Confession Confusion

[CuriousInIL]

what if you don’t like your pennance? Can you then go to a different priest to get an easier one? Like let’s say a person confesses to murder and his or her pennance is to turn him or herself in. Could that person not want to do that but still be sorrowoful for their sin and then go on to confession again in order to get a different pennance that is easier?

Two points. First, the priest cannot assign turning oneself in as a penance because doing so would break the seal of the confessional. Second, I have seen/heard a number of folks, including priests, indicate that (as a rare act) it is permissible to seek an alternate penance from a second priest.

 

[teachccd]

I just read *Rome Sweet Home *by Scott and Kimberly Hahn. Good book. But in one section of the book Kimberly wrote that for sacramental confession to be valid (for the sins to actually be absolved, I guess she meant) one must do the penance assigned by the priest afterward.

The way I had always understood Confession, one’s sins are forgiven once the priest pronounces the words of absolution, and if you purposely neglect to do the penance he assigns, you’ve committed a new sin, but the sins you’ve already confessed and had absolved are actually absolved. Am I mistaken?

What page is this reference?? thank you… teachccd

 

[scaron]

Two points. First, the priest cannot assign turning oneself in as a penance because doing so would break the seal of the confessional. Second, I have seen/heard a number of folks, including priests, indicate that (as a rare act) it is permissible to seek an alternate penance from a second priest.

Right. The priest could not assign that as penance. However, to make a valid confession the penitent must have a firm purpose of amendment, and it seems to me a priest could refuse absolution in the first place if the penitent was unwilling to atone for his sin in this way. Right?