Deo Gratias 42 WROTE:
“Then it goes without saying we’re not obligated to listen to what Fr. Ipsidipsy over at some website says about lists. The Church has told us numerous times that we can look to the saints for guidance in living our spiritual life.”
- We are not obligated to do so. Nothing in Church teaching obligates us to read the writings of the Saints or to base our lives on them. If you find them useful, then there is nothing wrong with that. But there are many people who do not. Saintly writings are considered extras to the Faith. They are often referred to as private revelations. The Catechism is quite specific with respect to such additions to the Faith:
“67 Throughout the ages, there have been so-called “private” revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church. They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.”
And again I must mention Catholic Apologist Steven Greydanus’ counsel:
** “The correct dictum is not “If we want to go to Heaven, we listen to the saints.” The saints themselves are the first to tell us that the correct dictum is: “If we want to go to Heaven, we listen to the
Church.”**
decentfilms.com/mail/mailbag-19/199
In short, if something that a Saint has written is causing you fear or worry, or has become an obstacle to your spiritual life, you are absolutely free to disregard it. There is no sin in this whatsoever.
I can certainly understand the fear and reluctance to embrace this viewpoint. It is often not what many Catholics have been taught. It
IS, however, the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. To ignore it would simply be a mistake.
Snugglebugmom WROTE:
“I made a list when I went to confession for the first time after 27 years. You better believe I needed it. I was so in awe of the whole situation that I would have drawn a complete blank…I tend toward scrupulosity, and even for me a list is a good idea. When I write things down, I can somehow see more clearly if they are actually sinful, or if it is just scrupulosity trying to get a foot in the door.”
- Let me share with you a different story. A friend I know had been away from the Church for most of his life – nearly 40 years. He was moved to return one day, and went to confession. He told the priest he wasn’t about to dredge up 40 years of sin. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. So he covered the basics. Not loving God, not loving his neighbor, being rageful, and so on. He tried his best, covered a few major things, and that was all. And he went out from the confessional with the complete knowledge that God had forgiven him.
The simple fact is, we are not required to have perfect recall. We are not required to remember every single sin. God and the Church do not want us to obsess about the details. As Father Santa says on the Scrupulous Anonymous website, perfection is not a condition of God’s forgiveness or mercy. We don’t have to be perfect to be forgiven. This applies to absolutely everybody, including scrupulous people.
Making a list of sins for confession may seem like a way of making confession less stressful, but it will usually make things more difficult in the long run. I don’t mean to invalidate your experience with this. But behind the impulse to make a list is often the belief that God requires perfection from us. We have to be flawless. We have to make that perfect confession. This is a very destructive belief. The more you encourage the idea that God requires perfection of us by making lists, the more ingrained and painful this belief will likely become. Making lists will not solve this problem. Lists are usually just an indication that this erroneous belief exists, and should be confronted. And the first, most basic way to do this, is to STOP MAKING LISTS.
If you really believed that God does not require perfection from you in confession, you wouldn’t make lists at all. Father Santa, director of the Redemptorist website Scrupulous Anonymous, says that when he sees a person produce a list of their sins in confession, he gently requests for them to put it away. Confession is about trusting in God’s mercy. Not in focusing on being perfect – which we most certainly are not.
Scrupulous people, Father Santa indicates, tend to have a very low tolerance for imperfection, and an exaggerated sense of sin. It is all too easy to engage in practices like making lists of one’s sins, which simply reinforce these beliefs.
I notice that you (Snugglebugmom) say that you tend toward scrupulosity. You are free to disregard any advice here that might cause you pain or fear in any way. But in the case of making lists of sins for confession, I would say what confessors of the scrupulous have consistently advised for years: try to act against the impulse to make lists. Perhaps you do not feel such lists are harmful to you. But they would seem to suggest that you feel that God requires a rigid perfection from you in confession, when he certainly does not. You are encouraged merely to confess your sins to the best of your recall and then to trust in God’s mercy that you are entirely forgiven. You will be.
Again, I invite you and anyone else here who is worried about these matters to read this article from the Redemptorist website, Scrupulous Anonymous. You will find it enormously helpful in easing fears in this area:
Keeping a List -
mission.liguori.org/newsletters/pdf_archive/march2003sa_web.pdf
And the Scrupulous Anonymous
Main Page:
mission.liguori.org/newsletters/scrupanon.htm
Thank you.
. But I do use the phone to do my act of contrition since I never memorized it 
. Honestly I think it helped to confess faster and completely so you don’t have to think about the sins and everything is in order. Not that I think confession should be super fast but I like to do it fast so everyone can confess. Sometimes I feel people go in and then start thinking about their sins there and take up time and its only one Priest so I get impatient lol. God give me patience!