How detailed do you have to be in Confession

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Hello, I’m new here. i was wondering how detailed you have to be in confessing your sins. like for years i just said things like “I’m had lustful thoughts.” but do you have to go into detail like name names if you can?
 
I think it depends on if you are intentionally glossing things over. If you are repeatedly lusting after someone you know, that is bigger than the momentary lustful thoughts that come when we see/hear things that tempt us.

Peace,
Kathy
 
We have to name our sins by type and number. So you would say something like “I had lustful thoughts that I deliberately entertained 2x this week.” You don’t need to say who they were about. If the priest needs more information he will ask. If a thought pops into your head that you immediately reject, that is not a sin, it is a temptation. If you reject it, change the train of your thoughts, and don’t dwell on it, then you are doing what you ought. As you continue turning your mind away from those thoughts (and keeping yourself away from occasions of sin like pictures, TV shows, etc) you will eventually have those temptations less and less. But this is something we usually need to fight against all our lives.
 
Just confess what sin and, if you remember, how many times. Like:

Lust, two times; greed, four times; pride, six times…
 
thanks for the responses. in the past when i gave the general statement a priest never asked me for more information and i always felt clean and new after Confession.
 
That’s good that you felt clean, because your absolution was indeed valid. These tips don’t make your confession any more cleansing, they simply help you to keep track of your specific sins, allowing you to better reflect on them and get them out of your life. Saying things like “I had lustful thoughts” is a confession, but does not make you think about the actual sin as much as more specifics do. Remember, God knows every sin you have ever committed, and every sin you will commit. Confession is for YOU, this wonderful sacrament is meant to help us overcome our sins, not tell God what we’ve done.

God bless you!👍 If only we could get every Catholic to think about confession.
 
thanks. but i have never encountered a priest that asked me to be more specific when i confessed of lustful thoughts and i have confessed the same thing to the same priest several times so they knew me from before and when i confessed to other priests they don’t ask any details either. also is it possible to commit a venial lustful thought, like something just pops up into your head because some things come up in my head and i may dwell on it for a second or two but then quickly change thoughts.
 
Something I’m discovering at the moment is the need to become less legalistic about confession. Trust the priest, unless you have an explicit reason not to trust him. If he needs more information, he’ll ask.

At the same time, I’ve been advised a lot in confession to explore more deeply the origins of my sins. It’s fine when you’re a child to just say “I used God’s name in vain 3 times, I hit my brother 8 times” and so on. It’s good to go a little deeper as an adult, and not use the ‘shopping list’ approach as an excuse not to address the stuff that, while not sinful in itself - desires, patterns of behaviour, things in our past - might be keeping us stuck in patterns of sin, confess, sin, confess, without much progress. We’re called to confess our sins, not just a list of generic sins, and sometimes the root of the desires in us that keep us sinning can be much harder to admit to than the longest list of mortal sins taken from a prayer book. As a priest told me recently, confession is not an exercise in ritual purity, but in drawing closer to God.

Of course, that’s not an excuse not to confess *mortal *sins by number and type, nor to turn confession into psychoanalysis.
 
thanks. that pretty much solves my generic statement problem. but to my other comment, if a lust ful image pops into your head and you think about it for a second or two but then quickly change thoughts is that a venial but lustful thought?
 
The conditions for mortal sin are:

Grave matter
Consent of the will
Awareness of the sinfulness of the act

If you’re daydreaming, and as soon as you become aware of what you’re daydreaming about you stop, that’s not a mortal sin.

Thomas M Santa S.J. in his book ‘Understanding Scrupulosity’ says that if there is a doubt that you have committed a mortal sin, then there is no doubt that you haven’t. If you are a faithful Catholic trying to live as God wants, then a mortal sin would hit your conscience like a bullet, you’d know if you’d done it, it would devastate you.

I have an examen of conscience that says that ‘brief entertainment of lustful fantasies’ is a venial sin, but serious lust, thoughts of the ‘if I could I would’ kind, are mortal sin.

None of us have perfect control of our thoughts. It sounds like what you’re talking about is more of a temptation, or a venial sin at worst. Sin is still sin though. Pray for purity of intention.
 
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