggles are related to a common vice. If you cry, he will comfort you. If you are scared to confess a sin, you say, “Father, I’m afraid to confess something.” He’ll walk you through it. If you are unsure if something was a sin or not, you ask him and talk it out. It’s very pastoral and safe. Then the priest gives you your penance. The penance is the sign that you wish to start a new life in Christ – that you’re going to make a change. The penance also shows a willingness to make reparation for the harm you’ve caused (for example, to return stolen money or apologize to a wounded spouse). A common penance is “Three Hail Mary’s” or “a decade of the Rosary” or “Three Our Fathers so that you’ll grow in the virtue of temperance.”
Then the priest says, “Now please make an Act of Contrition.” This is a prayer you say to God out loud and the priest listens to you say it. It’s proof to him that you really are sorry for your sins and not just playing “pinball Catholicism” (click here to see what I mean by that).
The Act of Contrition goes like this:
O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven, and the pains of hell; but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who are all good and deserving of all my love.I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and avoid the near occasions of sin. Amen.
Then the priest gives you absolution: “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father and of Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
The priest then tells you to go in peace and usually asks you to say a prayer for him.
After that you, leave the confessional and go into the church where you pray your penance quietly and pray about anything else that is on your heart.
That’s confession. It is certainly one of my top three favorite things about Catholicism.
Godspeed,
Taylor Marshall
PS: If you would like to read Parts 1-4 of “Becoming Catholic” please click here.
Dr. Marshall,
In the case of stolen money, as you mention here, would it be required for a person to pay it back? For example, what about corporate executives that stole millions and are now in jail. If they were to truly repent, and go to confession, would they have to pay it back? This would seem difficult if a person did not have the means to pay it back because of how much was taken. Or, if a person stole out of need but felt sorry for it. If they stole out of need, then it might be difficult for the person to pay it back.
I used to do this in my youth, and I look forward to the opportunity to do it again and again when I rejoin the church.
Rusty, it has been my experience that the priest will take your abilities into consideration when giving you penance. One may simply explain to the priest that a certain penance is impossible, and the priest will likely give a different penance.
Confession changed my life so much for the better. I will always be grateful for this sacrament.
Sincerely,
K. Doran
It’s hard to beat the sense of a fresh start after Confession.
Timing! Anyone else see this today?
https://www.internetmonk.com/archive/mpt-posts-on-church-discipline
Restless Pilgrim,
I just came from reading those posts! It makes me very glad that the sacrament of Reconciliation is (1) celebrated by priests with apostolic authority to forgive sins, not just a random pastor from a random church; and (2) is protected by the seal (i.e. is absolutely confidential), so I can feel free to fully confess my sins without having to worry about them being used to shame or manipulate me in the future.
Everyone, check the link in #6 for a first-hand look at how confession, when it is not confidential and used by heavy-handed pastors, can be used to promote guilt and alienation, not freedom and reconciliation.
For those who are interested here’s a link to an extremely helpful talk on the Sacrament of Confession by Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP entitled “On the Other Side of the Confessional.” It was recorded at a ‘Theology on Tap’ meeting:
https://site.adw.org/audio/othrsidecnfss.mp3
I can’t recommend it enough.
It makes me so happy to see how many people are actually moved by confession. Personally, I go to a Catholic school, and I do participate in Catholic mass with my school community and help out in Campus Ministry, but I am Prostent. Thank you for this explination. I hope you will not mind me using your input for my project- It will be sited.
I pray God will continue to use you to reach out to others and change their lives for the better as he has done for you. :)
God bless you all~
Okay. So not to start off a flurry of ‘how bad things can get in confession”, but I am really struggling with this sacrament and am a (fairly) new convert.
While I have had many good experiences in confession, with the great ‘close to God’ feeling and lightness that that entails, I have also had a couple of not-so-great experiences.
I am trying to make sense of the not-so-great experiences. So any feedback would be welcome. When Dr. Marshall wrote ‘it’s very pastoral and safe’…I definitely wanted to caveat that!
My first item has to do with ‘confession wars’. I go to one priest in town sometimes, and another priest other times (there are not a lot of Catholic Churches where I live). The reason I go to both is varied, and I do try to do weekly Confession but go to the different priests.
For purposes here, suffice it to say that when I go to one priest, he invariably ‘chastises’ me for COMING to confession at all. He has told me again and again that all I am doing is confessing venial sin or no sin at all (demeanor and tone, as well as sometimes words imply that I am wasting his time). He repeatedly tells me that my sins are ‘not sins’. Tonight he told me that God treats me as an adult, not a child. He said I don’t need to come confessing every little thing like a child. Ironically, the reading at the Mass tonight literally was the verse about receiving the kingdom of God as a child…..
Then the other priest across town. I go to him…well, I haven’t been to him in awhile. When I last went to him, he took my sins very seriously (for which I was grateful). But he also invariably ended up giving me almost the opposite advice of the first priest. Almost all my sins were mortal to him. He is a very good priest, very orthodox, and I appreciate this very much. But he has a way of making every thing I do seem completely off-the-charts heinous. Even sins that are similar to the sins I confess to the other priest who tells me that they are not even sins, this priest tells me are mortal. The last time I went to this second priest, we ended up in a discussion (1?! – which I didn’t think you were supposed to do in confession, but…?…there it was) whereby he told me that I needed to repent of the entire system of Protestantism from which I came and proceeded to tell me that there was no way I could have had a real relationship with Jesus prior to entering the Catholic Church and didn’t I know that the devil also believes in God and that didn’t mean he had a relationship with Jesus??? I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.
I left the confessional in tears and cried through the entire Mass following. No, not embarrassing at all, blubbering through Mass.
So….I’m no theologian….but doesn’t somewhere between these two extremes seem like a good balance to strike, or is it just me? Where is the ‘pastoral’?
I’m fairly tenacious and haven’t given up going to weekly confession…because I go for God, not nec. for these priests. But man, the priests sure could make things a lot more ‘pastoral’ by being more balanced. Or, just don’t give me any advice at all. Just let me talk, absolve me, and then let me go. Some times I wish for this.
What are the readers of this fine sites’ ideas/thoughts?
If the priest ask you for money for the confession you have done
Should you pay him and how much would you pay him ?
You can offer a gift, but I would try to place it in the offering basket during mass rather than giving it to the priest after confession. The sacraments should be free, as God’s grace and mercy are given freely.