Transcript

Can you go to confession if you're not sorry?

People sometimes think that the sacrament of confession works like that, as if it were a spiritual get out of jail free card or a magic trick.

I've done something wrong, perhaps I've done some serious injustice to another person, and all I have to do is tell it to a priest in secret, he says some magic words and waves his hand over me, and then presto, the sin goes away.

But this isn't quite how confession works.

It leaves out of the picture one of the three key elements or parts of this wonderful and powerful sacrament: you being sorry for having committed your sins.

That's what we call contrition.

In previous videos, we've talked about how, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the sacrament of penance has three parts on the side of the penitent, that is on the side of the person going to confession, and these are three different actions that someone must do in order for a valid sacrament of confession to come about.

He must be sorry for and repent of his sins, we call that contrition.

Then he must tell them to God's minister, a priest; we call that confession.

And finally, he must do something to make up for his sins, according to the decision of God's minister.

We call this penance or satisfaction.

Of course, we don't want to leave out of the picture the absolution given by the priest.

You only have a valid sacrament if you combine the three actions of the penitent with the absolution given by the priest.

But the focus of this video is contrition.

What is this contrition?

Saint Thomas gives a standard definition: sorrow for sins by an act of the will together with the intention of confessing them and making satisfaction for them.

We all know what it means to be sorry for something.

We regard it as evil or a source of sadness, and we regret it.

But Saint Thomas focuses on something even more specific: an act of your will to be sorry for or to reject the sin.That's because sin is especially in the will, which is your power of desiring with your mind, your power of loving and of choosing.

While it's true that we experience the effects of sin in other parts of us, like our sense desires and our emotions, the worst of it is in our will.

When we freely choose to do evil, we make ourselves bad and incur guilt above all because of this disordered act of our wills.

For example, suppose the family next door to you is about to hold a birthday party and they've made a special birthday cake.

From your open window, you smell it when the cake comes out of the oven and your stomach begins to grumble.

Your desire to eat delicious food is understandable.

But at the same time, you know it would be wrong to steal the cake.

The first impulse of desire to eat the cake, which might arise in you spontaneously, is not yet an act of your will, and so it is not yet a sinful act in the proper sense of the word.

But it would be bad for you to linger on this thought, and even worse to sit at your window day-dreaming about eating the cake.

If you were to do that, you would be deliberately setting your desires on the cake, which doesn't belong to you.

And of course, if you actually decided by an interior act of your will to sneak up and steal the cake, you would've committed the sin of theft, at least in your intention, even before you carry out that sinful act by actually taking the cake.

The essence of the sin consists in your act of willing.

To be truly sorry for the sin, therefore, requires an act of your will in the other direction.

It isn't merely being sad that the cake didn't taste as good as you hoped or being sorry that you weren't invited to the party and so could only get the cake by stealing it.

Contrition, in this case, is a changing of your will so that you repent of the evil that you did.

That includes detesting or hating the sin and resolving that you won't do it again.

This is key for forgiveness, and it's at the heart of the preaching of Jesus himself who says, Repent and believe in the Gospel.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, along with the tradition of the Catholic Church, identifies two kinds or levels of contrition: imperfect contrition, sometimes called attrition, and perfect contrition.

Imperfect contrition is when you're sorry for your sins because of the punishment you'll receive for them.

This is good.

It's good to repent, even if you're doing it out of the fear of punishment.

It's often a fruit of grace, and it does involve a real turning away from sin.

But it isn't yet full and perfect, although it is enough to bring you into the confessional and for the priest to give you absolution.Saint Thomas teaches that the sacrament of confession through the priest's absolution transforms your imperfect contrition by the infusion of grace and gives you a complete or perfect contrition.

Perfect contrition is the completion of your repentance, and it involves not only turning away from evil but consists essentially in turning to God by loving God above all things.

This is even more clearly the effect of God's grace which gives us charity or the love of God as a supernatural gift and virtue.

In the sacrament of penance, after the penitent tells his sins to the priest, he says what is called an act of contrition.This is a prayer addressed to God, and I recommend that you use the traditional formula for it, because that formula was especially designed to help you make the interior act of will that is your crucial contribution to the sacrament.

If you pay attention to what that prayer formula says, you can see how its words help you to make a perfect act of contrition.

Here's what it says.

Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins because of thy just punishments, but most of all, because they offend thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love.

I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to sin no more, and to avoid the near occasion of sin.

Amen.

In this prayer, I say that, by the help of God's grace, I detest all my sins, not only because I fear the punishment those sins deserve, but above all, out of the love of God.

That prayer also says that I resolve to sin no more.

This, too, is essential.

If I really detest what I did in the past, then I have to decide with my will not to do it again.

I may know that I'll continue to face this temptation.

It might even be predictable that I might fail again in the future, but I'm saying that here and now, I'm resolving with my will to put this sin behind me and not to do it again.

Notice that the Act of Contrition also says that I detest all my sins.

That's important too.

Your will only turns fully to God, and you only love him above all things if you don't hang on to one or two sins that you're not yet ready to give up.

This is why, in order to be forgiven in the Sacrament of Confession, you have to confess all of the grave or mortal sins you're aware of.

You can't hold back any of them.

You have to be sorry for them all.

There is a difference here between venial sins and grave or mortal sins.

We have other videos about that distinction.

Because mortal sins specifically keep you from loving God above all things, you have to confess each of them in the sacrament by naming their kind and saying how often you've done them.

But venial sins don't have to all be named, even though it is good to include them, too.

What if you realize after your confession that you forgot a sin?

This does sometimes happen, and you shouldn't let it bother you.

You can mention a forgotten sin in your next confession, but if you confessed all of the grave sins you were able to remember while you were in the confessional, and if you were sorry for all of your sins, then all of your sins were forgiven by the priest's absolution, even ones that you forgot to mention.

It's a different case, of course, if you intentionally didn't mention a grave sin, or if you weren't sorry for all your sins, because then you wouldn't really be sorry for everything you did.

And you, in effect, would be holding on to some sin even though it's displeasing to God.

That prevents you from loving God above all things.

So in that case, even if the priest does give you absolution, it doesn't have the effect of forgiving you because of an obstacle on your side, because you haven't repented.

The Sacrament of Confession is a wonderful gift of God.

By the power of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, he forgives all our sins through the Sacrament of Confession and restores us to friendship with him.

That's why the best reason to be sorry for our sins is the goodness of God.

When we really understand how infinitely good God is, we want to reject everything that keeps us from him.

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