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Is there a set time after committing mortal sin in which to confess. Is your soul in jeopardy if you miss the next available confession with plans to go to the one after that? Are some mortal sins different than others in the time frame allowed? Are there some sins that require finding a priest immediately as opposed to waiting for the next confession?
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What if you’re traveling in a foreign country where it’s unlikely you share a language with the local priests? Can it wait until you get home, or is there some way Catholics deal with the situation? Maybe find a member that can act as an interpreter?
As far as I know, there is no set time. It’s not like the sin is any worse if I miss Confession on Saturday and have to wait until Wednesday, and I have never heard that one mortal sin has a different time frame in getting to Confession.
I can’t answer about Confession in another language. If I were traveling and found myself in desperate need of it, I would learn the phrase that meant, “I don’t speak your language” in whatever language it was, and then confessing in English, figuring between the priest and me, we’d get the job done.
This is from a blog written by what seems to be a very conservative priest:
ASK FATHER: Priest couldn’t hear confession in Spanish.
If you read the comments, there are quite a few talking about their experiences going to confession when they didn’t speak the same language as the priest. And quite a few lamenting the fact that everyone doesn’t just speak Latin.
For a sin to be mortal, you must know it is a mortal sin and you must go ahead and do it anyway. Whenever you commit a mortal sin, you put your soul in jeopardy. Until you do something about the mortal sin, you risk going to hell if you die. You must confess the sin. If you intended to confess the sin, but getting to a priest was impossible, a perfect act of contrition may suffice.
Is it possible for a person with a mortal sin still on his soul to die and go to heaven?
There are no degrees of mortal sins. Either they are mortal or they aren’t.
As I remember it:
The mortal sin is a stain on your soul until you confess it and gain absolution. It doesn’t get worse if you wait. The risk of waiting is that you might die in a state of mortal sin, and go to hell.
There isn’t a time frame. You just want to avoid dying with a mortal sin unconfessed, or you’re going to hell.
Once you commit a mortal sin, your soul is in jeopardy anyway - that’s what a mortal sin is. You don’t get extra hell points for waiting more than X days to confess.
There is no time frame whereby it becomes too late to confess anything.
Your soul is in jeopardy whenever you commit a mortal sin, until you repent, so it is in your best interests to confess ASAP, but you can perfectly well confess a murder you committed thirty years ago and be absolved.
What could be done in that situation is to say an act of perfect contrition, like
Notice that this includes a commitment to confess as soon as you can.
If you don’t speak the local language, you could probably confess in English and it would work the same, as long as the confession was done in good faith.
I can’t remember the name, but there was some bishop or other who needed to hear confession from a condemned prisoner, and the prisoner only spoke his own language. The biship spent the night studying, and in the morning had learned enough of the language to hear the prisoner’s confession and absolve him. Maybe that was no more than learning how to say “murder”, “adultery”, and “say ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers” - I don’t know.
Regards,
Shodan (Not a Catholic, but married to a former Catholic, reader of the Baltimore Catechism, and brother-in-law to a Roman Catholic bishop)
I’m familiar with, although not a fan of, that blog. Its author, Father Zuhlsdorf, is indeed quite conservative, politically and religiously.
Thus, he thinks everyone in the US should speak English or get the *** out, and learn Latin while they’re at it (if they’re Catholic, which they should be, of course).
Because everyone knows Jesus said everything He had to say in Latin.
There is no limit of time, neither for mortal nor venial sins. At the first available occasion.
Having another person act as an interpreter wouldn’t work, in general terms (it may be possible to get a sort of “special permit”, but keep in mind that for example someone whose spoken language is signed will normally be able to write). Those cases cited before of people wanting to confess in Spanish and the priest only having English, well, excuse me, but if you can’t find a Spanish-speaking priest within a reasonable distance in the United States you officially live several miles outside Bumfuck, Nowhere. Confession is, among other things, a request for advice: if the priest can’t understand what you say, he can’t advise you. While there definitely are priests with a bad case of colonical obstruction, most would be happy to help someone find one that can communicate well with them: between mission work, international exchanges, and so forth, it may easily turn out to be in the next parish over.
As a Catholic child, I always thought this was grossly unfair. It was so easy to commit a mortal sin, for example by eating a cookie on the way to church and then receiving communion without the proper fasting period. Then if you got hit by a bus, with no time to make a sincere act of contrition, you went straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Sentenced for eternity for eating a cookie and being unlucky enough to get hit by a bus.
At the Catholic school, we went to confession once a month. I wanted to be hit by a bus directly after confession, before I had a chance to have an impure thought, laugh at a dirty joke, or some other heinous crime. My attitude was, “Please god, let me get hit by a bus right after confession, not this confession, but some confession in the future.”
P.S. I also wished I had been born into a Protestant family. According to the Catholicism I was taught, Protestants weren’t held to the same standard. As long as they were good people, they wouldn’t go to hell or heaven, but go to Limbo. Limbo seemed like a pretty good deal to me. No worries about buses, plus you wouldn’t have to hang out with angels playing harps all day.
See, that’s why you wear a Miraculous Medal. We were told that if you wear one, you wouldn’t die without being able to make an act of contrition. (Not, of course, official Catholic Doctrine, but what we were taught by the good sisters, where we learned most of our practical theology.) It seemed to me to be a pretty good insurance policy: you could be as bad as you wanted, and then play your “get out of jail free” card at the last minute.
The Brown Scapular worked that way, too.
At my Catholic school in the early '60s, we went to confession every week. It was hard for a little kid to generate enough sins to make that worthwhile. Until one got seriously into masturbation, that is, the worst sin of all, worse than murder. But you couldn’t confess that (particularly difficult for a girl), so you walked around all the time watching out for the odd stray bus that was going to send you to hell. The upshot: don’t ever take off that Brown Scapular.
where does he say this?
I must have gone to a renegade, off-shoot Catholic school: we were told Mortal sins could not be forgiven; just now I Googled the types of sins (three when I was in school, now four?) and there’s this thing called Eternal sin! Is this a recent invention (so to speak)?
Are you an only child? When I was a kid the go-to sin was ‘I was mean to my little brother.’
I wonder how many times Father Healy had to hear I said “shit” and bite his tongue to keep from laughing or going nuts?
Actually, I am an only child.
I always wonder about the souls who are burning in hell for eating meat on Friday.
Now it is not a mortal sin to eat meat on Friday. Are they still in hell or did they get an automatic reprieve and were released to live in eternal bliss in heaven?
Or is it all a bunch of nonsense and there really is no life after physical death?
I disobeyed my mother was my go-to.
Catholicism holds that there is but one unforgivable sin, despair of the Holy Spirit. Basically, it means you don’t believe in a forgiving God, and therefore don’t seek forgiveness. If you did, you would be forgiven.
Eating meat on Fridays was never a “sin”, per se. (Nowadays it’s just Fridays during Lent). I believe it was more that you were disobeying a rule and committing the sin of “defiance”. It was like, “I know I’m not supposed to do it, but screw the rules, I’m going to have a cheeseburger anyways” that makes it a sin. Now, I don’t believe you’d get in trouble if you forgot (Oh shit, I forgot it’s Friday!), if there was nothing else to eat (dammit, there’s nothing to eat but leftover meatloaf!), or if a person was in poor health.
That’s not a mortal sin, that’s a venial sin. I think. I can’t always keep track.