Over the centuries, people have gone to some extraordinary lengths to escape to Sacrament of Reconciliation. Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées that “The Catholic religion does not bind us to confess our sins indiscriminately to everybody; it allows them to remain hidden from all other men save one…and she binds him to an inviolable secrecy, which makes this knowledge to him as if it were not.” In Pascal’s view, the sacrament is hardly a thing to be feared or avoided: “Can we imagine anything more charitable and pleasant?” he asks rhetorically. “And yet,” he continues, “the corruption of man is such that he finds even this law harsh; and it is one of the main reasons which has caused a great part of Europe to rebel against the Church.” In other words, our fallen human nature includes an aversion to confession strong enough to coalesce into the Protestant Reformation.
Now, there were clearly other factors at work during the great schism of the 16th century—there were, after all, 95 theses, not all of which had to do with confession. And yet, Pascal’s point holds: there was, and remains, a strong reluctance in the human heart to confess one’s sins, even to someone bound by sacred oath not to pass them along. Many believing Catholics take a sudden detour to the metaphorical cafeteria on the confession question, unilaterally declaring it by word or deed an “optional” component of the practice of their faith. People within and outside the Church often prefer to rely on God’s mercy in a very general way for forgiveness, to pin everything on a single and allegedly lasting salvation experience, or to confess their sins “directly” to God through prayer. For almost everyone, going to confession is a mighty struggle, and it seems we try to avoid it through any means we can invent.
Whether caused by this atavistic aversion to the confessional or not, the tendency toward do-it-yourself morality and repentance has culminated in a massive loss of belief in sin itself. In one prevailing scheme, “sin” is dismissed as a quaint concept, an outmoded way to describe things about which we have guilt-inducing hang-ups; in another, the individual culpability implied by sin is shifted to circumstances and institutions, creating a culture of universal victimhood. It often appears that fewer people today believe in the existence of sin than believe in the existence of God. When I glance hastily at the world or into my own heart, the latter proposition seems intuitively like a much tougher sell; it doesn’t take St. Thomas Aquinas to reason back to sin from its effects here below. The modern mood is one of an extraordinary unwillingness to recognize the hitherto unquestionable fact of human sinfulness.
It is true that we are living in a world in which it is extremely difficult to commit a freely willed act. The fragmentation of the soul by modern psychology, the commercial incentives to fevered acquisitiveness and the enslavement of the will by addictions of all kinds have transformed us from actors into patients, in both the etymological and the (rehab) clinical sense. But the dominant tendency is to chalk everything up to unwilled compulsion. Even one of the most obvious and appalling sins cast before our jaded eyes, the rape of children by certain priests, has been largely blamed on the custom of priestly celibacy. The sinners become victims, and the sins of those in the institution who allowed these atrocities to occur and continue become confused and muddled amidst the culpability imputed to the institutional Church itself. The net result is that the culture of victimhood persists, the existence of sin remains unrecognized, and there arises yet another excuse not to go to confession.
I am neither a priest nor a theologian, nor am I any other kind of religious or cultural authority. I have no qualifications whatsoever to write on this topic, except this one: I don’t like to go to confession, either. It is painful to make an examination of conscience, reflecting in detail about my own bad acts. It is nerve-wracking to sit and wait outside the confessional, clutching a list of my transgressions. It is embarrassing to tell the priest what I’ve done wrong. I do not like to go to confession. But a wise priest once told me something I never forgot: “I don’t like going into confession, either,” he said, “but I sure do like walking out.”
When Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton was asked why he joined the Church he replied simply, "To get rid of my sins." Not to suppress them, not to wallow in them, not to work though his hang-ups and guilt on his own, and not to deny their existence, but to get rid of them; to receive absolution from a man who acts in persona Christi—in the person of Christ Himself. One need not follow Chesterton all the way into the Roman Church, however, to come to grips with the omnipresent reality of sin. For those of you who are not Catholic, please remember that sin is a decidedly ecumenical phenomenon, and do not allow yourselves to fall into the pernicious traps of modernity. For my Catholic readers, I urge you to make at least one confession during this season of Lent. Rescue yourself from the ethical and metaphysical pudding of passivity, and admit out loud you do act, you do choose, and that sometimes you choose wrongly by speaking in the active voice: “Bless me father, for I have sinned.”
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