Confession Of Sin

"Whom when He saw He said: Go, show yourselves to the priests" (Luke

xvii. 14).



"Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whose sins ye shall forgive, they are

forgiven them, and whose sins ye shall retain, they are retained"

(John xx. 23).



THE whole of the life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ may be summed

up in these words of the Acts: "He went about doing good." He healed the

sick, ga e sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and raised the dead

to life.



The healing of the body, however, was to Him a secondary object. The

healing of the soul was His mission on earth. He frequently called the

attention of His followers to this. For example, He cured the man of the

palsy to prove that as man He had the power to forgive sins. Another

example is when He gives us in the cure of the lepers a figure of sin

and its cure.



Leprosy has always been considered a figure of sin. As leprosy covers

the body and makes it disgusting and frightful to behold, so sin covers

the soul and makes it hideous in the sight of God. The Old Law required

lepers to separate themselves from society until their cure was

certified to by the priests who were appointed for this purpose. Our

Lord has been pleased, in the New Law, to institute a similar method for

the cure of the more fatal leprosy of sin. The spiritual leper, the

sinner, is to show himself to the priest, make known the diseased state

of his soul, and submit to the inspection and treatment of the priest,

who is the divinely appointed physician of the soul. But should we not

go directly to God, since God alone has power to justify us? It is true,

God alone can effect our justification; but He has appointed the priest

to judge in His place and pass sentence in His name. To the priests He

has said: "Whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound in

heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed also

in heaven" (Matt. xviii. 18); and again: "Whose sins you shall

forgive, they are forgiven, and whose sins you shall retain, they are

retained" (John xx. 23). These two texts clearly show that auricular

confession as practised in the Catholic Church was taught by Christ. For

how could the apostles and their successors, the pastors of the Church,

know what sins to bind and retain and what sins to loose and forgive

unless the sins were confessed to them and they were allowed to judge?



No matter how numerous or how great these are, provided they are

confessed with a sincere repentance, they will be forgiven. And they

will be forgiven by the power of the priest. Properly speaking, God

alone has power to forgive sins. But no one will deny that He has power

to confer this power on others. He communicated this power to His

apostles and commanded them, in turn, to communicate it to others by

means of the Sacrament of Holy Orders.



That Our Saviour communicated this power to His apostles is evident from

the words of St. John: "As the Father hath sent Me I also send you.

Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whose sins you shall forgive, they are

forgiven." But sin was to continue till the end of the world. Hence the

necessity of the means of forgiving sin being coextensive with sin. As

the people receive from the priests the Word of God and the cleansing

from sin in Baptism, so also do they receive from them the cleansing

from sin in confession.



It is certain that the apostles conferred the power of forgiving sins

upon others, if we find that those whom the apostles ordained this

power. But we find this to be the case.



From the time of Christ until the present the writers of every age tell

us that confession of sins was practised. St. John, who lived until the

beginning of the second century, says in the 1st chapter of his First

Epistle: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us

our sins and to cleanse us from all iniquity."



St. Cyprian, who wrote in the third century, says: "Let each of you

confess his faults, and the pardon imparted by the priest is acceptable

before God."



St. Ambrose, in the fourth century, wrote: "The poison is sin; the

remedy, the accusation of one's crime. The poison is iniquity:

confession is the remedy."



St. Augustine, who lived in the fifth century, seems to be talking to

some people of the present day, who say they confess in private to God,

when he says: "Let no one say to himself, I do penance to God in

private, I do it before God. Is it then in vain that Christ hath said:

'Whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven'? Is it

in vain that the keys have been given to the Church? Do we make void the

Gospel? void the words of Christ?"



These first five centuries were the golden age of Christianity. All

admit that the doctrines and practices of those early centuries were

pure and undefiled, as they came from Christ. But among the practices of

the time we find confession. Hence it is a reasonable practice, because

conformable to Christ's teaching. We might continue quotations from

writers of every century from the sixth to the nineteenth, showing that

the teaching and practice of confession did not vary through the lapse

of ages from the time of Christ until the present day. But this is

unnecessary. The quotations from the first five centuries show that the

power of forgiving sin was not only communicated by Christ to His

apostles, but by them to their successors by means of the sacrament of

Holy Orders. What would be the necessity of this power if they could not

exercise it in confession? If, as some say, priests invented confession,

some one ought to find out and tell us when and where it was invented,

and why they did not exempt themselves from such a humiliating practice.



Confession alone, however, will be of no avail without contrition.

Contrition is a sincere sorrow and detestation for sin with a firm

determination to sin no more. To the truly humble and sorrowful sinner

confession is not a punishment, but a remedy for a tortured conscience.

The most painful secret to be kept by a heart not yet corrupted by

disease is the secret of sin and crime. The soul that loves God hates

sin and desires to separate herself from it. To this desire is

associated the desire of expiating it. All, from the mother who

questions her child about wrongdoing to the judge who interrogates the

criminal, recognize in spontaneous confession an expiatory power.



Confession, it is true, is necessarily accompanied by shame and

humiliation. This humiliation is diminished by the knowledge that it is

of divine origin and that eternal silence is divinely imposed upon him

who receives it. Priests never divulge what they know from the

confessional. They have been ill-treated, as was Father Kohlmann in this

country; have even been tortured and cruelly put to death, as was St.

John Nepomucene, in order to extort from them knowledge they gained in

the confessional, but without avail. For what they knew through the

tribunal of penance, they knew as ministers of God. And as it is better

to obey God than man, no minister of state could force them to divulge

that which the laws of God forbid.



Only sinners, who after a thorough preparation, a sincere sorrow, and a

good confession, can realize the soothing and beneficial effects of

confession, and feel with David, "Blessed are they whose sins are

forgiven." If you have ever noticed such after leaving the confessional

you could see joy beaming on their countenances, as if a heavy burden

had been removed.



Confession quiets the conscience. But this is only one of the benefits

it confers upon those who practise going to confession. It has also a

salutary influence upon their morals; for one of its necessary

conditions is promise of amendment.



The pagans of the first centuries were aware of the guiding and

reforming power of the confessional. Voltaire, the leading infidel of

the last century, one who made sport of everything Christian, says that

"there is, perhaps, no wiser institution, and that confession is an

excellent thing, a restraint upon inveterate crime, a very good practice

to prevent the guilty from falling into despair and relapsing into sin,

to influence hearts full of hate to forgive and robbers to make

restitution--that the enemies of the Romish Church who have opposed so

beneficial an institution have taken from man the greatest restraint

that can be put upon crime." While his everyday experience forced these

words of praise from the arch-infidel, his hatred of the Church creeps

out in the word "Romish."



Confession of sin, as we have seen, is a reasonable practice, because

it was taught by Jesus Christ, and by His apostles and their successors

from Christ's time until the present; but especially because it has

the power of soothing and pacifying the conscience by freeing it from

the torture of sin, the poison of crime. It is not strange, then, that

it is so dear to virtuous souls. It is offensive only to those whose

hearts are so hardened as to blunt the sting of remorse. Confession is

Christianity using its moral power to correct and perfect the

individual. In the confessional the minister of God is continually

coming in contact with hearts in which reigns an idol that he

overthrows, a bad practice that he causes to cease, or some injustice

that he has repaired.



Confession is one of the gates by which Christianity penetrates the

interior man, wipes away stains, heals diseases, and sows therein the

seeds of virtue. The lives and experience of millions are witness of the

truth of this. Is it not, then, a reasonable, a beneficial practice? It

is only the malicious or the ignorant who calumniate the practice and

the consecrated minister who sits in judgment in the sacred tribunal.

Those who lay aside their prejudice and study the question soon become

convinced of its divine origin. A little study and reflection will show

them that confession of sin benefits society by preventing crimes that

would destroy government, cause riots, and fill prisons; that it

promotes human justice, makes men better, nobler, purer, higher, and

more Godlike; that it soothes the sorrowful heart whose crime might make

the despairing suicide; and that individuals and families who

frequently, intelligently, and properly approach this fountain of God's

grace will receive His blessing here and a pledge of His union

hereafter.