And supposing Joe Slowpoke had about 5 mins before the switch was thrown when the priest received the confession.
JS gets offed and the cops say"oops we boobed on this one, sorry Mrs Slowpoke"
Cold comfort to JS and his family doncha think?
Confessions are not necessarily done in that kind of “secrecy”, which is more to help the self-conscious. Mine are all face-to-face, which is both disconcerting but more emotional.
deleted.
Then what the priest has to do is tell the repentant “let’s warn them now, while we can still save Joe’s life!” He could with the repentant’s permission phone with the warning himself, but again he can’t just drop the confession mid-listening and call 911. He can’t detain the repentant and he can’t tell the cops who was it (again, generally he is to recommend to the repentant that he give himself in, but not always, depending on things like the laws of the land - if giving himself in is equivalent to suicide-by-cop, the priest wouldn’t be as obligated to recommend it as if the guy is likely to get time).
For a while ETA used priests to call in bomb warnings (as in, they’d call a priest and tell him “we’ve placed a bomb at such and such place”). Nice fellas… not.
**Picard Kills Kirk, **the murder sins aren’t yet committed and would therefore be beyond the scope of the confession.
Are there sins that a priest can’t abolve? Like the ones where the sinner is effectively saying, “I’m gonna do this heinous deed and then confess it so I don’t have to burn?”
Absolution doesn’t work that way. One needs to be sincere and while a priest can be tricked, God can’t. So unless the sinner really, really meant it when he repented he’d still burn in Hell even if the priest absolvled him.
Let’s say I’m a new Catholic, and I don’t quite understand how it works. I have a man in the trunk of my car, and he’s bleeding to death because I shot him. I go inside, and confess to a priest that I shot a man, and I have no intention of getting medical help for him. Before leaving I tell the priest I am going to drive in circles around Kroger until he dies so I can put the body in the trash can.
Whether I am sincerely apologetic or not, the priest now knows the details of what I have done, and there is a man about to die in the trunk of my car. Obviously, if the priest attempted to get help for this man it would without doubt identify me as the shooter (and the priest realizes this).
Is there anything the priest can do? Since I haven’t actually committed the murder sin, do the confidentiality agreements still apply?
That’s astonishing. I still have doubts though. Very well, the seal is absolute. Priests, however, are humans, to whom absolutes rarely if ever apply. My hope is that humanity would sometimes win out in extremities, where human life is at stake, and the priest would find just a tiny bit of wiggle room. I can’t imagine damnation for such an act.
Word.
The (Catholic) priest doesn’t HAVE to absolve your sins…requiring you to make effort yourself like Polycarp has pointed out.
Serious? I may be wrong in my previous post. I was under the impression (having been brought up Catholic and knowing several priests) that they could do that…
You’re thinking of this in human terms. In the philosophy of the religion, we’re here to experience Earth for a relatively brief time, then it’s on to bigger and better thingsin the afterlife. Humanity has to sort itself out if this is to be a spiritually healthy place, but ultimately the real goal is attainable only when you die. A win for humanity is trivial compared to a win for God.
The Code of Canon Law provides:
My grandmother, when she taught my Confirmation class, used an example of someone who embezzled money. The priest may tell them that if they truly were repentant that they would turn themselves in. Part of being sorry means that you are willing to pay for your crimes. So I’m assuming if the murderer refused to turn himself In then the priest can refuse to absolve him.
So, we’ve established that it’s against the rules of the church for the priest to say anything, and we’ve established that it’s against the rules of the state to force the priest to say anything, but I still have a question: If the priest decides to break the rules of the church, can his testimony be used in court?
What if the testimony of the priest is not about the confession, per se, but about something he observed during the confession?
Is it not surprising that a secular State should afford religion (and primarily Roman Catholicism) such a privilege? According to Wikipedia none of the other rules of confidentiality (doctors, lawyers, etc) are absolute, in certain circumstances, quite sensibly, the law can enforce compliance. Why should priests be any different? Yes, the confessional is sacred, but it isn’t sacred to the State and surely the State should only go so far in taking religious sensibilities into account.
The law can verify a doctor/patient or attorney/client relationship. There’s no paperwork involved in the confessional.
Say someone were to confess that they ARE going to do someone. They can not be talked out of it by the confessor. They haven’t yet sinned or committed a crime. But they are also not truly confessing, since they obviously don’t have any intentions of repenting.
In that case, is the confession truly a confession? It sounds more like bragging.
Can a priest make the call as to if a confession is truly a confession, or does someone asking to confess make that an automatic thing?
The rules of Confession are pretty strict as well. Just wanting does not make it so. It doesn’t have to be a special place or method, but the sinner does have to make certain efforts and allowances, and a priest need not to accept a flawed confession (that is, where the sinner fails to show remorse mostly).
Is it? It’s not a confession per se (action hasn’t taken place), and the priest calling up Rome to say, “better tighten up security this weekend, someone confessed to wanting to kill Johnny Ratz today” doesn’t exactly reveal any information about the confessor, does it?
If I’m reading this correctly…if the priest IS is doubt he can deny or delay…?
This fits with my first understanding.