I hear confessions

I am a priest. I hear confessions. I have heard thousands of confessions. I also go to confession myself quite regularly, but that is not the angle from which I am writing here. I want to write from the angle of the confessor, not from that of the confessing.

I do so for the sake of the thousands of Catholics who need a good confession, but don't make one because of what they think might go on in the mind of the confessor while they tell their sins. Also for the sake of the thousands who are not Catholics and who have been taught to think that just about the most horrible institution in the world is that in which one human being is supposed to tell another his sins. Well, here are some of the things, 'that go on in the mind of the confessor.'

Of course, I cannot (I say 'cannot' instead of 'may not' deliberately, because the thing I speak of is so near to a physical impossibility) say anything that would reveal or publish the sins of any individual. That is what is called 'the seal of confession. ' You have to lock up in your heart what you hear. You have to be ready to stand up to inquisitors, dictators, persecutors, and dare them to order you to the gallows or the firing squad or solitary confinement rather than tell them anything about anybody's confession. I suppose every priest has, at some time or other, had the dream of glory involving brave and stony silence in the midst of a third degree about confessions he has heard.

Actually, however, it isn't so hard to keep the seal of confession. I said I have heard thousands of confessions. I have never kept track of the totals, though we are asked to count the number heard on specific occasions. I would roughly guess that I have heard many more than one hundred thousand confessions in twenty odd years, which would be less than five thousand a year. Some years, I know, they were many more. Anyway, that comes to an average of about one hundred a week, and I've often wondered if there are any other professional men in the world, doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, etc., who in any given week treat the problems of a hundred different clients. I suppose doctors behind the front lines of a battlefield during a war do: But they would call this 'emergency treatment.' For hundreds of priests, one hundred or more confessions a week is normal practice for years. However, the point I want to make is that you don't have much capacity for remembering the sins of any individual when you are hearing one hundred or more confessions a week. All the stories blur together. The people whose confessions you have heard become like a crowd that you see only from a distance. You can see different heads and hats and heights, but you cannot distinguish features. You get so that these many voices you have heard whispering through a grate are like the one great voice of humanity whispering its plea for forgiveness and peace.

Sometimes, it is true, a penitent may arrange it so that you won't forget him or his sins. He comes to you in the parlor of a rectory, or he takes you aside from a gathering of people, and tells you outright what sins he has committed and asks you if there is any chance for him. Sometimes, if the place and time are suitable, you can have him kneel down at once, and put it all into a sacramental confession. He doesn't care what you know about him or what you think of him. To him, you are but an anonymous and shadowy instrument of God's mercy. But after such an open confession, you sometimes find the penitent wanting to keep in touch with you, remembering you with a greeting on feast days, reporting on how well he has been doing since the 'big' confession was made. This makes you very happy. Indeed, it is one of the great sources of happiness for a priest. It keeps before your eyes the kind of miraculous transformation that can be effected in people through a good confession and the strong graces that are imparted through the absolution you are empowered to pronounce.

There are those, too, who come to you regularly in the confessional in quest of guidance and help toward greater holiness. They want you to know them and to remember them just well enough to enable you to give them continuous direction. To you, they become souls without external features; you would not recognize them outside the confessional. Sometimes, on meeting you, a person will say: 'I've been going to confession to you for ten years. ' Yet, you won't have the slightest inkling of which 'case' or 'soul history' the person represents.

But nobody ever has to reveal himself, or herself, to the priest, either face to face, or by personal identification, when in need of a good confession. All they have to do is to join the queue outside the confessional, become one of the nameless, faceless, blurring multitude on a Saturday afternoon or evening, and slip into the shadowy cubicle when their turn comes. The story may be long or short; it may be weighted with big numbers revealing many falls, or it may come tumbling out charged with the emotions of remorse, sadness, fear, humiliation, grief. It may be the simple and placid revelation of those half deliberate slips and failings of which the Gospel says that even the just man can be guilty seven times a day. It doesn't matter to the priest. He has heard it all before. He has acquired the personal disinterest that routine and monotony and anonymity cannot but produce. Yet, that personal disinterest, that total lack of curiosity about who the penitent may be, does not destroy an intense desire to become the instrument of another miracle of forgiveness.

But what, you may say, about the reprimands and castigations that the priest sometimes gives to penitents after they have told their sins? What is in the mind of a priest when he rebukes you in the confessional? This is the thing that some people fear most before confession. Sometimes it keeps them away for far too long a time. 'What will the priest say to me?' is the question that makes them tremble.

But the motivation behind anything the priest says is so simple that it should allay all fear. Ever since Christ made confession to a priest necessary for forgiveness by the words, 'Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven; whose sins you shall retain they are retained, ' every ordained priest has been bound to judge, from each penitent's story, whether he may pronounce the words of absolution. In most cases, he knows at once that he may. The penitent is obviously sincere and determined, for the love of God, not to go back to the same sins again. In some cases, the priest knows almost at once that he may not give absolution. For example, if a person confesses a certain serious sin, and in the same breath defends it and states in effect that it cannot and will not be given up, the priest is helpless. If nothing he says can change the intent of the one kneeling before him, he himself would be guilty of a mortal sin if he were to pronounce, or even feign pronouncing, the words of absolution.

Then there are the doubtful cases, cases in which the number of serious falls, and the penitent's manner of confessing them, and the apparent lack of true spiritual awareness, make the confessor wonder whether this person really wants to break with his sins. In such cases, your thought as a confessor is this: If only I can wake this person up! If only I can help him to realize his need for reformation! So you talk to him. The manner of such talking naturally differs from priest to priest; and in the same priest, different circumstances can influence the manner of trying to draw forth a clear expression of love of God and hatred of sin. But the purpose is always the same.

Like all human beings, priests have different temperaments and express themselves in different ways. Some people sound a little bit angry even when they are talking about trivial subjects with friends; some priests sound angry when they are urging someone to take measures to save their souls. That is just their way. All of us who are priests keep trying out different methods of awakening genuine love of God and deep practical sorrow for sin in the hearts of those who appear indifferent. Sometimes a method will be poorly chosen, or ill-adapted to a particular person on whom it is tried. But there is one thing that should never be forgotten, and should be realized by the person confessing a hundred sins or one sin; the purpose of the confessor is always simple and always the same; he wants the sacramental absolution to be a miracle of forgiveness and transformation.

Another thing that every person in need of a good confession should know. You can make it absolutely unnecessary to receive a 'bawling out,' as it is so often called, from the priest who hears your confession, no matter how many or how awful are the sins you have to confess. All you have to do is to add, after telling the sins: 'I've thought it all over, Father. I have made my decision. I'm now ready to suffer anything, rather than commit these sins again. And I'll stay away from the occasions that led to my downfall. And I' ll be at confession and Communion often. ' If you say something like that, even after the saddest tales of sin, the priest's heart will leap with joy; as often as not he will congratulate you, and figuratively pat you on the back, and send you forth with new encouragement and confidence. It is only when you indicate that you have not made a decision about your offenses against God, or when you say, weakly, in response to a question of whether you intend to avoid the old sins, 'I don't know,' or 'I'll try, but I can't give up what led to my sins, ' that the priest has to try to enkindle a spark of real love of God in your heart before he can, in good conscience, give you absolution.

It makes us, who are priests, sad to think that people are afraid to come to confession; or offended by something that we say to them. It makes us sad that we cannot always say exactly the right thing, and that usually it is those who need the most to be aroused to hate their sins, who take from confession only a sense of having been mistreated by the priest. It is saddening, too, to find ourselves sometimes subject to circumstances that try our patience and perhaps, much as we want to avoid it, influence our way of speaking. Three or four consecutive hours of hearing confessions while one is sitting in a cramped position, perhaps with the feet growing cold and numb because the heat of the church does not seep into the confessional, or with the temperature around one hundred degrees in summer, and with constant whispering making the mouth dry and sticky, constitute an experience that can hardly be imagined by anyone to whose lot it does not fall. But every conceivable discomfort is forgotten with every confession heard that makes it easy to give absolution because the dispositions of the penitent are so clearly sincere.

Of course, there is much talk, outside Catholic circles, about how terrible it is for priests to be listening to the sins of girls, married women, etc. Priests smile when they see such things in anti-Catholic pamphlets. The worst shock most priests ever got in their lives was when they read and studied about the possible sins of human nature before they were ever ordained. There is scarcely any sin that can be committed that cannot be confessed in less than ten words, not one of them descriptive or provocative. It is just about as dangerous to teach the catechism or the Ten Commandments to a classroom of children, or a prospective convert, as to hear people say what commandments they have broken when they come to confession. Then there's the monotony of it all. It gets to be like hearing football scores of teams you never heard of, or weather reports. Only the supreme consciousness of being able to work the miracle of forgiveness remains.

But perhaps the best laugh is enjoyed by us who are priests when we hear or read that hearing confessions is a great source of personal enrichment for the priest. I suppose, to those who know nothing of the facts, that it looks like a wonderful opportunity. Into the confessional come people who believe that there, and there alone, can they be saved from hell. They believe that the priest holds the power to forgive or to retain their sins. What a chance, and what a set-up, for making a little charge, asking for a slight stipend! Yet, in the more than one hundred thousand confessions which I, as a priest, have heard, I have never received so much as a penny. ¥nd, sticking only to my own experience, I know that not one of the several hundred other priests, with whom I am acquainted, has ever received a penny for a confession.

Perhapœ, too, you'd like to know whether priests talk much among themselves about things they've heard in the confessional.

Among ordinary friends, trading secrets is one of the bonds that unite them. Among priests there is no bond that knits them more closely together than the bond of silence about what has been heard in confession. On many an occasion, three or four other priests and myself have heard confessions for from six to eight hours on a Saturday afternoon and evening. When it was all over and we would come together to relax, the only remarks made about the experience of the day would be such as these: 'My feet are half frozen, ' or 'My head is splitting' or 'Gee, we must have heard the whole city.' You may be very sure that consciousness of the seal of confession is especially strong in the mind of a priest when he is with his fellow-priests, because he knows that they possess that acute consciousness themselves.

From what I have said about the discomforts and inconveniences of hearing confessions, don't gather that you are burdening a priest when you go to confession, and that you should, for that reason, ever hesitate to go. You may gather this: that if confession were a merely human invention, as the ill-educated outsider to the faith so often says it is, if it were not demonstrably an institution set up by the Son of God Himself, your priests would be the first ones to cast it off. They have to go to confession to a fellow-priest themselves, and they do not find this any easier, generally speaking, than anyone else. If it were not a divine precept to confess one's sins to obtain God's forgiveness, the priest would neither go to confession himself nor burden himself with the hearing of the confessions of others. But this is a strange thing. Of all the thousands and tens of thousands of priests, all of them educated for years, you never heard of one who cast doubt on the necessity of confession according to the will of Christ. There are priests, of course, who give up the exercise of their priesthood, to take up a life of sin. They give up everything, confession included. But among loyal priests, there is nothing in all the teachings of the Catholic faith so taken for granted, as indisputably the will of Christ, as the sacrament of confession.

At the same time, all the inconvenience of hearing confessions is compensated~ for by the joy that comes from bringing joy and peace of soul to others. It is in the confessional that the priest sees miracles taking place, and who does not rejoice to be the witness of, not to say the participant in, a miracle? You read in psychology books about habits of evil so deeply grooved into human hearts that, the psychologist says, no power on earth can remove them. The priest in the confessional sees such habits broken, by the power of God and the graces of the sacrament. You read much today about neuroses and psychoses and phobias, etc., but any experienced priest can tell you how rarely abnormalities afflict a person who makes the right use of regular confession, and how quickly their beginnings can be cured by good confessions. But, above all, there is the joy that every priest hugs to his heart, together with the secrets that have been entrusted to him, over the knowledge that he has led souls back to God through confessions that he has heard, and over the frequent glimpses he is given of ineffable relief and peace in one who was sorely troubled and fearful and weighted down with sin before he made his confession.

So it goes on - this humiliating, but exalting, this maligned by a few but beloved of many, this uncomfortable for the lower nature but peace-bringing to the higher, practice of going to confession and hearing confessions. Every week of the year, and in many places several times during each week, we, your priests, enter confessionals and wait for you. Don't be afraid of us. Don't worry about what we may be thinking or what we may say. Don't let us wait in vain when you need a good confession.

There is nothing we ever do that has less of self in it. In the confessional, we want only to lead you to God and to preserve you in His love.

My daughter will be making her First Reconciliation next month and I think this will help me better explain it to her and at the same time calm some of her fears down about it.

Thank you so much for posting this.

Good article! I love Confession. My only complaint is that the only time you can go is 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. Why not during the work week, when priests are supposed to be, like, working ... aren't they?

I wish he would have written something about confessing venial sins.

To the best of my knowledge I have not committed a mortal sin in a long time, and I feel that I am wasting the Priests time with my piddly sins. I have even been told that by a confessor, though in more charitable language.

In part of the tradiional Mass the Priest says something like "may your sins be blotted out by the power of the Mass." They might say the same thing at a NO also, but I forget.

So anyways I wonder if I am required to go to confession when I can't think of anything to say. I don't want to appear holier than thou, but I am not the kind of person who tries to justify that my sins are not really sins. I have even told my confessor that "yes, what I did was a sin" when he tried to tell me it wasn't. To liberal confessors nothing is a sin. Which brings me to another fear - that you will not be absolved if the Priest doesn't recognize that you have sinned.

Make sure that the Priest says all the words or you might not be forgiven. I have actually had to ask a couple of Priests to do that.

I have even told my confessor that "yes, what I did was a sin" when he tried to tell me it wasn't. To liberal confessors nothing is a sin. Which brings me to another fear - that you will not be absolved if the Priest doesn't recognize that you have sinned.

Make sure that the Priest says all the words or you might not be forgiven. I have actually had to ask a couple of Priests.

You might look up "scrupulosity" in the Catholic Dictionary or Catechism. You seem to tend toward it.

He has acquired the personal disinterest that routine and monotony and anonymity cannot but produce.

The tone of that makes a penitent feel real good. You sense it with some, most actually. I hope God hasn't lost his capacity for taking a personal interest in our lives as the individuals we are and not "type" us or put us in little file categories like this priest has.

It's only human that priests would develop that disinerest, callousness, or whatever the physic mechanism is that goes on in yourself when things get too routine.

People in the medical profession get like that, too. You always remember the ones who seemed to take an interest in you as a unique individual and not as a case #.

That priest would have done better for me this morning to write something different.

Just some food for thought. Maybe a little exercise in role reversal or something might do wonders for his soul . . .

You might look up "scrupulosity" in the Catholic Dictionary or Catechism. You seem to tend toward it.

Sinkpur how can you discern that by what Argus said. I'm sure many educated, knowledgeable Catholics have had the same experience. I know I have. I've actually had a priest say to me, "Oh why don't you tell me the good things you've done instead."

I've also been given penances that are so vague it is next to impossible to tell whether or not you've completed them. Like, "Do something nice for someone sometime".

To the best of my knowledge I have not committed a mortal sin in a long time, and I feel that I am wasting the Priests time with my piddly sins. I have even been told that by a confessor, though in more charitable language.

I've had similar experiences. Part of it is that they're in a hurry because there's such a shortage, and they're spread very thin, at least in my area.

My regular Priest is acutally pretty good, and is very tolerant with doubts about the Faith, which I'm prone to, and suggests reading material to buck up my belief. But he's an administrator as well, and on a rotation for the Latin Mass. He's got a million things going on. And other Priests are assigned as confessors.

One Priest who heard my confession, asked me if I was finished, in a tone that conveyed, 'is it over yet?' So, if you're saying that a good confessor is hard to find and keep, I agree with that.

The problem with having too many of these experiences in a row, is that it inevitably leads to the question, 'what's the point?'

Sinkpur how can you discern that by what Argus said.

Read the post again. It's full of fears and doubts.

There is no requirement in Church law to confess at all if one is only guilty of venial sins; these sins are absolved at the penitential rite of the mass or even with an imperfect act of contrition.

Good post.

However, I should never be in the role of the confessor.

I'd be laughing at some of it, taking notes on some of it, and getting phone numbers whenever possible.

I'm Evil Light. Picture Hitler, only instead of gassing the Jews, he gives them all really bad Noogies, and maybe a Pinkbelly.

Confession of venial sins is a pious and worthy practice recommended by JP II.

CCC 1458 Without being strictly necessary, confession of everyday faults (venial sins) is nevertheless strongly recommended by the Church. Indeed the regular confession of our venial sins helps us form our conscience, fight against evil tendencies, let ourselves be healed by Christ and progress in the life of the Spirit.

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