Hay I never said I was the brightest bulb on the tree, but as I have experienced through my Catholic Parent's, they confessed to a Priest, Not directly to Our Savior, and it is He that stands before God, and God Honor's Him, and If He [our Savior] except's your repentance then that is how it works.
That's
NOT what
Jesus and the
Apostles taught . . .
The practice of telling our sins directly to the
Church is based
directly in
Scripture.
Three times in the Gospels
(Matt. 16:19, 18:18 and John 20:23), we read where Jesus gave the
Apostles the power to
forgive sins or to hold them bound. This is not a something that Jesus took lightly. In
John 20:21-23, Jesus
(who is God) breathes on the Apostles as he is giving them this power:
(Jesus) said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you."
And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins YOU FORGIVE are forgiven them, and whose sins YOU RETAIN are retained."
The fact that Jesus
breathed on the Apostles when entrusted them with this ministry is
highly significant because he doesn’t do this
anywhere else in the New Testament. In fact, there are only
two times in
ALL of Scripture where God breathes on man:
The
first is when he breathed
life into Adam.
The
second is here in John’s Gospel when he is giving them the power to
forgive or retain sins.
The practice of confessing your sins to the
Church is an
ancient one that goes all the way back to the
Apostles themselves. We see this in the 1st century document, the
Didache (The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles), where it emphatically states the necessity of confessing our sins to the Church:
“Confess your sins in Church, and do not go up to your prayer with an evil conscience. This is the way of life. . . , On the Lord's Day gather together, break bread, and give thanks, after confessing your transgressions so that your sacrifice may be pure” (Didache 4:14,14:1 [A.D. 50]).
St. Paul makes
no small case for this ministry of reconciliation
clearly in
2 Cor. 5:18-20:
“And all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”
In
2 Cor. 2:10, he states,
“Whomever you forgive anything, so do I. For indeed what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for you in the presence of Christ.”
In the Greek, the word
“presence” in this phrase is
Prosopone, which means
Person.
"In the PERSON of Christ" is a more correct translation. Paul was indicating that
THEY (the Apostles) were forgiving sins in the
PERSON of Christ, which is translated into Latin as
In Persona Christi.
