Yes, priests do forgive sins (and I would not be at all surprised if some of my comments have led to confusion).
There are different aspects of how we look on forgiveness and what that forgiveness means and entails.
I’ll probably say part of this confusingly, again, but I’ll give it a try.
When a person recognizes that they have sinned and they are sorry and repent of that sin, God forgives them. For those who view the relationship between God and man as a solely personal relationship in which religions simply act as conduits for conveying the ideals and rules to the next generation of believers, that is the end of the event: man sins, man repents, God forgives, done.
The RCC views the relationship between God and any person as more complex. Paul frequently used the phrase “Body of Christ” and the RCC has incorporated that concept into their teachings. The idea is that Jesus is present in the world in His people. (“Where two or three are gathered in my name…”) When a person sins, it is not simply an act of disobedience against God the Law-giver. Rather, it is a diminishing of the Body of Christ. If a person has sinned, that person has shut themselves off from the Grace of God; they cannot carry that Grace to other people. The Body of Christ is diminished to whatever degree that person cannot bring the message of Jesus (by word or by example or by action) to other people. The sinner must be reconciled with the Body of Christ for that sin to be forgiven.
The passages in Matthew have always been cited as the authority of the Church to forgive sins. This is not intended to mean that humans have the power to interfere with the forgiveness from God; it is indicative that the sin must be dealt with from the perspective of the community of believers (the Body of Christ) and that the Church has that authority.
Now, I will not claim that all people (or all Catholics) at all times have held this exact belief. There is ample evidence that there have been people who believed that if they died without being confessed they were in danger of damnation. However, the RCC is a big outfit and there is always a certain amount of confusion among the rank-and-file as to the meaning of all the teachings. The Church does not teach that only sins forgiven by a priest are forgiven by God.
I think it has to do with Catholics not taking Christ as their “personal saviour”…in that they use priests as intermediaries between themselves and God/Christ. So I agree with one of the other posters that this is probably a “born again” Christian attitude. I was raised Anglican myself, and we kinda though of Catholics as the epitome of Christianity.
A nit-picking point, but an important one. Catholic doctrine holds that the sacraments (confession, but also baptism and all the rest) are actually carried out by God. While in using ordinary language (again, sorry about this being so pedantic) we say the priest baptizes or the priest forgives, that’s shorthand for the priest serving as a conduit of (in this case) God’s forgiveness.
A Christian is someone who accepts Christ as their Saviour simply by asking Him to save them from their sins and trusting in the price He paid on Calvary. Nothing more or less can make one a Christian. Being Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, etc. doesn’t mean that one is a Christian any more than being a skeptic necessarily makes one an atheist.
With no intention of giving this hideous tract any support, I did want to comment on the above. As others have mentioned, priests do have the power to forgive sins, as instruments of God. The Pope and other Catholics do pray to Mary (though not to a statue) and ask for her intercessions to God on our behalf. The dead who will enter heaven do suffer punishment for their sins in Purgatory so as to enter heaven as new people. Being baptized does cleanse one of original sin and make one a member of the Catholic Christian community.
It is terminology like this that keeps Protestants screaming at Catholics, you know.
Please do not say “pray to,” as that implies that they are literally praying TO her, and not JC, which is uncool.
They ask Mary to pray for them. You would not say that you are praying to me, for example, when you ask me to pray for you, which is a common thing. Catholics like to ask Mary and other Saints to pray for them - not to them.
Yer pal,
Satan
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Has the catechism changed in the past few decades?
A few years ago, I read a book that was published in the 40’s or 50’s which explained the catechism. It was written by a Catholic for Catholics, so I’m assuming that the explanations were valid.
The only thing about it that disturbed me was the part that said, in no uncertain terms, that there are only two kinds of people who can go to Heaven: Those who are Catholic, and those who give their lives in order to save a Catholic’s life.
Has this actually ever been in the catechism? If so, has it changed? Is the author’s explanation valid?
I’ll see if I can find the book again, next time I’m at my mom’s.
David, there is a (relatively) new catechism for the Church. On the other hand, Feeney was thrown out in the early 1950’s when the 1890’s Baltimore Catechism was still in vogue for all Catholic schools. I’m sure that it is possible to find Catholics and Catholic publications that assert that only Catholics get to heaven. It is not Church Doctrine.
(There are followers of the Pius X movement and similar groups who claim that Vatican II was not “really” a Church Council and they are fond of deciding who will or will not go to Heaven. Protestants have their Ian Paisleys and their Oral Roberts types. Catholics have their own brand of know-nothings and haters. :::sigh::: )
Ahhh…I should have known that an organization as large as the Catholic Church would have hundreds of splinter groups.
Just to show my own ignorance…how does the catechism differ from official church doctrine?
This is one of the reasons I could never be a good Catholic–I couldn’t keep up with it all! Then again, I didn’t make a very good Baptist or AoG-er, either…
Um, as far as I know, the catechism IS official church doctrine.
Oh, and the Church really doesn’t have many splinter groups, per se. There are alot of differing opinions, and tendancies, but groups are rare, as far as I know.
It’s almost a question of semantics, but I know that doesn’t make it trivial (“was God”, and “was like God” being the prime example.) OK, when I say a prayer (e.g., the “Hail Mary”) and it’s addressed “to” Mary, or a saint, I guess I call that “praying to Mary (or a saint)”. No, I wouldn’t praise her (except to thank God for her example as an obedient servant), thank her for her grace in my life, etc. No, Mary and the saints do not have the power to grant prayers, only to recommend them to God, but they are the intercessors for people to God.
There was a new catechism published I believe in 1996, and it is the official Church doctrine. One thing I remember as different from what I had heard said about Catholic doctrine in the past was concerning suicide. I heard, but can’t be sure it’s true as we didn’t learn the catechism by rote, is that a suicide was considered a sinner and wouldn’t be buried in holy ground. The latest catechism says that we don’t know what that person suffered from and that we should pray for him or her.
The Catechism is certainly supposed to be the Doctrine of the Church presented in teaching form. I’m not trying to suggest that it is some random publication of vaguely church-related information.
However, the issues of any specific catechism are generally related to the choice of language for the intended audience, the culture from which the catechism derives, etc. The Baltimore Catechism was written specifically to be used by students (and generally students in the primary grades) at a time (1891) before the ecumenical movements of the 20th century, when the European RCC was facing increased anti-clericalism and the U.S. Catholics were under repeated attacks that stopped just short of persecution. Thus, there are no gray areas presented in the Baltimore Catechism. There are the good guys (Catholics) and everybody else.
In addition to those limitations, the Baltimore Catechism was published as a series of three volumes (I don’t believe there was a fourth) intended to be used at successively higher grades. The second and third volumes repeated the lessons of the first volume, providing some more nuance to their presentation than the first volume, but I do not know more than three people who have actually seen the second or third volumes. Nearly all schools/kids quit after mastering the first volume which is quite rigid in its presentation. (Remember, it was designed to be memorized by seven-year-olds.) The current Catechism differs from the Baltimore Catechism in that it was published for the whole Church (requiring lots of agonizing over translations to multiple languages) specifically to provide the Doctrine of the Church in a teaching format to adults. It requires a darned near college level education to understand some of it. It is nuanced. It develops themes. It provides rationale for its statements. (That won’t make it more palatable to people who disagree, of course, but it is not presented as if it had been written on the back of the Ten Commandments the way the Baltimore Catechism seemed to have been presented to my first grade class.)
As to factions in the RCC: I would not say that the RCC spawns cults and sects in the way that a few of the more independent minded Fundamentalist churches do. It is quite large enough to encompass contradictions and people who really don’t like each other. On the other hand, Archbishop Lefebvre was effectively a herisiarch with quite a few followers and it does not take very long searching the web to find numerous groups declaring that Vatican II has either been totally “misunderstood” or was invalid from the get-go.