As a high school teacher, I’m supposed to be opposed to be peer pressure. “Don’t worry about what other people think,” I’m supposed to say. “Be true to yourself. Follow your heart!”
Sometimes your peers are less stupid than you, though. Sure, it would be better to follow the Saints or wise adults or pretty much anybody over the age of 30, but peer pressure isn’t always bad. In fact, everything good in my life is a result of peer pressure.
You see, if no one’s paying special attention, it’s pretty easy for a Catholic kid growing up in America to make it from First Reconciliation through Confirmation without making a second reconciliation. It’s an unfortunate truth, all the more so when the kid in question lied in her first confession. Yup—I told him I broke a cup and blamed it on my sister. Not true. She broke the cup. What a pathetic way to enter into mortal sin.1
Once I found myself in mortal sin, I just kept digging myself in deeper. I had a field day with lying, cheating, stealing, and cursing. I didn’t pray, and if you had asked me, I would have told you I didn’t believe in God. I distinctly remember answering “I don’t know” while the rest of the congregation chorused “I do” during the renewal of baptismal promises at Easter. Before I knew it, I was confirmed, having no idea if there was a God and not particularly caring. I was actually late to my own confirmation because I was shopping. Definitely ready to be a soldier of Christ.
That March was our confirmation retreat. After confirmation. Whatever. Despite my penchant for breaking rules, I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I went. On Saturday night, we were split into small groups, and as we discussed the great woes of our adolescent lives, the other girls went to confession, one by one. Now, I didn’t much care what this theoretical God thought of me, but I cared very much what the other girls thought of me. As I watched them go, I became convinced that if I didn’t go to confession, none of them would be friends with me.
There is no worse threat you can issue to a thirteen-year-old girl.
And so, unprepared as I was, I got up when it was my turn and walked to the cabin that was doubling as a confessional. Fr. Mark Moretti was the patient priest who heard what was functionally my first confession and turned my world upside down. That day, I was returned to a state of grace and was introduced to Jesus Christ, the love of my life. Despite ongoing struggles with sin,2 I gave my life to Christ that day and haven’t looked back since. The life I would gladly have tossed away on Friday afternoon became a joy on Saturday night, and has been ever since. I owe my joy, my career, and my life to the grace that flooded my soul that chilly March evening.
God Said So
“I’m sure that was very nice for you,” some of you are thinking right now. “But I don’t enjoy confession. Why should I go?”
The simple answer? God said so.
Jesus said to his disciples, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them. Whose sins you retain are retained.” (Jn 20:21-23)
The first part of this commissioning sets up an analogy. In a throwback to SAT prep, we could say that the Apostles (today’s priests) are to Jesus as Jesus is to the Father. Jesus was sent into the world with the Father’s power of reconciling man to God; the Apostles, too, were sent into the world with Jesus’ power of reconciling man to God. They are being sent, one might say, in persona Christi—that is, in the person of Christ.
Now, Jesus didn’t do much after the Resurrection. He hung out with some disciples, ate some fish, walked through some walls—all seemingly unimportant events with great theological importance. So it’s important here that we look at what he said and at what he did. Here, Jesus doesn’t just give the Apostles a job. He breathes on them. The only other time in Scripture that we see God breathing on someone is in Genesis: “The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being” (Gen 2:7). Adam was clay, lifeless, until God breathed on him. The breath of God made him more like God; it made him a man—something totally different from what he had been. Jesus’ breath has the same effect on the Apostles: it makes them more like God. It changes them into something different. Here, they become priests, able to forgive sins with the power of Christ’s forgiveness.
When Jesus gives the Apostles the power to forgive sins, he isn’t just encouraging them to be forgiving, as he is in the Sermon on the Mount. He’s telling them that the forgiveness they offer actually does something. And it’s pretty clear that the Apostles are being told not just to offer forgiveness but actually to hear confessions in some form—how can they refuse forgiveness without knowing the sin and its circumstances?
The Epistle of St. James makes that even clearer: “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. The fervent prayer of a righteous man is powerful indeed” (Jas 5:16). James tells us that we can’t just ask God for forgiveness; we have to confess our sins to one another—to priests, if we’re reading it together with the Gospel of John. From these two verses, we can see that Jesus has sent priests with a ministry of reconciliation, receiving penitents and forgiving them in Jesus’ name, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
And the Apostles clearly understood this role because the early Church gets it, too. Hippolytus of Rome prays at ordinations that priests may “have the authority to forgive sins, in accord with your command.” That was in 215 a.d. In 248, Origen tells us: “[A final method of forgiveness], albeit hard and laborious [is] the remission of sins through penance, when the sinner . . . does not shrink from declaring his sin to a priest of the Lord.”
Sure, in the early Church it looked different from what we’re used to—they actually had to confess in front of the whole church and then do a penance that could take years. (Makes you wonder why you complain about whispering to a priest who can’t even see you….) But the basics of the Sacrament—the form, matter and minister—haven’t changed since the time of Christ.
It’s for Your Own Good
Our God isn’t arbitrary, though, and He doesn’t enjoy watching us suffer. The Sacrament of Reconciliation exists for a number of purposes, all closely tied to human nature.
If you’re going to shape up, you really have to regret your past. I don’t know about you, but I feel a lot sorrier for my sins when I have to say them out loud. It’s all well and good to tell God you’re sorry about something—He already knows about it. You have to be really sorry to be willing to accuse yourself of it to somebody else, though. And since sin is rooted in pride, the humility required in the confessional is the antidote. Besides, how many of us have withstood temptation simply because we couldn’t bear the idea of confessing it?
For those of us who have habitual sins to overcome, the process of examination of conscience and confession can be invaluable. I had my conversion in the eighth grade, but I still cursed like a sailor—until I realized that I confessed cursing every time I went to confession. Maybe a year after my conversion, I came to a sudden realization that confessing cursing meant I actually had to stop. (There’s a funny story there about how I decided to quit cold turkey without asking for God’s help and ended up missing the bus twice and ripping my pants open at school. Another time, maybe.) Something about saying the same thing every time makes you desperate to change, in a way that I don’t think I would have been without that monthly reminder.
If nothing else (and this is true of all Sacraments), we need something physical to feed our senses, since we are physical and spiritual creatures. My friend Katy and I were hanging out one night in high school after listening to a chastity speaker. She said, “I’ve confessed my sins to God, so I know I’ve been forgiven, but every time I go to one of these speakers, I feel guilty and confess all over again.” I didn’t know how to react to this—my sins are gone! They’re not my own any more. The experience of hearing the words “I absolve you” makes it impossible to deny that you are forgiven, loved, and made new in Christ. Now, knowing this and believing it can be very different things, but when it comes down to it, a believing Catholic can give an exact moment at which her sins were forgiven. However she feels about her past, she knows God, who gave us this Sacrament so we could experience the joy of certain absolution, has forgiven her.
There are any number of reasons that God gave us this Sacrament, and there are any number of reasons to take advantage of it. Go because you can’t live with what you’ve done. Go because you know there’s something missing in your life. Go because you want to be at peace with the Lord. Go because it would make your grandmother proud. God is so desperate to forgive you, He’ll accept you for any reason—even adolescent vanity. You have nothing to lose but your sin. You have everything to gain.
“Jesus said to the woman, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on, do not sin any more.” (Jn 8:11)
Fast Facts about Confession:
- Catholics are required to confess all mortal sins (serious sins that you willingly committed, knowing they were wrong) at least once a year.
-Even if you’re not in a state of mortal sin, this is a good minimum
-It’s a better idea to go every Advent and Lent—better yet to go once a month! - You’re only required to confess mortal sins (being specific about the sin and the approximate number of times you committed it), but you’re encouraged to confess venial sins
- If you forget to confess a sin, you’ve got nothing to worry about—it’s covered. If you leave one out on purpose, your confession is invalid and you’ve added the sin of making a bad confession to your list.
- Your sins are forgiven at the moment of absolution (“I absolve you of your sins….”) if you are intending to do your penance.
- To be forgiven, you have to want to avoid those sins in the future. You do not have to be certain that you will never sin again. That would be ridiculous.