You can still confess your venial sins. It’s a good devotional practice that can help you grow in humility and to work on those areas. It is true that objectively they are forgiven just by using holy water, saying an act of contrition, or receiving the Eucharist. But it can also be helpful to bring them up in confession, if for no other reason than accountability.
I’ve given this some thought. A parish near me is actually going to have confessions during rush hour the week before Christmas, since it sits near a main thoroughfare. And I’m giving some thought myself to going down to the mall on Black Friday and sitting in the food court with a book and a purple stole.
It is still valid. You’d have to ask that priest why he skipped it. I don’t know why anyone skips it. I don’t about 90% of the time, unless it’s evident to me that the person has no clue what it is and I’m pressed for time.
The same reason you should pray for your priests at any other time. It’s not always an easy job.
Sounds good to me!
I don’t know that it had anything to do with Constantine. From what I recall from my Church History classes, private confession was a later development, starting with Irish monks and spreading to the continent from there. The justification for continuing to do it is that the Church, having been given authority from Jesus, can regulate the practice of the sacraments. There are very, very good reasons not to have confession in public. You think people don’t go to confession now, imagine if we required it to be done publicly, with lengthy public penances. I’d never have to hear another confession. I don’t want to go in public, and I’m sure neither do you. With the internet age putting so much of what used to be private out in the open. it’s nice to have at least one area of our lives that stays locked away forever.
I’m sure that the apostles absolved sins. They had the power to do so, and they traveled around engaging in the ministry entrusted to them. So it would be hard to imagine that they didn’t. I can’t picture the scenario: “Hey, Saint Peter, could you hear my confession?” “Oh, sorry, Billy, confession won’t be invented for another three hundred years. Have a nice millennium!”
It’s a good way to tell the priest you’re finished, but it’s not required.
New Catholics just need to know how to go to confession, and make sure they continue to do so! I hear so many stories of converts who join the Church at RCIA and immediately fall away, for any number of reasons. Keep at it! And the biggest thing anyone should know is not to be afraid of confession! We hear everything; by the time I had been a priest for about a month I’d heard everything I was ever going to hear. Nothing shocks me anymore, and the only thing that bothers me is when people come in and front off about how awesome and pious they are. We hear everything, we remember almost nothing, and honestly, confession is not terribly exciting for the priest–it’s the same dozen sins over and over (not saying that anyone should get creative and try to mix it up…). The exciting part is knowing that I get to dispense God’s mercy and reconcile someone to the Church.
Each priest is different. For me, I try to give SMART penances:
Mileage may vary, but I always ask the penitent to do it, except for the circumstance I’ve already commented about. I can’t speak for why any other priest doesn’t do what he’s supposed to do, but I always ask for it, and my priest friends to whom I confess do as well.
Rarely, only if the person has said something that could mean a variety of things. For instance, if you said “I did stuff I wasn’t supposed to do,” I usually ask for clarification, because that’s literally every sin ever. If you say “sexual sin,” I might ask for clarification as to whether it’s alone or with another, or what kind of sexual sins, since there are different ones. If you said you stole, I might ask you to tell me from whom and what you stole–there’s a difference between stealing my paperclip and stealing my car.
It depends on a number of factors. The routine confession is not conversational at all–the person confesses, I assign penance and give absolution. In more involved situations, there will be more involved conversation, if time permits. On weekdays, where I have a limited window to hear confessions before I need to get ready for Mass, I am less conversational; on weekends, where confession time is scheduled to end at such-and-such an hour, but in reality it goes until I’m finished since I’m not saying the Mass, I will take more time.
Sure it has. Obviously, the prudent thing to do is speak from experience without speaking of experience, to talk about it like I know what I’m talking about without telling you how I know about it. But I suppose there are two ways to know the nature of sin–one is study, and the other is experience. Obviously both are helpful. The thing that’s more helpful to me, and the reason scrupulosity is one of my personal crusades, especially on here, is that I have at times struggled with anxiety, so I know how to help people discern their thoughts.
I look for the common thread. There is always one commonality to all sins on the list, in that they were all committed by the same person, so I try to figure out what might be the reason why, or at the very least I point out to them how the sins are related. Sometimes people can be so mired in their sins that they can’t see the bigger picture.
If it’s a venial sin, don’t worry about it. If it’s a mortal sin, approximate, speak in generalities. Do the best you can.
You don’t really have to convey that you’re making the confession for devotional reasons, though many people do. And I would think it unwise, even for devotional reasons, to rehash old sins. Surely you can come up with at least one or two sins you’ve committed since your last confession.
Not at all, though it doesn’t happen as often as I would have thought it did. I get flagged down at the hospital to anoint someone other than the one I was called to anoint far more often. The only times I really get flagged down in public to hear confessions are either at Church events where 95% of the attendees are Catholic, or else on campus at the local Catholic university.
I don’t mind if employees come to me in confession, and I treat them as I would anyone else. I can’t say for certain if any of them have, to be honest. And in the hypothetical you propose, I wouldn’t be able to act on that outside the confessional, of course. If I knew it was that person, I could encourage them to rethink their ministry, if I felt that was warranted, but only during the confession itself.
