Why do Catholics Confess Their Sins to a Priest?

Part of the answer to that question is to rephrase it. We don’t believe we are confessing our sins only to a priest. We are confessing our sins to Jesus Christ through a Sacramental encounter mediated by a priest. Mediation within a Sacrament is founded on two things: first, Jesus is the one and only mediator between the Father and humanity (actually, all creation) and second, Jesus gave his disciples authority to mediate on his behalf until He returns. So what, in particular, is the function of verbal confession of sins?

Let’s review a bit about the Sacrament of Penance, or “going to Confession.” Also termed the Sacrament of Reconciliation, Penance is a Sacrament of healing. Jesus comes as the Divine Physician of our bodies and our souls. There are many instances documented in the Gospels where Jesus heals a person, drives out a demon, and forgives sins. Jesus’ authority derives from His status as the Father’s Only Begotten Son. He has come into the world to reveal and mediate the Father’s profound merciful love. Jesus’ redemptive death on the cross and His Resurrection to glory prove, beyond any doubt, that God’s love is stronger than sin and death. He eagerly desires us to approach Him and to receive the promise of salvation through our faith in Him and by our incorporation into His Body, the Church. Once united with Him, we live His life—a life poured out in loving obedience to the Father and for others.

After His Resurrection, Jesus passes on His authority to forgive sin. When He appears to the apostles gathered in the upper room in Jerusalem, He breathes upon them (think of God’s breath giving humans life in Genesis 2:7) and tells them “Receive the Holy Spirit. Those who sins you forgive are forgiven. Those whose sins you retain are retained” (John 20:22-23). He sends them out to preach the Gospel, baptize and bring others into the Body of Christ so that they can be saved (Mt 28:19)

Jesus clearly commands His apostles to use the Holy Spirit’s power to forgive sins. But how can they do so? They have power and authority from Jesus, but they do not have His abilities—they cannot read souls (well, some saints could…) and therefore have no way to look at a person and determine if their sins should be forgiven or retained. The only way they can exercise this authority is by hearing a verbal confession of sin. Then they can confirm a person’s awareness of their sin and true contrition for it. Being thus assured, they can offer forgiveness won by Jesus and given by Jesus through their ministry.

And what about the penitent? How does a verbal confession help the one seeking God’s forgiveness? It’s easy for us to “live in our heads” and forget the necessity of action and embodiment—to be incarnational about our faith. Perhaps an illustration can help us see how confession of sin can empower us to take action and incarnate the grace of forgiveness won for us by Jesus on the cross.

During a historic windstorm that blew through our region, our power went out for 6 days. We kept the freezer door closed for the first day, then when I learned that the power would be out for days, I quickly packed packages into our coolers and drug them outside to sit in the near-freezing temperatures.

Taking food out of the freezer and into the coolers was a humbling experience for me. For a couple of years prior to the power outage, I had periodically opened the freezer door in a vain search for inspiration about what to cook for dinner. My eyes would scan the freezer and I would go through a mental checklist—“well, that looks freezer burned, I better not cook that…. What, exactly, is that anyway? I better not get it out in case the kids wouldn’t like it…. That looks like it thawed and refroze because it’s all in one big brick, better not use that….” On it went. Did I actually remove any item and toss what I had repeatedly rejected? Oh no, that would be wasting food!

I had developed the bad habit of casting a quick glance through the freezer when adding another unmarked batch of leftovers, only to pass them all over the next time I needed a quick meal for dinner. It filled me with shame about my lack of housekeeping skills, and I began to loathe opening that door. I knew what was in there, I knew I had to do something about it, but all I did was think about it. What’s wrong with me? Why am I like this?

With the power outage, I had to face up to the truth that most of what was in my freezer was either unusable, unidentifiable or unattractive. I finally chucked all those packages I had been rejecting for months and, even, I am ashamed to say, for years! Now I am committing to actually labeling the food I package and put in the freezer—with contents and date on it so that I’ll never have to go through the “big clean out” again!

What’s that have to do with confession? My failure with the freezer is a perfect example of the difference between shame and true contrition. The power outage? That’s symbolic of the sacramental encounter—it puts everything in perspective and requires action.

Shame is the experience of looking into the freezer and feeling horrible about that food going to waste, beating myself up about my lack of skills as a homemaker, and giving in to the discouragement that things just won’t change (especially when I won’t lift a finger to make anything change in my own freezer!). True contrition is not about recognizing the uselessness and garbage-worthiness of spoiled food, but actually throwing it out instead of just shutting the door and letting it all stay the way it is.

How many times do I open the door to my soul and see stored in there all sorts of “food gone bad?” Attitudes and judgments that spoil relationships; dangerous and disgusting items that just get pushed back and ignored; broken containers that can’t keep anything fresh and useful. And how many times do I give myself a good berating, “tsk-tsk” about my failings, and then just shut the door without doing anything about it? Too many times.

I usually don’t need anyone to point out my faults and failings. I already know the food that’s gone bad. I already know the hidden contents that I don’t want to use and should toss so I can make room for stuff I can use. Going to confession is the act of actually opening up the freezer and getting rid of the garbage—and being done with it and ready to move on. Going to confession gives me the grace to move from shame to contrition—to a heartfelt sorrow about my sins and a firm conviction to make amends and sin no more in that way. The power outage that necessitated my freezer clean-out is like going to confession—it didn’t create the problem, but it creates the situation where action must be taken, where problems must be faced. It’s the catalyst for change, for real change.

We’re just like that, aren’t we, in this fallen world. We put off what is difficult. We ignore what is uncomfortable. We wish away and rationalize our faults because somehow seeing them in us is familiar and predictable and means we have an excuse to fail. Jesus wants to shake all that out of us. He created us for excellence and He wants us to flourish with a living and lively faith. He knows how He designed us to live in the perfection of heaven: if only we’d allow Him to purify us of our imperfections! The actual battle against evil is a thousand times less difficult than the countless imagined and repeated “play fights” that we allow to rattle around in our heads and hearts for days, for weeks, for months or even years.

“God wants your misery to be the throne of his mercy. He desires that your powerlessness be the seat of His omnipotence.”

St. Francis de Sales, Letters, fragment 10

Going to confession helps us face the reality of our sins and make a choice about how to respond rather than simply reacting in ways that diminish and disempower us. The Sacrament of Penance brings us to an encounter with the Lord that echoes the encounter He had with the woman caught in adultery. She stood before Him, after all her accusers left, and waited to be condemned. No condemnation came from Jesus—only assurance of forgiveness and the command to sin no more. The same awaits us in the confessional. We silence the accusations and condemnation spoken by others and by our own guilty conscience as we own up to our sins and present them to the Lord, not to our accusers. The priest is there as an instrument and dispenser of God’s mercy and healing. He acts in the person of Jesus Christ, not as a representative of the stone-throwing mob—and it is through the power of Jesus Christ that our sins are forgiven and we are restored.

Speaking our sins out loud in Sacramental Confession prepares us to receive forgiveness. How can we receive the gift when our hands are clenched and holding onto our guilt? When we speak of our sins, we own up to them and admit to our responsibility—we sinned, we failed to love, we chose to exalt self over God. Once we name our sins in this way, we have done something amazing: we have allowed God to separate us from our sins. We have acknowledged that those sins don’t define us and aren’t a part of our true identity. We join God on the side of reality, of truth—and we reject the lie that is at the heart of every sin: that we are our own gods who have the right to declare what is right and what is wrong.

In confessing our sins, without rationalizing or blaming or defending or despairing, we have given God the space within our hearts to get to work. The divine surgeon can now begin to cut out the cancer, or drain the infection, or repair the brokenness. When all we do is interminably think about our sins—musing and brooding and never acting—we are playing at the interior life and keeping ourselves front and center on-stage rather than giving God the starring role. We rehearse the story, revise the characters, change the scene so often we lose grip on what’s real about our life—it’s exhausting and demoralizing and ineffective.

Going to confession is a powerful corrective to these tendencies we fallen-humans possess. Some worry that confessing our sins rejects or ignores the truth that Jesus already forgave our sins by His sacrifice on the cross—that we are asking over and over again to be forgiven for something he already forgave. I don’t see it like that at all.

Our Catholic faith affirms that Jesus’ sacrificial death is the once-for-all sacrifice that redeems us and wins our salvation. But nowhere in the Gospels—either in Jesus’ public ministry or in the preaching of the Apostles—does it teach us that we just have to lay around and soak up that redemption as if we were some non-sentient sponge. No! The Gospels and the Apostles keep telling us what to do in response to Jesus’ great work of redemption—repent, believe, love, turn away from sin, pray, cling to the teachings of the Apostles, gather together for the breaking of the bread, serve one another, forgive one another, do what is right.

Jesus’ redemption is received, strengthened, affirmed and restored in us continually throughout our lives as His disciples. Jesus’ image of the vine and branches might help us embrace this view. Jesus says that He is the vine and we are the branches—that without Him we can do nothing. A vine continuously supplies the branches with what they need for life—and those branches spend a lifetime growing, setting fruit, changing direction, weathering storms. That’s what our Christian life is like—we are living organisms, not attractive knick-knacks God has lovingly restored and then set on a shelf and left alone. Going to confession is one way God ‘prunes’ us so that we can bear good fruit. It’s how the broken, diseased and unproductive parts of us are taken care of—and it’s essential.

I have expressed how important it is for us to name and give voice to our sins—that this is the way we take responsibility for our actions and then hand them over to God to forgive and remove from our hearts. There is another great reason to confess our sins to a priest: this Sacramental encounter assures us of God’s forgiving, healing mercy—it’s a visible sign of God’s invisible grace. Why do we need that?

How could we not need it? We are human beings, not spiritual beings like the angels. God, when He designed us an embodied soul, wrote this need for physical signs into the very fabric of our nature. Think of how babies learn about their environment—by picking up everything within reach and looking at it…and putting it in their mouths. Think of how you know someone is really in love with you and not just trying to take advantage of you—by what they say and whether they back up their words with actions.

We can—and should!—spend moments in prayer each day in an examination of conscience. We need to speak to the Lord about our choices in attitude, words and action—and whether they showed real love or not. We can express our thanksgiving for the times we aligned ourselves with Him in love, and we can express our contrition and ask for forgiveness for the times when we refused to love and instead exalted self. Going to confession does not replace these moments in prayer—they are a beautiful and profound culmination of them.

When we go into the confessional and speak our sins out loud within that graced, sacramental encounter with the Lord’s mercy, it doesn’t stop with us meekly confessing our sins and then walking out shame-faced and miserable after hearing the priest’s audible gasp or pious finger-waving. No! The confession doesn’t stop with our confession—it concludes with the Lord’s absolution! We celebrate the Sacrament of Penance not because we love talking about our sins (if that were the case, we’d get on social media or sign up to be on a daytime talk show…) but because we love God’s forgiveness!

The Sacrament of the Eucharist is consummated by our reception of the Lord in Holy Communion. The Sacrament of Penance is consummated by our reception of the Lord in Absolution—He rushes into our soul with the healing light of His love, illuminating and then destroying what is ugly and harmful and broken. We are given a taste of the judgment we will face at the end of the age. We are and will be judged by the One who gave His life for us. And so we hear the priest tell us that by the power of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and through the ministry of the Church we are absolved of our sins and can go in peace. The sign of the cross is traced over us in case we have any confusion about what, exactly, was the price of that forgiveness.

We leave the confessional renewed, reborn, revived. Our soul is as beautiful and pure as on the day of our Baptism. We are renewed as a beloved child of God and reconciled with the Body of Christ that has been harmed by our sins. We can take up the weapons of the Spirit (the love of Christ) and engage again in the battle for our souls—not as a passive bystander but as an agent empowered by the Lord Jesus Christ to grasp the prize won for us on the cross at Calvary.

That’s the goal of confession, but it’s hard to drag yourself into that confessional, even when all of this makes sense! Why? Because our fallen human nature and Satan, the enemy of our soul, wants to keep us out of that confessional. Our fallen human nature (“brother ass” as St. Francis called it) doesn’t want our soul in control of our thoughts, emotions and body—that would involve “dying to self” in order to live for Christ! The devil doesn’t want us in there either: he can’t hear what happens in that graced, sacramental moment, and he knows that it is in the confessional that we return to the Lord and reject the ways evil has insinuated itself into our soul.

If you feel reluctance, shame, anxiety or prideful resistance, don’t give in! Going to confession does not cause these things—sin does! Going to confession is not shameful, sinning is shameful. God already knows our sins—in fact, He has a much clearer picture than we do about how sin and vice manipulates, tempts, and uses us. God was with us when we sinned—He saw, better than we did, how that sin harmed our soul and hurt others. He understands with a parent’s sorrow, how our attempts to hide, rationalize or deny our sins harms our relationship with Him. He is ready to forgive. Why doesn’t He just do it apart from the confessional?

Well, of course, He does. We all experience the Lord’s forgiveness in many different ways—through our private prayer and contrition, through our acts of spiritual discipline (especially almsgiving and fasting), through our attempts to seek forgiveness from those we have harmed, and in the Mass (where we are cleansed of venial sins through our worthy reception of the Eucharist). But God isn’t satisfied with ‘good enough’ or ‘the minimum requirements.’ He is love—and His love is lavished on us beloved children to an astonishing, overwhelming level. The Sacrament of Penance isn’t the only way God forgives—but it is the most powerful “weapon” in his arsenal of spiritual healing (apart from Purgatory, I suppose, but that’s another topic).

When you present yourself to your doctor with a physical ailment, there are usually many treatment options. Usually, the doctor begins with the least invasive treatment that has minimal side effects. He saves the “big guns” for those tricky cases that do not respond to the more benign cures. But when he sees that we have a serious, potentially deadly ailment, we don’t want him to fiddle around with the aspirin: bring on the chemo! Jesus Christ, the physician of our souls, has the same approach. Sometimes we need to simply be aware of a pain that signals overuse or misuse. Sometimes we need a wound cleansed so that healing can happen. Sometimes we need the cancer of serious sin cut out. He knows what He is about and He wants to heal us, but we need to be a good patient: to speak openly and honestly about our sin symptoms, to admit to the ways we jeopardize our own spiritual health, and the ways we take care of our souls. He will provide the cure we need, but are we willing to do our part?

The Sacrament of Penance is required of us when we are aware of mortal sin on our souls—we must go to confession before we present ourselves to receive the Eucharist. Why? Because going to Holy Communion means that we are in a state of grace, that our lives are in communion with Christ’s demands for his disciples. If this is not the case, then we eat and drink our own judgment—we are being hypocrites by claiming to be in communion with Christ by receiving the Eucharist but not living that way in our lives.

But going to confession doesn’t have to be reserved for these dramatic and urgent situations! Going to confession can be the spiritual equivalent of the Emergency Room where we are saved from imminent death by the expert treatment of the doctor. But we could also use the confessional as a regular check-up—when we visit the doctor to assess our health, spot potential problems before they become urgent, and receive guidance for how to maintain our good health. In this case, the grace of the Sacrament can lead us to vibrant, flourishing spiritual health: giving us the joy and freedom of running on the path of God’s commandments. We become capable of thriving, not just surviving, in this valley of tears until God calls us to our real home in heaven.

God doesn’t need the confessional to forgive our sins, but we need the confessional—just as we need the altar and sacrifice of the Mass. Because at both the altar of the Mass and at the ‘altar’ of the confessional, we are offering God the beautiful sacrifice of our worship. This worship entails acknowledging God as our Lord and acknowledging us as a child desperate for the gifts He bestows. And as we hold out our hands, bare our souls, and bow our heads, we realize that we are asking the One who is eager to bestow. Why does He wait until we ask? Because He loves us as a son or daughter, not as His pet or slave or hired hand. God wants us to talk with Him, to know His heart, to explore His nature—in a word, to love Him. That’s when His love can be unleashed in our lives. That’s when we can start living the life His Son won for us. That’s the goal of frequent confession. I urge you to make a commitment to celebrate the Sacrament of Penance monthly—once you avail yourself of the grace and peace, the joy and healing, that Jesus offers you, you’ll be amazed at the life that pours into you and out of you.