The Sacrament of Penance

Catholic teachings are so inter-related that, while I may only want to go into Confession, doing so requires an explanation of Catholic teaching on the Graces, Justification, Sanctification, Salvation, Sin, Purgatory, Contrition, Penance, etc. In other words, any attempt to explain a Catholic position on one issue requires at least some understanding of several others to grasp it. Yet another reason why we're so misunderstood I expect.

With that being said, I will now attempt to begin outlining some important points concerning the above concepts as they relate to Catholic Confession. This will be done in an expository fashion,

As previously noted, I have to explain several topics that relate to Confession before I can get into Confession itself. We'll start with Faith.

I have seen many varied definitions of Faith before. I will here provide mine, which I do not believe specifically contradicts or conflicts with anyone else's, but which I do think will illuminate a particular difficulty many have with Catholicism.

Faith is something that is believed/trusted/accepted and acted upon. I add the final part regarding action, because we are told, for example, that even the Devil believes. Yet the Devil is not saved. Moreover, we are told that Faith without "works," or in other words, Faith without action based upon it, is dead in the Letter of St. James. In my personal opinion, Faith is something that changes us, and I have yet to meet the Christian who actually disagrees with me on this. As part of that change, Faith inspires us to act in a manner different to the manner we acted before we had it. In fact, I will go so far as to say that even the act of willing to have Faith, the very choice to have Faith, is the first act of Faith. I believe it is utterly impossible to have Faith divorced from action. They necessarily go hand in hand for Faith to be legitimate, or for it to be living, as St. James says. Keeping that in mind, let us progress to the concept of Grace.

Catholics actually have several names for Grace, and understand it to work in various ways in different situations, which is why we have the seperate terminology. Here we will treat with one form in particular, that called Sanctifying Grace (not to be confused with Actual Grace, a common problem).

Sanctifying Grace is the Grace we receive in Baptism, it is the gift of God that results in our salvation. We receive it because we choose to repent and turn to God. Thus we have Faith, that Faith is what allows us access to Grace, for without both belief and acceptance of Christ's redeeming Sacrifice, we cannot access His Grace. When we perform the act of Faith and are Baptized into the Church, that is when Sanctifying Grace is poured out upon us by God, and we are freed from the power of Sin and cleansed for God. Our Faith, and our choice, are inspired by God, to turn us away from sin and towards Him. We must then choose to accept His prompting and come to Him. This is how we first receive Sanctifying Grace.

Please note that water Baptism is only one of three forms of Baptism, and is called the ordinary form. Sacraments in general are the ordinary means of receiving Grace. By ordinary we mean that they are the normal ways, but we do not say that Grace cannot be received through any other means. It's all up to God. Therefore, let's have no one taking my comments regarding any of the sacraments out of context. If someone dies on his or her way to baptism, for example, we do not believe such a person was not baptized, we consider him or her to have been baptized by desire instead of water. Likewise, if someone is martyred for his or her faith in Christ before they can be baptized, they are considered to be baptized in blood.

However, because of the above outlined understanding that Faith and Action (works, fruits, etc.) are inseparable, we do not divorce Faith from the action that the Faith prompts. Someone who says "I have faith" and doesn't act upon it to be baptized in any way (see John 3 and Matthew 28 as to why baptizing is considered so important), we would question whether they truly had Faith at all, as per James' letter. A person who claims Faith, yet chooses to not engage in the rite by which all Christians become Christians, a rite commanded by Christ, and a rite that is a visible act of Faith (at the very least) to all of us, would be suspect as a result.

Progressing onwards, then, we must now tackle the issue of sin. Sin is, in essence, a rejection of God to one degree or another. It is also an inherently criminal action, for it violates the law of God, and is evil. Catholics have an understanding of difference in degree of sin as well. Catholics do not subscribe to the idea that all sin is equivalent, and for the following reasons:

For Catholics, there are mortal sins and venial sins. Mortal sins are sins that involve Grave matter (something important, usually outlined for us in Scripture as sinful), willful rejection of God, and knowledge that what you're doing is sinful. To further go into this, let us consider the following hypothetical examples (these will be somewhat extreme, their extremity is meant to highlight the principles involved, not because I have some realistic expectation of these things happening).

#1: Let us say that I am somehow forced to commit murder, and forced in such a way that I have no way to stop myself (maybe some kind of drug, or mind control device). I have committed a gravely evil deed, that being murder, the killing of an innocent person for no justifiable reason (like self-defense). But I did not choose to commit the evil deed. Because choice is always linked to culpability, we cannot say that I am fully culpable for this action. In other words, we cannot reasonably say that God would truly be Good and Just were He to condemn me for a deed that I did not choose to commit. And likewise, I have not voluntarily separated myself from communion with Him through this act, as it was not an act I choose to do.

#2: Let us say again that I have murdered someone. But in this scenario, I come from a culture in which murder is not considered wrong, a society which teaches from birth that murder is perfectly normal and fine, warping the conscience. In other words, I do not know that murder is wrong, nor do I know that I will be punished for it, that there is a moral rule against it, etc. I am utterly unaware of the fact that killing some random person for no reason is morally wrong. In this case, we Catholics again believe that some of the guilt of this action, evil as it is, is exculpated because of the offender's ignorance of the evil nature of the act. One must wonder, if the person knew it was evil, would the person still have done it? We believe that a Just and Good God would not necessarily condemn someone who was unaware that what they were doing was wrong. In like fashion we might consider a child who does something wrong without knowing it. Do we kill this child for the offense, lock him in his room, or beat him bloody? Of course not. We teach the child, perhaps scold him a bit, etc. but the punishment is far less severe than it would be for a child who knew it was wrong to do something and did it anyway.

#3: The last situation is the most difficult. Because it involves the gravity of a particular matter, I have saved it for the end. Gravity of sin is very difficult to judge. We are very certain that some sins, namely theft, rape, adultery, murder, idolatry, blasphemy, and aposticization, are objectively grave. They are, by their very nature, objectively and totally evil as a complete rejection of God's gift of goodness, and to perform them (willfully and with an awareness of that evil nature) is tantamount to a total rejection of God, who is Good. There are more sins than those lifted above that are considered grave matter, of course. The question, however, is what sins are not considered Grave matter.

When Protestants and Catholics fight about the Catholic gradation of sin (this happens occasionally) it has been my experience that what we're really fighting about is the idea of gravity of sin, and not whether a sin might be less or worse based on our knowledge or free choice of it. So I will attempt to provide an example of an action that is not gravely sinful.

Let us say that I am being mugged, and my attacker draws a knife on me. And as a result, I break his wrist and elbow in rapid succession to prevent him killing or injuring me. I am fully aware that the techniques I would use on him (after years of martial arts training) will hurt him severely, and I am also well aware that causing physical injury to another person is bad, even with the intention that I am only protecting myself (the fact remains that I have hurt someone to an excruciating degree). Catholics would consider my sin here to not be grave matter, for several reasons. First is that my action is not, in and of itself (at least as far as I am aware), objectively and totally evil. Hurting someone is not on par with taking a person's life. Moreover, Catholics, like most Christians, understand morality to work in terms of intentions, means and ends. My intentions here were to hurt the mugger, but for the purpose of defending myself, not out of pleasure or superiority, etc. My actions were wrong in that they hurt someone, whereas the perfect Christian might gladly surrender to a mugger (turning the other cheek), and the means are physical techniques that leave our mugger severely injured, and hopefully myself unharmed. This is not an action that I believe can be seen as gravely sinful, and thus I do not think it would qualify as a mortal sin.

And so we continue to the other kind of sin in Catholic theology, known as Venial sin. Sometimes our sins are small, or unwilling, or unrealized (as illustrated in hypothetical form above), thus they cannot qualify as mortal sin, and may not qualify as sin at all. In those cases where they do qualify as sin, though they damage your relationship with God and with those against whom you sinned (if against someone other than God alone). While these smaller sins won't kill the Grace inside you, they will do other things. They will attack the charity/love in your soul for God, as well as damage your relationships, etc. And by committing many of these lesser sins you can still do so much damage that you deteriorate into a state of mortal sin as well.

Mortal sin is so great a rejection of God (again, due to it being willful, knowledgeable and grave) that it will not just damage or offend the charity/love in our souls, but kill it entirely. It does this because sin is contrary to the Will of God. By knowing something is terribly wrong, and choosing to do it anyway, you have set yourself in total opposition to God's Will, which is a Will always oriented towards Love of God and Love of Mankind, Good, and Justice. If you have rejected God's Will, you have also rejected your acceptance of God's Salvation, which is naturally part of His Will for us, I think we Christians all agree, and it is that Will which allowed us to receive Grace in the first place. By rejecting God's Will, and God's Salvation, you have cut off that force which connected you to God's Grace. You have assaulted and mortally wounded your faith. This is how we destroy our connection to Sanctifying Grace, and in so doing, place ourselves under the power of sin again.

In a nut shell, this demonstrates the Catholic understanding of salvation as a process, not as a moment. Catholics believe that our initial Faith Justifies and Sanctifies us, generally through the baptismal act, whatever form it takes. The justification of our Faith is accompanied by the pouring out of God's Sanctifying Grace upon us, this is what makes Baptism a Sacrament. It is, and this is what is meant by "Sacrament," a visible outpouring of God's Grace upon us. We believe that mortal sin, because it demonstrates that we are rejecting completely the Will of God, corrupts our souls again, removing our initial Justification and Sanctification, necessarily, as a being who sins cannot be sanctified (holy) or justified (you have sinned and not yet repented, your actions have not demonstrated faith, they have demonstrated an antagonism towards God, thus the Faith that justified you is no longer even present). To remedy the problem of mortal sin, then, we finally arrive at the Sacrament of Confession, the ordinary means by which God's Grace and forgiveness is received by a Catholic.

First and foremost, let us address a couple of things that Confession involves, its history, and then make some clarifications as to what Confession is not. Both are extremely essential to properly understanding Confession, and both result in confusion, misunderstandings and arguments on the subject.

First, the Sacrament itself generally consists of going into a small room with a screen of some kind between you and the priest. The priest recites ritual phrases, and you first express that you are repentant for your sins and wish to confess, asking for forgiveness. You tell the priest how long it has been since your last confession, and you tell the priest the sins that you've committed (I've found it's best to write them down before hand, because it can be difficult to remember once you're there). Upon telling the priest your sins, you say the prayer called the Act of Contrition, and the priest absolves you of your sins in the name of the Holy Trinity and with the authority of Christ (John 20). That is the end of the Sacrament of Confession itself. After the Sacrament, the priest usually assigns a penance for you to undertake, often some prayers said for a specific intention. This penance is voluntary, no one can or will make you do it, it is left to you to do as an individual, and it serves a several specific purposes which I will go into soon. Failure to complete the penance, however, qualifies as a further mortal sin, nullifying the Grace you've just received. Understand that the voluntary assent to penance is implicit in going to Confession in the first place, and soon we'll see why.

Before that, however, I want to address several misconceptions and the history of the Sacrament itself. First off, for some common misconceptions.

Misconception #1) It is through some power of the priest that we are forgiven, and not the power of God. This is absolutely false. In Confession we are confessing to Christ, and the priest is only there to act as a physical stand in for Christ whose physical body is in Heaven. The priest in and of himself has no special or magical powers, he merely has a special authority, vested in him by Christ through the Sacrament of Holy Orders. This is Scripturally traceable to John 20:23, where Christ tells His Apostles that He is giving them the authority to forgive people their sins. The power for this action comes from God, it is His Grace that works in us in the Sacraments, and it is on Christ's authority that priests are able to transmit this Grace.

Misconception #2) It is our act of penance that results in forgiveness or absolution, or in other words, that we are only forgiven once we've said a certain number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys. This, too, is absolutely false. As noted above, the Sacrament of Confession results in absolution for the penitent Christian, before penance is assigned, let alone completed. Penance exists for an entirely seperate purpose, and is unrelated, utterly, to our forgiveness. I wish to say this again, absolution is not dependent upon penance, though failure to complete penance just results in further sin. I am most emphatic on this subject because this is the source of several accusation towards Catholics that we think we can "earn" forgiveness. This could not be farther from the Truth, I assure you.

Misconception #3) That it doesn't matter if we are truly repentant or not, we are still absolved. This, again, is false. Contrition is necessary for the Sacrament to be valid. The priest may pronounce the words of absolution, but the power of it, the grace, comes from God, and is only going to be effective on someone who is truly penitent and sorrowful for his or her sins. Period. If you make a false confession with no actual remorse or repentance, you have only worsened your sin by lying to God about your penitence.

Misconception #4) That Confession is a license to sin and then just confess again. Of course, false. Part of the Act of Contrition, the prayer that closes the Sacrament is a solemn promise to go, and with the aid of Christ, sin no more. Part of the purpose of repentance, which as you recall is necessary for the Sacrament to be effective, is that a repentant person does not intend to just go and sin again. Such an attitude is obviously not penitent, and would render the Sacrament invalid. So no, Confession is not a license to sin, for to treat it as such would mean that a person was not repentant, in which case the Sacrament doesn't result in absolution.

And now that we've addressed some of the biggest misunderstandings surrounding Confession, let's look at the history. Catholics are often attacked on the subject of Confession, because it is allegedly not Biblically based. Or more specifically, confessing to a priest by yourself isn't Biblically commanded. And this is true, in so far as it goes. Leaving aside arguments about the validity of relying solely on Scripture, let us look at exactly how the form of the Sacrament of Confession evolved in the Church.

The Rite I described above is the "modern" form of the Sacrament. In other words, private confession with you and the priest is the newer form of the Sacrament. But by newer it should be understood that it is at least 1500 years old. Moreover, private confession with a priest has always been allowed in the Church. And for certain more public sins, like apostasy, early Christian writings are very clear that people would confess publicly before the entire church community (including the priest, of course). Moreover, the confessing of sins in general is Scripturally backed and even commanded. James 5:16 says, for example, "Confess therefore your sins one to another: and pray one for another, that you may be saved. For the continual prayer of a just man availeth much." And I John 1:9, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all iniquity." Note that in both of these examples, they are epistles (letters) written to Christian communities. In other words, these are instructions from the Apostles, in the Bible, to Christians who have already been Baptized, to confess their sins, in one the injunction is made to confess to each other, in the other, to simply confess, it does not specific as to whom. Moreover, early Christian writings like the Didache, the Letter of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch's writings, Irenaeus's writings, along with Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, and more support the confessing of sins. The practice of confessing our sins goes all the way back to the Apostles (who wrote the Didache) their earliest successors (like Ignatius of Antioch), etc. The history of Confession, thus, runs throughout the history of the Church, though the form of the practice has changed from being more public to being more private.

Why change from the often communal confession of the past to the more private confession of the present? Why confess to the priest still and not just to God? Why is confession to each other, important enough that James specifically commands it? What is the value in Confession, aside from the claim that it brings absolution for our sins? Well that's next, so stay tuned.

In Catholicism, Confession is considered extremely important. I like to argue that while most of the Sacraments are not considered "necessary" for salvation, they are considered "essential." Confession is not strictly necessary, in that someone may very well be baptized and not mortally sin afterwards, and then die, in which case Confession wouldn't be necessary, as Baptism cleanses us of sin. But most of us do sin, even mortally, and for us, having a means of receiving forgiveness and sanctifying Grace that we can easily access is vitally important, and thus essential to our faith lives, essential to the point of being necessary for our forgiveness in ordinary circumstances. Let's look again, in brief, at the Sacrament....

The first step, and most important part of Confession is repentance. Obviously, as without repentance, the Sacrament has no effect.

Next is the action of confessing. Again, for Catholics, Faith and Action are undeniably and unalterably linked. It is action that demonstrates and breathes life into Faith, it is action that shows that our Faith as altered us. When a person has mortally sinned, that person has willfully and knowingly rejected to follow God's Will on some gravely important matter, thus demonstrating that they do not have living Faith. The act of repenting, the act of confessing is the action that demonstrates that a person's Faith has begun to rejuvenate at the behest of God, even under the strain of his or her sin. Moreover, the act of confessing is very important in that it requires of us and allows for us to experience several critical things.

First, it lets us face them in their entirety. To confess our sins means that we must honestly and contritely examine our consciences and our past deeds, identify our sins, and vocally admit them to another person (we're drawing closer to the why of confession to another), and at the same time to God. This is an incredibly powerful experience, and it requires not only a great courage from the Christian penitent, but also an amazing quality of Faith, to look our sin in the eye, confess to it, freely admit to our guilt, and trust that Christ has forgiven us for even our most horrible actions. It brings us quite literally face to face with our own worst selves, and even better, reminds us of the ever present, and all powerful grace of God that can forgive anything we have done.

The benefits do not stop there either. Confession also encourages an amazing sense of humility, one of the most important virtues a Christian can cultivate in his or her spiritual life. Because confession demands that we admit and own up to our failings to another person and to God, there is no room for pride, no room for arrogance, no room for selfishness or conceit. You are stripped bare of all egotism and humbled before God in Confession, and then you are Justified anew and washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb. There are no excuses, and no vanities in legitimate Confession, there is only honest, humble, repentance, and the Sacrament encourages these qualities the more we partake of it. Many great Catholics, like the late John Paul II, have been known to frequent Confession monthly, weekly, or even daily. This is not because they are committing horrible atrocities every day, but because for the humble Christian, even the slightest of sins is too much, and any chance outburst of anger or lust or sin in any of its many forms demonstrates to us that we need to remain humble and loving. Confession encourages this, and those who practice it regularly are amazing examples of Christian humility in their daily lives as a result.

And now we reach the last part of this expose, that being Penance. Penance is one of the most misunderstood teachings of the Catholic Church, due mainly to its confusion with absolution by some. Penance can even be used to describe the entire Sacrament itself (it is alternately called the Sacrament of Confession, the Sacrament of Reconciliation, or the Sacrament of Penance, as in the title). When this is done, penance is used in the sense of a person being penitent, not in that the action of penance is required for absolution, as I have already noted. Penance is also the purpose of Purgatory as well as Indulgences, resulting in further misunderstandings and confusion on both subjects. I will address both here.

While our forgiveness is not dependent on performing penance, penance is important and often assigned by our confessors. Penance is oriented towards healing the damages done by sin on our lives. What damages are these that are not healed by forgiveness itself? Such problems as addiction, or family feuds are two excellent examples. While we can be forgiven for our sins by God in confession, and realign ourselves to His Will, it is indisputably true that while we are under the power of sin we develop bad habits that can easily lead us to sin again after confession. If your sins were watching pornography and masturbating, not only will you be at risk for a sexual addiction, but your psychological understanding of the beauty of sexual intercourse and the value of the opposite sex as more than just objects of lust are in danger from your sin. One purpose of penance is to repair these damages by forcing you to perform actions that are opposite to those sinful ones you were performing earlier. Thus your penance might be aimed at repairing your relationships with the opposite sex and removing from yourself your treatment of them as objects of lust.

If your sins are, for example, linked to fighting with your family members, your penance might be to ask forgiveness in person from each and every family member you've fought with, or to say prayers for them for every time you've been angry with them or upset with something they did. This is the primary purpose of voluntary penance, it is to remedy the effects of sin upon our selves, and not just our souls.

There are more purposes to penance though. The next purpose of note is that penance is indeed a form of punishment. Catholics do not deny that Christ's death on the cross removes from us the Eternal punishment of Hell that is the wage earned by our sins. However, while Christ has taken upon Himself the Eternal consequences of our sins, there are still the temporal consequences to be dealt with. That there are temporal consequences seperate from both the Eternal consequences and from forgiveness itself, we can see by looking at King David. In the case of King David, he sinned concerning Bathsheba and Uriah. When confronted by the prophet Nathan, David repented and God forgave Him. And yet, God still, despite forgiving David of his sin and not damning him to Hell, carried out the temporal punishment He had decided upon for David, that of taking his ill-begotten son from David. Scripturally, the idea that forgiveness does not relieve us of responsibility for temporal consequences for sin is quite sound. Christ takes for us the Eternal penalties of sin, that is what we know from Scripture. And we know that even when forgiven there remain temporal consequences to our actions. Penance is the action voluntarily undertaken as a form of punishment for our sins to relieve ourselves of the temporal consequences of sin while in this life.

Purgatory is, for the most part, our temporal penance for sins that remain to us from incomplete penance in our lives. While we are forgiven and we are spared from Hell, we are not spared the temporal consequences that we know from the Scriptures and reason. Penance is how we address that in life, Purgatory is how we address that in death. Thus, I hope it will be understood here that Purgatory is not performed for the forgiveness of sin. Like all forms of penance, Purgatory does not exist for absolving sins or earning forgiveness. This is a misunderstanding. One's sins are not forgiven because of completing penance, one's sins are forgiven by God in an act of Graceful forgiveness, both in this life and in Purgatory should it occur.

Indulgences, likewise, do not exist for forgiveness. You cannot buy forgiveness in indulgences (and the buying of indulgences was an abuse happily ended in the Counter-Reformation, as indulgences are supposed to be earned/worked for in some fashion). What one earns with an indulgence is a remittance of penance in Purgatory. In other words, through performing some good work or act of charity and gaining an indulgence, one has essentially done pre-emptive penance. There is no forgiveness involved, if a person has many indulgences, but dies in a state of unrepentant mortal sin, that person's indulgences are utterly meaningless. They do absolutely nothing. Period. I repeat, indulgences and Purgatory do not exist for the absolution of sin.

Now, I mentioned that it is also knowable according to reason that God requires some form of temporal punishment for our sins in addition to the Eternal punishment He Himself has relieved us of. But how can I say this? Here is the explanation:

First we must examine momentarily the Problem of Evil. We know that Evil exists as a result of human freedom (in that we choose to commit evil acts, and that is sin). I also assert that God's Love turns Evil to Good, and will soon demonstrate how and why. But right now in our examination we all perform Evil, and in doing so stain ourselves. We do wrong. God does no wrong, it is part of God's Nature. As God is Good and Just, Evil in those whom God desires a relationship with is very troublesome. While God can Love those beings (us), their ability to Love Him will always be hindered by their choices to reject Him and hurt others. Moreover, those rejections and those injurious acts to others are in some sense criminal (I believe I mentioned this before). Which means not only that humans will have a hard time returning the Love of their Creator, but they will also run afoul of their Creator's Perfect Justice. Humans reject God, and God being loving will not force humans to not reject Him. Thus humans seperate themselves from God (sin). Moreover, as perfectly Just, for our criminality against God and each other, we face Justice which coincides with our choices to spurn God and hurt others. God's Loving relationship is thus injured by us. But God loves us still, and God is also Merciful. So how do Love, Justice, and Mercy co-exist in such a tricky situation?

I submit that God, as a Loving Creator who Wills for a relationship of Agape Love with His Creation, will also Will to somehow end or take away that which threatens that relationship (sin). The question of course, is how? We already know God will not remove our wills, as that will defeat the purpose of Creation. But God can forgive sin. God can forgive the crimes we commit, the rejections and the hurts and wrongs.

As an omnipotent being, God can take away all of our faults and forgive us of all of our sins. As a Merciful God, God does just that. But God is also Just. Which means that God will not just snap His metaphorical fingers and say every thing's taken care of. Justice does not allow for crime to go unpunished, even when it forgives. We often choose to do wrong freely, knowing that such a thing, at the very least, might hurt someone else. We choose, and we choose freely, knowing that there are negative consequences for others revolving around our choices. Justice demands that we pay the consequences of our choices, it's part of the responsibility inherent in having choices.

Were God to be Just without Mercy, every single one of us would be accounted as having rejected Him. The Just thing to do would be to leave everyone of us to continue existing without Him even after we die here. This would be the very definition of Hell, existence separated from God, and is no more than the Just and logical conclusion of choosing to not Love God and not want God. Mercy without Justice would strip humanity of responsibility for its choices and destroy the very notion of a governing morality that teaches us to treat each other with love and respect. With only perfect Mercy we can do whatever we please, so long as we repent, and we never suffer any consequences for our actions. I've noticed some atheists seem to believe that Christians think there are no consequences for our actions once we ask forgiveness. This is utterly false, at least in Catholic theology, penance is always required to meet Justice. So, Justice without Mercy is not so great (kind of pointless for God to create us if we all just go to Hell anyway) and Mercy without Justice is also not so great (though perhaps better than the other) but regardless God exists as both. So how do Justice and Mercy co-exist? Justice "demands" that the natural consequences for the crime of rejecting God be mete out. And Mercy "demands" that God's Love for us is so self-less that He bring us to Him no matter how horrible we are so long as we truly repent.

The solution, is that God Himself must take on the eternal "punishment" associated with the crime of rejecting God, that being separation from God. This is not only the supreme act of selfless love (God Himself dying for the entirety of the world's sins, and taking upon Himself humanity's rejection of Himself) and satisfies God's Mercy, but it is Just, for the punishment due to humanity for its crimes is met, the eternal consequences borne, for those that let Him, by God Himself. The temporal consequences however, remain to humans themselves to satisfy through voluntary penance. Certainly no matter your sins they are not so great that God cannot forgive them (and indeed God's one sacrifice is in fact an Eternal sacrifice because He is outside time, which means your sins are already forgiven, you merely need to go to God and repent). But that doesn't mean that you will not be expected to perform penance, to work to rectify the harm you have done yourself, your neighbors and loved ones, the community and the Church and to your relationship with God through your habits and wrongs. Through our temporal penance, we also satisfy God's justice, as well as come closer to Christ in His suffering and sacrifice for us. Penance thus allows us to not only experience God's justice, but also God's merciful love to a fuller extent than we would otherwise. And so from Love in response to Evil, we find a greater Good, and Evil itself is turned to Good. It is taken away, forgiven, and we are turned towards Good and God and that relationship for which we were created.

On one final note concerning Purgatory, I would like to address the idea of a final cleansing or purification, that is actually at the root of the name Purgatory. While not expressly related to Confession, I wanted to address it while dealing with all these related concepts. Purgatory is considered, in addition to being a place for the completion of penance, it is also a place of final scrubbing of the stains of sin upon us before entering into the presence of God, where sin is inadmittable. While sin has been forgiven, Catholicism believes that it leaves a certain stain upon the soul, especially when not repented of before death (as in the case of unrepented venial sins before death). Temporal Purgatory allows us the opportunity to ask for forgiveness one last time (because it is a temporal existence, we have the ability to pray, choose, etc.) for our sins and to be scrubbed clean or purified as in fire (there is more to support this notion both Biblically and among the Fathers, but as it is merely a side note to the main issue in this essay, I will leave that aside). Hence the name Purgatory.

Returning, finally to Confession, I have one last issue to address, namely the questions of why confession to another person, especially in the Catholic case, to a priest is so important to the Sacrament. I have already noted that it increases the power of the Sacrament in terms of its effects upon us such as humility, courage, etc. (not in terms of efficacy, of course). Now I'd like to address somethings more often ignored even in Catholic apologetic writing on the subject (at least I can't recall ever having read this before I wrote it to someone else, though I believe it may be referenced in the Didache as well). And that is the difficulty, combined with the communal aspects, of Confession.

One problem often noted by critics of Confession is that confession is difficult. As already noted it requires a great deal of courage, humility and faith to properly perform. It is often described as a rather uncomfortable experience at first, and I know of many former or lapsed Catholics who never went because of this uncomfortableness. Coupled to that uncomfortableness is the idea that many people have that we're confessing our sins to some strange man, a random stranger priest, or even a familiar man. Regarding this, I have this to say: Confession certainly is difficult. And I think it should feel uncomfortable. Sin should make us feel uncomfortable! We should be ashamed of ourselves when we go into confession. I usually cry when I go to confession, I have no problem admitting, and it's the only time I can actually get myself to cry usually.

I'd like to reiterate again that we're not confessing to "a strange man." We're confessing to Christ through His Body the Church, and the representatives He gave the authority to absolve sins to. You're not telling your sins to any old man, you're telling them to Christ, and you're telling them to the Church. And therein lies the necessity of telling them to someone else. Sure it feels uncomfortable and scary and strange. But that's a good thing. If you don't feel uncomfortable confessing your sins, something is wrong! In the early Church, as I noted before, Confession often took place before the entire community. Now that would be uncomfortable! I don't say this just to make that comparison though (indeed, that'd be a waste of time). James didn't exhort the people to confess to each other just because it would make them unbearably ashamed. No, James did it because there is value in confessing, not just in prayer from yourself to God, but in confessing to the Church, to physically present oneself as sinful and sorrowful, and go to the Living Body of Christ in person to receive absolution. Part of that I noted before, in that it has personal value for us in our spiritual development, but there's more to it, and to finish the tale, we must return, again, to sin.

Sin is not just a crime against God, or against our own souls, it is a crime against the Church. It is a crime against the body of believers. Your sin affects others, hurts others, could even destroy others. When the burglar steals, certainly he offends the laws of the land and God, but it is the person he steals from who is most aggrieved and who seeks justice. When the murderer strikes, certainly he offends all society with his crime and God Himself, but it is the victim who suffers the most. And it is to the victim that the first and greatest apology should always be given.

The glory of Confession in Catholicism isn't just that it is the means appointed by Christ of receiving the Sacramental Grace of forgiveness (though that's certainly the biggest part), it's that in Confession, we do not confess just to God, we confess also to the Church, to the Body of Christ, and thus to all our brothers and sisters in faith against whom we have sinned. We are a community of believers, we're together as one body in the Church, and we must seek forgiveness from that community for our evils against it just as we seek forgiveness from God for our evils against Him and again just as we seek forgiveness from ourselves for the harm we do our own immortal souls. Thus, why confess to someone else, especially some priest? Not only because of the nature of the Sacrament, the authority granted by Christ, but also because that priest, that person, is a representative of the entire Church, the entire Body that we are a part of, and our interaction with that person, our confession and contrition, allow us to beg forgiveness not only of God, but of our Brothers and Sisters whom we have failed in our sin.

And that is the Sacrament of Penance in a formidably large nutshell.