Don't Fall Into That 98 Percent

I have read that only two percent of Catholics go to regular Confession.

This does seem to fit with the pattern of modern Catholicism (which could be described as leaving the treasures of the family estate to gather dust while we labor to build a bitcoin empire), but never mind that now. For today, I’m going to simply offer a quick primer on why we need to go back to Confession.

First and foremost, of course, there is that little matter (or so we often seem to regard it) of the salvation of our souls. To put it bluntly, if you have sinned mortally after Baptism, then, as a rule, you will be condemned absent the Sacrament of Penance (and if you can honestly say that you have never sinned since your Baptism, you probably don’t need me to tell you to go to Confession).

A mortal sin kills the life of the soul and leaves us in a worse state than we were to begin with.

It means we have cut ourselves off from the True Vine and now have only to wither and die unless Christ grafts us back on. He will certainly do so if we ask, but that’s a pretty significant ‘if’.  

To put it another way, when we sin mortally, we are essentially setting ourselves in opposition to Christ. Before we can receive His mercy, we must put ourselves back under His authority. Picture a soldier in war who has sided with the bad guys, but then comes to his senses and seeks readmittance in the king’s army. He can’t simply walk back into camp like nothing has happened; he has to present himself to his superior for judgment and forgiveness. Until he has done so, he is going to be treated like the traitor he is.

This brings us to the second point: besides your eternal salvation (if anything can be ‘besides’ that), Confession, along with the other Sacraments, conveys a very useful lesson. Namely, that we do not get to set the terms of our relationship with Christ.

This is particularly useful for us moderns, as the whole tenor of our lives runs counter to it. We are surrounded by choices and the continual message that we and we alone can legitimately make them, often causing us to fall into the habit of thinking that the world can and ought to conform to our own wishes. We even extend this to God, saying things like “oh, I can find my own way to serve Christ.”

Jesus does not play games like that. He is the one in authority here.

You have sinned against Him, and He is offering a means of forgiveness. If you don’t like the means offered, too bad. That isn’t your call to make. The repentant soldier doesn’t get to tell the king what conditions he will accept for being readmitted into the army. As long as he is doing that, he is still in rebellion.

As you might be able to tell, this applies in relationships as well. If you habitually treat God Himself as an extension of your own ego, then you’ll be much more inclined to treat your girlfriend or wife the same way: to act as though your needs were the most important thing and to imagine that you can unilaterally set the terms of your relationship, while expecting the other person to lump it or leave. A healthy dose of the much-neglected virtue of obedience will go a long way to curing that.

Finally, there is the simple fact that going to Confession forces us to come up with something to confess. This means that we have to actually acknowledge the times we have sinned and admit that they were sinful.

Again, this runs counter to the whole tenor of our lives, from the self-esteem lessons in school to the “you are perfect the way you are (provided, of course, you are not one of the officially designated varieties of Bad People)” theme of so much in the media.

This state of thinking ourselves ‘basically good’ is an extremely dangerous one.

Once we start thinking in those terms, we tend to try to evade anything that might suggest otherwise, lest we find our comfortable self-image shattered. Thus, anything we happen to do becomes, if not good, at least acceptable simply because we have done it: “Sure, I use pornography, but it’s not like I’m hurting anyone.” “I did a bit of shady dealing at work, but that’s just how things are done; I’m not really like that.”

Confession forces us to cut the nonsense and admit that the bad things we do really are bad and deserving of condemnation. That we are, in fact, not ‘basically good people,’ but sinners in desperate need of Christ’s mercy.  

This sounds harsh (and I suspect that avoiding this uncomfortable image of ourselves is one of the chief reasons we don’t go to Confession), but it is in fact liberating. It removes the very fragility and despair that we have been trying to evade by the ‘basically good’ label.

When we do something bad or shameful, there is now no longer any comforting self-image that needs to be protected. We know already that we are sinners and that such things are what a creature like us might be expected to do. There are no more desperate attempts at justification or excuse; the thing is bad and we shouldn’t have done it, so we seek forgiveness and we move on.

Now is the time to begin building the habit.

Now, for those who aren’t used to going to Confession, I understand that it can be a very uncomfortable experience. It hurts to say out loud the things you would rather forget about entirely. Like so many things in life, there’s nothing really to do about that except to pray for help and bite the bullet.  

If you are just coming back to the Sacrament, I would personally recommend you try to receive it as often as you can; once a week if possible, at least to start with, whether you feel you need to or not. The great thing at that stage is simply to get used to the experience (rather like talking to a pretty girl, in fact).

You will soon find, in any case, that your embarrassment of doing it is compensated by the joy of having done it: of hearing with the paralytic that staggering assurance, “Child, your sins are forgiven.”