You wrote it but I wasn't supposed to read it?
In future please identify those parts of your posts which are not meant to be taken seriously.
Look. You're running with the big dogs here, and there is no subject more important than that which we discuss. Id give it the care it deserves.
Actually no priest has ever told me to say 10 Our Fathers and 12 Hail Mary's. I have been told to say a decade of the rosary. But that was not to obtain forgiveness.
If I offend my wife, I buy her flowers. The flowers are not meant to buy her forgiveness, but to tell her I am sorry and the covenant we have is more important than the fights we have (or used to have). If I do a "penance" after a confession, well, God already knows, better than I how sorry I am (and am not).
But it's like an exercise, a gesture, to remind myself that the sins I commit day in and day out are things to be sorry for. It also provides a kind of "closure", as they say these days. I have apologized. I have tried to understand to the best of my fallen ability what went into my sins and how sinful they are and what sadness and sorrow comes out of them. I have been forgiven, or, rather, the eternal forgiveness has, once again, touched me.
So, not in sorrow but in confidence and gratitude, I say my prayers (or whatever else is assigned) as a gesture to show that I know I blew it (again) and as an exercise to remind myself, to drive the salvific lesson home.
What was the question?
Yeah, the big dogs who can't even keep their replies straight. I am Gargantua. I am a male. I have a wife. I don't know who you think you're responding to, but that's okay, because apparently neither do you.
Big Dog. What a sad, self-important joke.
;-/