Does the Priest remember sins heard in confession?

[Elizabeth502]

Terry, I liked odile’s comment just now, and I do understand what you mean.

Many Catholics – reverts and not – report “a great weight lifted,” “a feeling of lightness” after confession, as if it’s even a physical feeling. (Not sure, but that’s the way it’s been described to me.) I have never “felt” that. Rather, I feel intensified sorrow for my sins, and an increased awareness of their scope & effect in my life & in the lives of those I interact with. That acute awareness doesn’t lead me to despair, but it does lead me to thirst more for the graces that result from fidelity to God’s laws.

Since the purpose of the sacrament is to restore our individual relationship with God, I know that there’s nothing “more” than that to be gained by it. I know that God knows me better than I know myself, so perhaps for me, He knows that some radical experience of relief is something I would attach to inappropriately as “final,” as opposed to intensifying my incentive to stay in communion with Him.

(Just offering a different perspective.)

 

[acadian]

I don’t remember all the sins I confess, so I know my good priest doesn’t. However, as he has been my only confessor for the past 4 or 5 years and I go face-to-face, he does have some idea of the things that are the snags in the fabric of my life. That is helpful when I have questions or he has advice to give. I can ask a general question, and he is pretty good at reading between the lines and understanding the specifics - sometimes based on things i’ve said before.

I have fairly regular contact with him for things outside the confessional, and I have never, ever felt like he was looking at me and thinking about what I had confessed.

Seldom do I have the walking on air feeling, but that’s OK.

I will add that a friend of mine recently went to confession after 37 years. She said she felt relief that it was done, and said she felt lighter, but the true impact did not hit her until she resided the Eucharist on Christmas morning after 37 years. She said she could feel “warmth” spreading throughout her body. Even this past week, she had tears in her eyes recounting that. God is good.