It happened to me. The parish has a regularly schedule time for confessions. I showed up and there was no priest in the church so I waited. Eventually I saw a priest enter and he wanted to know why I was there, so I told him confession. He said they were not having confessions and that the church was closed that day. Apparently he did not lock the door. There was no notice that the confessions had been canceled anywhere I looked and certainly not on the web site.The “turned away” thing baffles me also. I can’t imagine a priest would do this. It must have been the office staff making decisions for them, or maybe it was a case of priests being temporarily unavailable due to some other activity. Anyway, they should not have turned you away. But, I have read about similar ridiculous statements from office staff when people call churches. Don’t let it discourage you from going.
You don’t have a location on your profile, but if you are in USA, I find the website Masstimes.org to be helpful in finding churches that have confessions. However, always verify the info on Masstimes by checking the church website or calling them, as sometimes the info on Masstimes is out of date or the church has different schedules for summer time.
Usually reliable near us. If nothing else, the phone numbers are nearly always correct - unless parishes recently merged.I checked my own parish.
Daily Mass times are wrong.
Confession times are wrong.
I don’t know where or how they get their data or where/how they update it.
The point is: check with the parish itself.
This caught my eye; someone I work with in RCIA is employed by the parish in other capacities also, and has mentioned several times that the rule for staff is that they have to seek a confessor outside the parish. Given we are suburban, that is not particularly difficult; and I have no idea if this is the pastor’s rule, an archdiocese rule, or “universal”; only that it applies to all the staff in my parish.Now that I work for our parish there is no excuse for me. We have confession on Wednesday afternoons and all I have to do is cross the street.
It applied at my former parish where I was the DRE. No confessions of employees heard. We went to the parish 10 miles away and took advantage of Penance services in Advent and Lent. Fortunately they had confessions several times a week. That parish only had them for 45 minutes on Saturday.This caught my eye; someone I work with in RCIA is employed by the parish in other capacities also, and has mentioned several times that the rule for staff is that they have to seek a confessor outside the parish. Given we are suburban, that is not particularly difficult; and I have no idea if this is the pastor’s rule, an archdiocese rule, or “universal”; only that it applies to all the staff in my parish.
I have had the very same priest who is practically bounding with joy whenever he is asked to hear a confession have to apologize and turn me down because he had already had something on his schedule or already had too much to do in a time too short to do it. (Good homilies don’t just spring out of the tops of their heads, for instance.)Don’t explain your situation.
When I travel, I just say I’m traveling and I need reconciliation. More often than not, the priest is accomodating.