I left Catholicism when I was 18, so I literally have a child’s understanding of the Catholic practice of confession. It was a ritual that did not make much sense to a child.
What is confession? It’s one of the seven sacred sacraments, the other six being eucharist, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, annointing the sick, and baptism, in some order. Catholic Wednesday school, known as CCD, is supposed to introduce kids to three of the sacraments, namely eucharist, confession, and confirmation.
Confession was essentially a scheduled annual obligation. One day, all the kids would quietly line up for a little private chat with one of the priests. And just to paint the picture, we always talked to priests face to face, we never used confessional boxes, ubiquitous though they are in fiction.
While in line, many kids are going through their memories and trying to think of an incident they can turn into a story. I sinned and I’m sorry about it, will God forgive me? To me it always felt inauthentic, like I was being asked to write a book report about my life so I could present it to a stranger. Though it’s supposed to be an exercise in self-reflection, I was just trying to get the A, and do it without outright lying. Weirdly it would have been a relief to have unambiguously sinned, so I would have something to say.
Now as an adult, I realize that priests can probably easily see through the narrative machinations of a child, but are nonetheless duty-bound to take everything seriously. What must they think? Do they have bingo cards?
Confession remained in this form as long as I knew it. Even during high school, confession continued to be a periodic obligation. I suppose there’s some merit to scheduling it, since if you really do have something to confess, it relieves the embarrassment of having to bang on the church doors. On the other hand, it did not instill in me any reverence for the sacrament.
Confession imposed certain narrative constraints that never felt natural to me. It divided the world into sinful actions, and non-sinful ones. The sinful actions must be bite-sized, easy to encapsulate in discrete incidents. And such sinful incidents must occur within a narrow frequency range—you can’t very well tell the priest about the hundreds of little things you did in the year since your last confession. Nor can you approach the priest empty-handed, or at least it felt like you couldn’t. You also have to know and remember each incident, but it would be weird if you took notes and read them out to the priest.
I tell this story, because there are a lot of things said within our culture about Catholic confession, and they all feel completely alien to me.
As I understand Catholic doctrine, there’s something about confessing before you die? Like, if you do a sin and then die in an accident before making it to confession, something bad will happen? I admit, I’m not quite sure, because I just wasn’t taught that, or it was never emphasized anyway. I wasn’t even really taught to believe in hell. (Christian parents, fwiw I heartily recommend not teaching kids about hell. Hell feels like a concept designed to trigger people’s mental health conditions.)
For all that people say about the beauty of religious rituals, and even some atheists will wax poetic about them, I have never felt that way. Beyond all the more serious problems with religion, to me it has always been an ~aesthetic~ disaster. Confession was not some beautiful ritual, it was weird and awkward and inauthentic. Why were we compelled to make up stories of sin to confess? Why were we compelled to sit in a church every Sunday, and listen to a priest that I couldn’t understand anyway? These are questions I asked long before I thought about whether God is real.
Now I could be an outlier in my inability to connect with confession as a practice. Or maybe you think Catholicism is an outlier in its ineptness to inspire. Or maybe they just failed to teach me the right way to think about it. I really just don’t like rituals in general, even the secular ones, even the ones that do not entail any belief in the supernatural. With all respect to people who are differently disposed from me, but also asking respect in return.
I’d like you to imagine, if you were Christian. What if your religion promoted a specific kind of music, a specific kind of art, or a specific ceremonial practice—and you just did not like the thing? You know in your heart of hearts, it’s not really important, you’re not abandoning faith just for that. But oh, how it needles that God and you have such a basic difference in opinion.
When I was a Catholic child (ca. 55 years ago), Confession was a weekly event. If you wanted to take the Eucharist on Sunday, you went to Confession on Saturday.
In a confessional.
As a teenager, I never understood the (religious) point of hymn singing. (Why does an omnipotent being need our worship?) In hindsight I can sort of understand that it might have a role in community building, but as an introvert it didn’t work on me. (The CoS also wasn’t very good at teaching me what exactly it was that I didn’t believe.)
An ace will always be at a disadvantage for sin competitions.
Grew up Roman Catholic in the 80s, on the East Coast.
We had those stereotypical curtained closets/alcoves, and I think we were supposed to perform once a year? (officially, I imagine if you really wanted to more often than that, there was probably a way, but I wasn’t the least bit concerned…)
I just remember thinking I was to young to be making a decision like confirmation…
and now I’m not religious…
Confession was weird. I got Catholic schooling so I didn’t have to deal with CCD on top of regular schooling but they did always shoehorn in a religion class and I have no idea what I missed out on to get that.
I didn’t like confession much because most of the children I was around and adults close to me were telling me I was a bad person. The issues with kids were due to simple bullying. The issues with adults were fueled by their untreated mental problems. I wasn’t perfect or anything but it kind of takes work for a young child to be really terrible and I wasn’t working at it. Going to confession and telling someone about bad things I’d done either felt hollow and meaningless or like I was admitting that other people were right about me. Kind of depended on mood.
With all that, it’s actually confirmation that I have the biggest problem with now. It happens in 6th grade to children of Catholic parents and it’s supposed to be a life choice to bind yourself to the christian god and presumably Catholicism. It’s kind of setup as a choice and you’re asked, but every Catholic kid I’d ever heard of went along with it. Quick reality check: many of those parents don’t want their 6th grade child to get accurate sex ed to learn real information about how their bodies work. How are they supposed to make a lifelong choice if they can’t be trusted with knowledge about themselves? Or per the religion, a choice that affects your immortal soul even after you die all the way through eternity?
The normal age for it makes it a bit too obvious what’s really going on there.
‘As I understand Catholic doctrine, there’s something about confessing before you die? Like, if you do a sin and then die in an accident before making it to confession, something bad will happen?’
cf. https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_two/section_two/chapter_two/article_4/vii_the_acts_of_the_penitent.html
TLDR; if you don’t get a chance to confess but feel perfect contrition, you’re good to go.
(Main point is not to die with a mortal sin on the slate)
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I too was brought up Catholic, and had to fucking try ever so hard to come up with sins to confess.
It was quite stressful.
(“I was mean to my friend the other day” type of thing)
In my community I think it was the norm for people to be confirmed around 16. I never got confirmed though, I wasn’t interested.
Has been awkward. At 14 I opted out of religion at school (the age when you may decide yourself on religious matters in .de). Got talked out of leaving the church by my dad. Left anyway at 17 when I found out that he left the church to avoid the taxes.
In evangelical land, we always looked at Catholics with suspicion, speculating that they probably weren’t “real” Christians. Because there were so many Catholic rituals and traditions- we thought they were prioritizing these meaningless traditions, rather than really believing and connecting with God, having a “personal relationship with God.” And also, we were suspicious of the authority structure of the Catholic church- like the priests are gatekeeping God, rather than every individual Christian being able to know God directly. Like why don’t people just confess their sins to God directly, why do you have to go through the priest.
A lot of this turned out to be oversimplified stereotypes about Catholics though.
And yeah, in evangelical land we also confess sins to each other. Not in this kind of structured way, but every now and then there would be some kind of event where everyone was supposed to confess a sin. I definitely know that feeling of trying to think about what to say. You can go with a “safe” one like “I haven’t been reading my bible every day” but it’s kind of obvious you’re just trying to avoid the question, like in a job interview when they ask “what’s your biggest weakness” and you say “I work too hard” or something.
And then there’s accountability partners and accountability groups, where people meet up for the purpose of checking on how everyone’s “personal relationship with God” is going, and confessing sin related to that. Apparently a lot of times this just devolves into people confessing their sexual thoughts/ porn use and beating themselves up about it.
ALSO I agree with this!!! “Christian parents, fwiw I heartily recommend not teaching kids about hell.”
Confessing sin to peers seems like it could have different social dynamics, because you can essentially compare notes. I think my outlook on confession was fairly common and I heard a few people say they felt that way. But people didn’t talk about it, so there was no way to know. If lots of people were confessing about porn, I was oblivious.
> You also have to know and remember each incident, but it would be weird if you took notes and read them out to the priest.
One of the surviving documents we have from Isaac Newton is a list of his minor sins.
@Oscar Cunningham:
Yeah, but we already knew Newton was something of an obsessive sort anyway, so that’s a lot less surprising than it would be for your more average believer.
Me, I grew up Anglican in Canada (which is probably the most Catholic-like of the Protestant churches, even if a lot of Anglicans refuse to admit it). Formal scheduled confession was not a thing, though basically all of the other sacraments were, so the whole idea was kind of foreign to me.
I was actually scheduled to start confirmation classes in my high school years, before the priest in question had a heart attack and died and that was put on (indefinite) hold. I was never a particularly religious person anyway. My sister actually did complete confirmation classes, and for a time was the Crucifer at our local church, leading the Procession towards the altar. One family dinner we were talking about what our great-grandfather who had been an Anglican priest would have thought of that, and realized there was a good chance the answer would be ‘he would have been horrified a girl was allowed to do it’.
Is it different in Canada?
Back when I was in high school and thought I wanted to be an Episcopalian priest (this was in the early ’60s…I’m an old fart now), the rector at my church lent me A Theological Intruduction to the 39 Articles of the Church of England; and reading it was just as tedious as you might imagine.
<pedantic>One thing I remember is that there are only two sacraments, baptism and holy communion. The others—confirmation, penance, holy orders, matrimony, and extreme unction—are kinda like sacraments but lack an outward and visible sign ordained in the Gospel.
</pedantic>(Note that there’s no confession in the list. Were you thinking of penance?)
Penance is the formal name for confession, although nobody will be confused if you call it confession.
I’ve never heard Annointing of the Sick called Extreme Unction, although apparently that’s what it used to be called. The name I remember from my Catholic education was “Last Rites”, which is another valid name.
I have no idea how they came up with 7 sacraments. Is that just what they teach to children, and serious Catholics have a more layered understanding? Is it ancient tradition, or something they just came up with in the last century? I’m sure these questions could be answered with some research, but I’m not going to spend time on it.
It’s been years, hell, decades, since I was taught any of this stuff, and I was never that interested or paying much attention (I got kicked out of Sunday School/CCD pretty often for asking the wrong questions… I probably spent more time in the hallway of that building then I did any of the classrooms…).
Anyways, about all I remember is that at some point, the order of the sacraments was a bit different, and then it changed up to the more modern version. I think something like baptism and confirmation were swapped.
I remember catching hell one day in CCD because we were talking about altar boys or something, and someone asked why girls can’t be altar boys, and I did not understand the fuss.
7 sacraments there are: https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_two/section_two.html
Thing about Catholicism, it’s all laid out in both in canon law and in liturgical law.
Specifically, the Catechism. The rules. The dogma.
There is no interpretation to be had, and that’s the entire point of Confirmation, wherein one undertakes to believe those rules to the utmost, that’s what it’s all about. They are the thing, even if one fails to uphold them.