I appreciate the reply. From your conversation.....do you Have to go through the priest or can you go straight to Christ?
My initial response is you'd better have gone to Christ before you show up in the "sin bin" in the first place to be reconciled with His Church. Father says "Christ established the Sacrament as the way of going straight to Him otherwise what's the point of the power to bind and loose, what is there to communicate?"
He's a Southern Baptist convert so he still speaks the lingo of Evangelicalism when talking to non-Catholics but you're getting it filtered through me and I'm a former Nazarene with serious resentment issues.