Inside the Confessional: What Is It Like for a Priest?

Aletelia ^ | March 4, 2015 | FR. MIKE SCHMITZ

[NYer]

I was once riding in a shuttle-bus with a number of older folks on the way from an airport. 
They noticed that I was a priest and started asking questions about it.

"Do you do all of the priest stuff?"

"Yep."

"Even the Confession thing?"

"Yeah. All the time."

One older lady gasped, "Well, I think that that would be the worst. 
It would be so depressing; hearing all about people’s sins."

I told them that it was the exact opposite. 
There is almost no greater place to be than with someone when they are coming back to God. 
I said, "It would depressing if I had to watch someone leave God; I get to be with them when they come back to Him." The Confessional is a place where people let God’s love win. 
The Confessional is the most joyful, humbling, and inspiring place in the world.

What do I see during Confession?

I think there are three things. 
First, I see the costly mercy of God in action. 
I get to regularly come face to face with the overwhelming, life-transforming power of God’s love. 
I get to see God's love up-close and it reminds me of how good God is.

Not many folks get to see the way in which God’s sacrifice on the Cross is constantly breaking into people’s lives and melting the hardest hearts. 
Jesus consoles those who are grieving their sins . . . and strengthens those who find themselves wanting to give up on God or on life.

As a priest, I get to see this thing happen every day.

I see a saint in the making.

The second thing I see is a person who is still trying – a saint in the making. 
I don't care if this is the person’s third confession this week; if they are seeking the Sacrament of Reconciliation, it means that they are trying. 
That's all that I care about. 
This thought is worth considering: going to Confession is a sign that you haven’t given up on Jesus.

This is one of the reasons why pride is so deadly. 
I have talked with people who tell me that they don’t want to go to Confession to their priest because their priest really likes them and "thinks that they are a good kid."

I have two things to say to this.

1.  He will not be disappointed! What your priest will see is a person who is trying! I dare you to find a saint who didn’t need to God’s mercy! (Even Mary needed God's mercy; she received the mercy of God in a dramatic and powerful way at her conception. 
Boom. Lawyered.)

2.  So what if the priest is disappointed? We try to be so impressive with so much of our lives. 
Confession is a place where we don't get to be impressive. 
Confession is a place where the desire to impress goes to die. 
Think about it: all other sins have the potential to cause us to race to the confessional, but pride is the one that causes us to hide from the God who could heal us.

Do I remember your sins? No!

So often, people will ask if I remember people's sin from Confession. 
As a priest, I rarely, if ever, remember sins from the confessional. 
That might seem impossible, but the truth is, sins aren’t all that impressive. 
They aren’t like memorable sunsets or meteor showers or super-intriguing movies… they are more like the garbage.

And if sins are like garbage, then the priest is like God’s garbage man. If you ask a garbage man about the grossest thing he's ever had to haul to the dump, maaaaaaybe he could remember it. But the fact is, once you get used to taking out the trash, it ceases to be noteworthy, it ceases to stand out.

Honestly, once you realize that the Sacrament of Reconciliation is less about the sin and more about Christ's death and resurrection having victory in a person's life, the sins lose all of their luster, and Jesus' victory takes center stage.

In Confession, we meet the life transforming, costly love of God… freely given to us every time we ask for it. We meet Jesus who reminds us, "You are worth dying for .. even in your sins, you are worth dying for."

Whenever someone comes to Confession, I see a person who is deeply loved by God and who is telling God that they love Him back. 
That's it, and that's all.

[daniel1212]

I’ve read that the practice of auricular (oral) confession to a priest was something that developed over many centuries and was not a practice of the early Christian churches.

As long as you define "early" as meaning the NT. And not only did regular confession of any sins distinctively to a priest develop, but so did the distinctive class of "priests."

Catholic writer Greg Dues in "Catholic Customs & Traditions, a popular guide," states, "Priesthood as we know it in the Catholic church was unheard of during the first generation of Christianity, because at that time priesthood was still associated with animal sacrifices in both the Jewish and pagan religions."

"When the Eucharist came to be regarded as a sacrifice [after Rome's theology], the role of the bishop took on a priestly dimension. By the third century bishops were considered priests. Presbyters or elders sometimes substituted for the bishop at the Eucharist. By the end of the third century people all over were using the title 'priest' (hierus in Greek and sacerdos in Latin) for whoever presided at the Eucharist." (http://books.google.com/books?id=ajZ_aR-VXn8C&source=gbs_navlinks_s)

And R. J. Grigaitis (O.F.S.) (while yet trying to defend the use of priest), reveals, "The Greek word for this office is ‘?e?e?? (hiereus), which can be literally translated into Latin as sacerdos. First century Christians [such as the inspired writers] felt that their special type of hiereus (sacerdos) was so removed from the original that they gave it a new name, presbuteros (presbyter). Unfortunately, sacerdos didn't evolve into an English word, but the word priest [from old English "preost"] took on its definition." (http://grigaitis.net/weekly/2007/2007-04-27.html)

In response to a query on this issue, the web site of International Standard Version (not my preferred translation) states,

No Greek lexicons or other scholarly sources suggest that "presbyteros" means "priest" instead of "elder". The Greek word is equivalent to the Hebrew ZAQEN, which means "elder", and not priest. You can see the ZAQENIM described in Exodus 18:21-22 using some of the same equivalent Hebrew terms as Paul uses in the GK of 1&2 Timothy and Titus. Note that the ZAQENIM are NOT priests (i.e., from the tribe of Levi) but are rather men of distinctive maturity that qualifies them for ministerial roles among the people.

Therefore the NT equivalent of the ZAQENIM cannot be the Levitical priests. The Greek "presbyteros" (literally, the comparative of the Greek word for "old" and therefore translated as "one who is older") thus describes the character qualities of the "episkopos". The term "elder" would therefore appear to describe the character, while the term "overseer" (for that is the literal rendering of "episkopos") connotes the job description.

To sum up, far from obfuscating the meaning of "presbyteros", our rendering of "elder" most closely associates the original Greek term with its OT counterpart, the ZAQENIM. ...we would also question the fundamental assumption that you bring up in your last observation, i.e., that "the church has always had priests among its ordained clergy". We can find no documentation of that claim. ( http://isvbible.com/catacombs/elders.htm)

[ealgeone]

Nyer is posting info saying 70 ad. Maybe y’all should compare notes m

[ealgeone]

Compare what the didache says with the Word. You’ll see the difference as I’ve already posted.

[FourtySeven]

“The passive voice indicates that someone has already done the forgiving or retaining. “

I believe I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the following:

Indeed, the commentator is correct here, no one denies the grammar he points out. The question really still is “who does the forgiving and retaining”?

With all due respect to the commentator you cite, he engages in “begging the question” when he later asserts: “That person must be God since He alone has the authority to do that (Matt. 9:2-3, Mark 2:7; Luke 5:21)”

In other words, he engages in eisegesis here. The careful reader will note that in the passages in question, every time, it is the scribes and Pharasees who claim “only” God has the power to forgive sins. Everyone, including Catholics, knows and claims that it is *ultimately* and *through* God that all sins are forgiven. So those passages are not violated in spirit.

However to insist that the spirit of Scripture states that *only* God can forgive sin is,quite frankly, to take the side of the same scribes and Pharasees who doubted Jesus. It’s eisegetical.

[MHGinTN]

Um, the scribes and Pharisees were speaking TO GOD where God was intersecting their spacetime. ONLY GOD can forgive sin and only God could make provision for the salvation of anyone.

So you know where I'm coming from: It is my belief that the binding loosing refers to the Gospel and the means for salvation. I believe scripture supports this because we see two specific scenes where Peter is opening the Gospel to the Jews (Pentecost) and gentiles (the House of Cornelius). When Peter opened the means of Salvation, that Grace was opened in Heaven and the rejecting of that Grace was then bound from those who reject that Grace.

The catholic church has taken liberties to stretch this to mean their priesthood can forgive sins. ONLY GOD CAN FORGIVE SINS, and to presume a priest can do so and God must conform to this catholiciism presumption is, well, blasphemous.

[boatbums]

I’m sure it will be explained away as doctrine vs. practice. But what cannot be denied is that the way confession is practiced today was NOT how they did it from the start.

[boatbums]

Let’s not forget that all these writings were copied and recopied hundreds if not thousands of times and they were definitely not writing in English. How their words were interpreted and translated changed as well.

[GreyFriar]

I think I’m going to have to agree with you. With these writings being copied and recopied and words changed, how can we ever hope to know what was originally written in the Old and New Testaments. what we have today may be completely opposite of what was originally written. Yes, you can’t trust those old hand copiers.

[daniel1212]

Let’s not forget that all these writings were copied and recopied hundreds if not thousands of times and they were definitely not writing in English. How their words were interpreted and translated changed as well.

And consider that sacred oral tradition is only what Rome says it is, and unlike Scripture, which is verifiable due to the nature of the medium, oral tradition exists in an amorphous form, and the tradition-based EOs significantly disagree on some things as to what is valid O.T.

And unlike Scripture, consider some of the plainly unScriptural things which esteemed fathers held to.

[daniel1212]

I think I’m going to have to agree with you. With these writings being copied and recopied and words changed, how can we ever hope to know what was originally written in the Old and New Testaments. what we have today may be completely opposite of what was originally written. Yes, you can’t trust those old hand copiers.

Parody understood, but the issue so much reliance with the writings of so-called church "fathers" is not so much that of a question of reliability, though I believe we have far far more mss evidence for Scripture, while only a relatively small portion available for examination out of what all ECFs are estimated to have written;

But the real issue is that these uninspired writings simply do not warrant the weight Caths place upon them to provide what Scripture does not, and often is contrary to, while CFs can disagree with each other, and Rome, as well as Scripture.

Faced with the absolute absence of even one prayer to anyone else in Heaven but the Lord, despite the Holy Spirit recording approx. 200 prayers in Scripture, and the lack of any created being being able to hear and respond to prayers address to them, Caths turn to the writings of certain "fathers" who adopted this late unScriptural tradition.

But even more unwarranted is the veracity attributed to the Roman magisterium which decrees which of the many traditions of CFs warrant being doctrine, and can declare belief in such as binding even almost two millennium after it allegedly was believed.

And despite the lack of early evidence for it, but which is justified under the premise that the church can "remember" was history does not evidence, and her own scholarship was heavily opposed to.

Like cults, having autocratic declared herself (conditionaly) infallible, then history, Scripture and tradition only consist and mean what she says they do.

[boatbums]

Nice try. There are thousands of manuscripts in fragments, scrolls and codices of the Bible texts in the original languages as well as the writings of leaders where nearly all of the books of the Bible are quoted so that it could be recompiled from them even if we had no manuscripts.

We continue to have the more sure word of prophecy because the Holy Spirit is the author.