Confession

[Daniel_Tooma]

Why do I only say one sin at confession and get resolution for all my sins? And is penance a random thing handed out by the priests? Sometimes I will confess a bad sin and have to say one Hail Mary and one Our Father, and sometimes I’ll confess one not so bad and have to say a decade of the rosary.

 

[dylanschrader]

From The Code of Canon Law:

Can. 988 §1. A member of the Christian faithful is obliged to confess in kind and number all grave sins committed after baptism and not yet remitted directly through the keys of the Church nor acknowledged in individual confession, of which the person has knowledge after diligent examination of conscience.

If you only have one grave sin to confess, then that’s all you need to confess because the confession of all grave sins is the essential matter (technically, quasi-matter) of the sacrament of Penance.

Why? Because mortal sins committed after Baptism are normatively forgiven in the sacrament of Penance. That’s the main reason that the sacrament exists. Venial sins can also be the matter of the sacrament of Penance (and the Church strongly recommends this), but venial sins can be forgiven in other ways without their confession being strictly necessary.

Deliberately withholding a mortal sin will invalidate the matter of your confession, and you will not really be absolved of any of your sins and will have committed the additional grave sin of sacrilege.

From the Catechism:

1456 Confession to a priest is an essential part of the sacrament of Penance: “All mortal sins of which penitents after a diligent self-examination are conscious must be recounted by them in confession, even if they are most secret and have been committed against the last two precepts of the Decalogue; for these sins sometimes wound the soul more grievously and are more dangerous than those which are committed openly.”

**When Christ's faithful strive to confess all the sins that they can remember, they undoubtedly place all of them before the divine mercy for pardon.** But those who fail to do so and knowingly withhold some, place nothing before the divine goodness for remission through the mediation of the priest, "for if the sick person is too ashamed to show his wound to the doctor, the medicine cannot heal what it does not know."