Medicine for the Soul

When people ask me why they need to go to see a priest in confession instead of going “directly to God,” I remind them that they already believe that you can’t “go directly to God” when it comes to another sacrament: baptism.

Protestants believe that someone else (ideally, a Church minister) has to baptize you—you can’t baptize yourself. Protestants who believe that baptism saves us from sin consequently believe that we need the involvement of a minister of the Church if we want to obtain the forgiveness of sins that leads to our initial salvation. 

But if we need that involvement from a minister of the Church the first time we go from being dead in sin to being alive in Christ, then why wouldn’t we need the Church’s minister the other times we fall from grace and seek to be reconciled to God?

Paul even says in 2 Corinthians 5:18, “Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” In the fourth century, St. Ambrose, the teacher of St. Augustine, said, “If baptism is certainly the remission of all sins, what difference does it make whether priests claim that this power is given to them in penance [confession] or at the font?”

I’m not saying you will go to hell if you are unable to confess your sins to a priest. As we have seen with baptism, God can save people in extraordinary ways if they are unable to seek him through the ordinary ways he gave us. But we should not presume upon extraordinary ways of salvation if we can seek the ordinary ways God gave us, one of which is the confession of sins to a priest of Christ’s church.

I want to be clear that confession is not a work we do to earn salvation. We can’t even approach God on our own when we are in a state of mortal sin and separated from him. In that case, God gives us “actual grace” (a spiritual kick in the pants, if you will) that moves us to seek him in the confessional and to be restored in friendship with him through his grace, which sanctifies our souls. 

So, when St. Paul, quoting David, says, “Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not reckon his sin” (Rom. 4:8), he is referring to anyone who experiences the blessedness of God’s forgiveness. This does not mean that after we are saved, God simply looks the other way and doesn’t “count” future sins against us. It means that when God forgives us, our sins will no longer be held against us or “reckoned” to us, and God is always waiting as a merciful Father to forgive our faults, no matter how big we tiny humans think they are. Indeed, it is God who forgives sins, not a priest. Paragraph 1441 of the Catechism says,

Only God forgives sins. Since he is the Son of God, Jesus says of himself, “The Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins” and exercises this divine power: “Your sins are forgiven.” Further, by virtue of his divine authority he gives this power to men to exercise in his name.

God forgives sins, and he does so through a minister of the Church. Although Jesus taught his disciples to ask God to forgive us our trespasses, the New Testament authors never say that we should confess particular or individual sins to God. Instead, confession and the forgiveness of sins is bound up in the authority of the ministers of the Church.

Just as baptism marks a definite sign that we have been cleansed of sin, and so we don’t have to doubt if we were really saved, sacramental confession marks a definite sign that we have been received back into communion with Christ and his church, and we don’t have to worry about if we “did enough” to come back into God’s graces. We simply do what we did in our baptism: bring our sins to the minister of God’s church and accept God’s gift of salvation from them. 

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