A listener named Kay asks a question about the Sacrament of Reconciliation. “When going to confession, do you have to detail every instance [of sin]?” She asks. “For example, if you tend to embellish the truth, do you describe every time you lie? Or if you have been promiscuous, do you have to detail every instance?”
“Strictly speaking, the priest doesn’t need to know any details beyond naming the sins,” Father Dave begins. “There might be some instances, where for your experience as the penitent —- the person who’s confessing — it may actually be helpful, cathartic, and healing for you to say [more details] out loud. That’s what we believe about Confession; when we celebrate the Sacrament, you don’t just walk in there and have sins in your mind.”
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He notes which details are most important for the priest administering the Sacrament. “The number and kind of the sin is typically how we describe what happens in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, because there is a bit of a difference for the priest’s awareness of your sin and absolution if you’ve done one thing in six months, or if you’ve done something every other day for six months,” Father Dave says. “That can add to the severity of the sin, and it might raise to the level of being a more serious sin than something that’s once.”
Father Dave offers an example of a sufficient amount of detail using one of the sins Kay mentioned in her question. “If you say, ‘You know, Father, it’s been three months since my last Confession, and probably about once a week I lie.’ Then we have some sense of what that number is, but it would be superfluous [to say more],” he says. “It would also go a little beyond what the bounds of the Sacrament really are and what we believe about God’s forgiveness. For God, it doesn’t matter how severe or how many times something happened in order for God to forgive you. It’s not like if I walk in and say, ‘I lied three times,’ the priest would say, ‘Well, that’s good, because if it was five, God [wouldn’t forgive.]’ We believe that no matter how bad it is or how often it’s been, that God forgives us. Therefore, more detail and a story is not necessary.”
He explains how giving lots of details can lead us astray in our confessing. “I find in my experience as a priest who’s listening, very often the details that are provided tend to cross over into the realm of excuses, like ‘This is why I did that,’ or ‘This person did this to me, and so therefore I did that to them,’” Father Dave says.
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“Think of it as if it’s another person. [Let’s say] there was someone that you said something very mean to, and after a couple of days, you ring their doorbell,” he says. “Imagine this: they open the door and see you, you make eye contact, and you say, ‘That was really wrong of me. I’m sorry, forgive me.’ Compare that to them opening the door and you saying, ‘You know, I was having a really bad day, my husband was getting on my nerves, and that’s why I did that.’ You can see that the more details we add, the more it waters down purely saying ‘I’m wrong, and I need forgiveness.’”
“You can see as I’m describing it, that one is just very humbling and just really stripping down to just needing the experience of forgiveness…That’s really all we’re doing in this Sacrament of Reconciliation,” Father Dave continues. “For some people that are more extroverted, it will be perhaps more healing to talk it out a little bit more. But when you’re doing that, listen to yourself and see how much of this is making an excuse or framing a situation so that it doesn’t feel as bad.”
