Introduction
I was 24 the last time I went to confession.
Kneeling across from a priest I had known since I was nine, I openly admitted that I struggled with insecurity about my body. Before launching into pastoral reassurance and a reminder of my dignity, he probed with a question: “Which part of your body? Boobs? Hips? Thighs? Butt?”
In that moment, the sacrament of reconciliation felt less like the mercy of Christ and more like an intrusion into my most private self. I remember thinking, and I still think now, what business does an older man, celibate or not, have asking a young woman to catalogue her body parts? And how many times, in how many confessionals, has that same power dynamic been exploited under the guise of spiritual care?
The Catholic Church calls confession a “sacrament of healing.” It promises grace, freedom, and the relief of a cleansed conscience. But for many, especially women and young people, it is experienced as invasive, manipulative, and unsafe. What’s marketed as a path to reconciliation often functions as a mechanism of control, dependency, and, in the worst cases, exploitation.
Jesus’ Example of Forgiveness
When you open the Gospels, you won’t find Jesus building confessionals or demanding that people recite their failures to a designated religious official before He will extend mercy. What you find instead is startling in its directness.
In Luke 5:20, a paralysed man is lowered through the roof by friends. Jesus doesn’t cross-examine him or ask for a full moral inventory. He simply says, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” The same with the woman caught in adultery (John 8:10–11): no interrogation, no humiliating recital of every past act. Just: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.” Even in John 9, when His disciples try to tie a man’s blindness to sin, Jesus rebukes the idea entirely: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”
Forgiveness, in the ministry of Jesus, was never mediated through an ordained gatekeeper. It was personal, immediate, and rooted in God’s own authority, the kind of authority that doesn’t need clerical permission slips.
The Lord’s Prayer, prayed aloud by every Catholic at every Mass, confirms this. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The grammar itself is a theological earthquake: we can forgive one another directly, and God forgives us directly. No one in that crowd of worshippers needs a priest to sign off before their forgiveness “counts.” To insist otherwise is to say that God waits for human approval before He will act in mercy, as if divine grace needed a middle manager.
James 5:16 does urge believers to “confess your sins to one another,” but that’s a mutual, horizontal exchange of vulnerability, not a top-down transaction between a spiritually dependent layperson and an institutionally elevated man. The early Church was not built on private booths and whispered inventories to clergy. It was built on direct access to Christ, lived out in a community where confession was relational, not ritualised for control.
The Fiction of “In Persona Christi”
Catholic theology defends confession on the claim that the priest acts in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ.” When a priest absolves you, the idea is that Christ Himself is absolving you through the priest’s words and presence. It sounds pious. But it is neither mandated by the Gospels nor immune from theological scrutiny.
The phrase itself is a medieval development, not something you’ll find in Scripture. In the New Testament, Christ does not delegate His authority to forgive sins to a special class of robed men who stand apart from the rest of His followers. He invites all believers to forgive one another directly. He forgives directly. To insist that a human intermediary is necessary for divine mercy is to imply that Christ is either unwilling or unable to act without clerical cooperation.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you take the Catholic “examination of conscience” sheets seriously, in persona Christi looks alarmingly like some of the very sins they list: blasphemy and idolatry. The priest is not just representing Christ; he is standing as Christ, speaking divine absolution with his own lips. This is not humility but appropriation.
The parallels to the oldest sin in the book are hard to ignore. In Isaiah 14, Lucifer declares, “I will make myself like the Most High.” In Genesis 3, the serpent tempts Adam and Eve with the promise, “You will be like God.” What is in persona Christi if not the same aspiration: to take upon oneself an authority that belongs to God alone? However carefully it’s couched in sacramental theology, the logic is eerily familiar.
Argue the semantics if you want, but the structure remains: mortal, fallible men claiming to operate as the incarnate Son of God in the act of forgiveness. Christ did not create an approval chain for grace. The idea that you need a man in a collar to stand “in His person” to receive pardon is not faith in Christ’s sufficiency but in the institution’s monopoly on Him. And that is dangerously close to the very idolatry the Church warns against.
The Psychology of Shame
If the theological problems with mandatory confession are serious, the psychological damage can be just as enduring, especially around sexuality.
From childhood, Catholics are taught that nothing is too small, too private, or too intimate to be confessed. This includes sexual thoughts, desires, and behaviours, often framed as “sins of impurity.” The result is that the most natural aspects of human development become freighted with guilt and secrecy. For adolescents, the build-up to a confession of sexual sin is a perfect storm of shame: you dread the words you’ll have to say, you fear the judgement you’ll receive, and you imagine God Himself looking on in disappointment.
In that environment, sex and sexuality are never discussed as part of healthy human flourishing, only as temptations to be fought, falls to be admitted, and stains to be removed. Confession does not encourage curiosity, understanding, or responsibility; it trains you to package your experiences into a list of infractions for the approval or disapproval of a single authority figure. This is a form of conditioning that equates desire with danger, and curiosity with corruption.
The looming threat of mortal sin, and the even greater threat of omitting one in confession, turns the whole exercise into a high-pressure performance of moral self-surveillance. You are not learning to know yourself; you are learning to fear yourself. And when the conversation about your body, your sexuality, and your relationships begins not with mutual respect but with guilt, the damage lingers far beyond the confessional. It becomes harder, as an adult, to approach intimacy without suspicion. It becomes harder to speak openly about sex with a partner. And it becomes almost impossible to see your body as anything other than a moral liability.
Many Catholics call this “Catholic guilt” as if it were an amusing quirk. In reality, it is a learned reflex, a deep groove in the mind that mistakes shame for holiness. And while confession claims to heal, it often cements the wound, ensuring that even in adulthood, the mere act of talking about sex feels like crossing a forbidden line.
The Predatory Risk
Defenders of confession often reassure us that abuse is the exception, not the norm. But the problem is not just “a few bad apples”, it’s the orchard. The confessional is structurally ripe for exploitation because it creates a deeply unequal power dynamic: one person is bound to absolute vulnerability, the other cloaked in institutional authority and secrecy. And that imbalance is not limited to “old priests.” Youth, charm, and inexperience can mask immaturity, instability, or predation just as effectively as age and gravitas.
I learned this firsthand from a priest I had known since childhood, someone I trusted. Over time, he began sharing details of penitents’ sexual confessions with me. He justified it by saying the seal of confession was intact because he wasn’t revealing their identities. But anonymity doesn’t erase the violation. The seal is not just about names but the inviolability of what is shared. Breaking it in any form corrodes trust and betrays the penitent’s belief that their vulnerability is safe.
Here is what he told me:
- A woman in her twenties who masturbated inside a church. He said he was so disturbed that he rushed through her confession to get rid of her.
- A religious sister in medical school who admitted she becomes aroused when looking at certain anatomical diagrams.
- A girl being sexually abused by her father.
- A boy who confessed he was gay.
And then there’s me, having confessed to him my own sexual struggles with masturbation and pornography. I can’t help but wonder: did he judge me the way he judged her? Did my confession become another lurid anecdote in his private mental file?
If a priest is so shaken or titillated by sexual confessions that he can’t process them without contempt or gossip, he has no business hearing them. He should take an indefinite break from the sacrament, seek serious psychological evaluation, and perhaps never return to the role. The confessional is not therapy, and priests are not trained clinicians. Yet the Church continues to funnel vulnerable people, including children, into closed, unrecorded conversations about the most intimate parts of their lives with men whose fitness for that responsibility is entirely assumed.
When you strip away the mystique, the setup is frightening: no oversight, no witnesses, no accountability, and no way for a penitent to know whether their confessor is a safe listener or a predator. In such conditions, abuse is not an aberration but an inevitability.
Confession as a Mechanism of Control
Confession is often marketed as a channel of grace, but its structure bears an uncomfortable resemblance to techniques used in high-control religious movements. Former Scientologists speak of “security checks,” in which members are interrogated about personal failings to maintain compliance. Latter-day Saints undergo “worthiness interviews,” where bishops, often older men, question teens and adults about sexual behaviour. Jehovah’s Witnesses conduct “Elders’ Councils” to extract confessions of doctrinal or moral breaches.
These practices share certain traits:
- They normalise divulging the most private aspects of one’s life to an authority figure.
- They create psychological dependency on the institution for moral standing.
- They provide leaders with intimate knowledge that can be used, consciously or not, to influence, shame, or control.
Catholic confession fits the same sociological pattern. The difference is scale and sacramental framing, not function. You enter the booth carrying your conscience; you leave having handed it over for inspection. The more often you do this, the more the process feels natural, even necessary, for spiritual legitimacy.
It’s not inherently abusive, but the setup lends itself to abuse. When every believer is told they must confess regularly to an institution-approved figure, the line between spiritual guidance and behavioural control becomes dangerously thin. And when confession is tied to eternal stakes—heaven, hell, the state of your soul—the institution’s leverage is absolute.
Optionality breaks that chain. When people can choose if they confess, who they confess to, and in what setting, they reclaim agency. They can seek out confessors or counsellors who are trustworthy, mature, and capable of healthy boundaries rather than being assigned to whoever happens to be behind the screen. This way, the sacrament becomes a free act of faith, not a compulsory ritual of compliance.
Without that freedom, confession risks being less about reconciliation with God and more about submission to an apparatus that thrives on access to the most private corners of a believer’s life.
The Right Help from the Right Hands
In any other area of life, we instinctively understand that expertise matters. You wouldn’t go to your plumber to fix a nosebleed, ask your accountant to repair your car, or hire your dentist to write your will. Common sense tells us to seek help from those trained, qualified, and accountable in the field we need.
And yet, in the Catholic confessional, people are expected to unburden the most sensitive and complex parts of their moral, emotional, and sexual lives to someone whose primary qualification is ordination, not formal training in psychology, counselling, or trauma care. (Yes, some priests do have backgrounds in psychology, but even then, their methods may be filtered through their Catholic formation and clerical authority. They may or may not be practising psychologists in the same way as those who do it as a profession, under the oversight, accountability, and client safeguards that come with that role.) In most cases, the penitent has no way of knowing the skill level, bias, or emotional stability of the man hearing their confession.
Professional therapy, imperfect though it is, operates under clear standards: confidentiality with boundaries, ethical oversight, mandatory reporting of abuse, and a focus on helping clients understand and accept themselves while making meaningful change. The relationship is voluntary. You choose your therapist, and you can leave if it isn’t working.
Confession offers none of that. The seal of confession means the priest himself cannot report what was disclosed in the confessional, even in cases of ongoing abuse. Outside the booth, the penitent, or anyone else who learns of the abuse, can and should report it. But for a variety of reasons, including fear, shame, loyalty to the Church, or lack of knowledge about legal processes, many people never take that step. The result is that abuse often remains hidden, with the confessional functioning as a place where it can be disclosed without consequence to the perpetrator or to the institution.
Even Jesus didn’t run a revolving door of sin inventories. He forgave people directly (the paralytic, the woman caught in adultery, Zacchaeus) and then sent them away with a charge to live differently. We don’t see them returning weekly to itemise their failures in His presence, nor is there any hint that their forgiveness hinged on a second, third, or tenth audience with Him. His forgiveness was real the first time.
In the real world, you go to the right person for the right need. In the Kingdom of God, the right person for forgiveness is Christ Himself. And He is available without an appointment, a booth, or a collar.
The Path Forward
If the sacrament of reconciliation is to have any integrity, it must be reframed from the ground up. That begins with making it voluntary. Abolish mandatory childhood confessions, especially in schools where students are funnelled into booths with priests they did not choose. Allow every Catholic to select a confessor, including women religious or trained lay spiritual directors, so that penitents can find someone trustworthy, mature, and genuinely equipped to help.
This reframing also requires ending the fear campaign that keeps so many chained to the booth: the teaching that dying with an unconfessed mortal sin means certain damnation. This idea does not reflect the Jesus of the Gospels. Consider the Good Thief crucified beside Him (Luke 23:39–43). His “confession” was nothing more than a public recognition of who Jesus was: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replied, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Not “after you list every sin.” Not “once you’ve recited an Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and a Glory Be.” Not “pending clerical mediation.”
Forgiveness, in Christ’s own ministry, was immediate and unmediated. Reconciliation was an act of grace, not a bureaucratic transaction. The Church could recover that vision by returning to Gospel simplicity:
- Forgiveness as something believers can extend to each other.
- Forgiveness as something God extends without a human gatekeeper.
- Confession as one possible pathway to healing, not a compulsory checkpoint under threat of hellfire.
A sacrament restructured on these principles would be one people approach freely, without coercion, fear, or shame. It would be centred on Christ, not on clerical control.
Concluding Remarks
It is good and right to examine our consciences. It is good to remember where we have failed, to name those failures honestly before God, and to seek forgiveness from those we have wronged. But that self-examination should lead to repentance and healing, not to a life of scrupulosity, fear, or ritualised shame.
Too often, confession as practised in the Catholic Church becomes a revolving door: walk in, recite your list, get absolution, walk out, and then repeat the same patterns, confident you can “wipe the slate” next time. That is not repentance. Repentance is transformation. It is not a mechanical reset button; it is a reorientation of the heart toward God and neighbour.
The most important confession any of us will ever make is the confession Peter made in Matthew 16:16: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” The Gospel is clear on who holds the authority to forgive: “The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mark 2:10). And in Matthew 28:18, Jesus Himself declares, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” If He holds all authority, there is no lack in Him that needs supplementing by a human proxy.
A reformed practice of reconciliation would keep the heart of confession—humility, honesty, reconciliation—while discarding the coercion, the fear, and the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of the few. It would make the act of confessing a choice, not a mandate. It would keep the examination of conscience but strip it of the threats of damnation that drive people to obsession rather than to freedom.
The call is not to abandon reconciliation, but to strip it of the distortions that turn it into surveillance, shaming, or abuse.
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