Why Go To A Priest for Confession?

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I recently wrote an article on the new and somewhat controversial Catholic Confession iPhone app.  In the wake of that piece, I received a number of letters and e-mail communications about the practice of Confession.  Many expressed a rather deep impatience with the whole idea of confessing one’s sins to a priest.  Why, some asked, do we require a mediator when seeking the divine forgiveness?  Why can’t we “go directly to God?”  Others somewhat more darkly insinuated that the Catholic obsession with confession is tantamount to an abuse of power, the institutional church asserting its control over the inner lives of ordinary Catholics.

Well as you know, these are very old objections, going back at least as far as the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation.  Young Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk with a somewhat unhealthy preoccupation with confession.  It is said that Luther would finish an exhaustive rehearsal of his sins and peccadilloes and then return, almost immediately, to the confessional box, convinced that he had forgotten something.  He tried, over and again, to receive assurance of salvation from the practice of confessing and receiving absolution, but he never felt satisfied.  One day, after many years of anguished wrestling, Luther was in the tower of the monastery studying the opening of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome.  A particular verse hit him with the force of a revelation:  “the just man shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17).  What struck him with such power was the conviction that justice or salvation came, not from any external work of ours, but only from God’s grace accepted in faith.  And this faith, he surmised, was an act that took place in the believer’s deepest interiority.  On the basis of this experience, Luther sharply distinguished between what he called “the inner man” and “the outer man;” and he asserted that what is really vital in the spiritual order—the acceptance in faith of the offer of grace—is a function of the inner man, while the works and efforts of the outer man remain relatively derivative and secondary.

Now one of the major implications of this distinction is that the “external” features of religion—liturgy, vestments, rituals, pilgrimages, sacramentals, and sacraments—become marginal.  Thus, Luther reduced the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church to two—Baptism and the Lord’s Supper—and declared that even these are not, strictly speaking, necessary for salvation.  And he directed his particular ire against the sacrament of confession, which, in his judgment, the Lord had never commanded and which had become simply a means by which Roman authorities could exercise their power over the good people of Christ.  I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of Protestants have followed the lead of Luther in this regard, many even going beyond him in their marginalization of the sacraments and their suspicion of confession in particular.

It is fascinating to mark how thoroughly our modern secular culture has been influenced by this typically Protestant bifurcation between the inner and the outer.  How blithely most of us assume that what is really important is going on “deep down inside;” and how quick most of us are to relegate the body, behavior, and action to the realm of mere “externals.”  Relatedly, we are deeply suspicious of a person or institution that would impose upon us any sort of behavioral conformity.  Even the most cursory acquaintance with contemporary culture reveals that freedom—the sovereignty of the inner self—is our supreme value.

Why precisely did the Catholic Church find itself in opposition to Luther’s accounts of salvation, the inner man, and the sacraments?  In a word, it was the abiding Catholic sense of the Incarnation.  In Jesus Christ, the absolutely transcendent God came close to us, spoke to us in a human voice, reached out to us with human hands, looked upon us with human eyes, and saved us with his crucified human body.  As St. John put it so pithily, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  Accordingly, from St. Irenaeus onward, orthodox Christian theologians and spiritual masters have consistently resisted the temptation to drive a wedge between spirit and matter; for they knew that the pure Spirit of God addressed us precisely through the body of Jesus.  Now the Church is nothing but the extension of the Incarnation through time and space, the vehicle by which Christ continues to touch and address the world.  And this is why, for Catholic theology, externals matter very much indeed.  Color, texture, voice, liturgical gesture, light, sound, bread, wine, oil, the touch of a hand are the material elements by which the Incarnation continues to find expression.  To say that such things are secondary or peripheral is to say that the body of Jesus is secondary or peripheral.

One of the most powerful moves that Jesus made was to offer the forgiveness of sins.  To the paralyzed man, he said, “my son, your sins are forgiven;” and to the woman caught in adultery, he said, “neither do I condemn you;” and to the good thief, he said, “Today, I assure you, will be with me in Paradise.”  But in none of these cases did the Divine Spirit immediately commune with the human spirit; rather, the communication of forgiveness came through the voice, eyes, gesture, and embodied presence of the Word made flesh.  As he administers the sacraments, the priest is operating, not in his own person, but in persona Christi (in the person of Christ).  His voice, his gesture, and his embodied presence are a sacramental representation, a bodying forth, of Christ’s embodied presence.

Could God forgive outside of the rituals of the Catholic Church?  Of course.  God is held bound by nothing.  But the stubbornly incarnational God, Catholics believe, has desired to convey his forgiveness through the body of the church.  And that’s why we go to a priest, an embodied alter Christus, for confession.

By Rev. Robert Barron

Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry Word on Fire and the Francis Cardinal George Professor of Faith and Culture at University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein. He is the creator and host of a new ten episode documentary series called “Catholicism” and host of a weekly program on WGN America, Relevant Radio, EWTN and at www.WordOnFire.org.

About Author

Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

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