I mean because of the way Confession is used in so many TV shows and movies.
This might not be a GQ but then again maybe there’s been a survey or something - do priests sitting for confession (I’m not Catholic but I gather that there are hours) tend to get random non-Catholics there to unburden themselves of problems small and large?
Because the idea is very attractive. So if I went to St. Joseph’s whenever the time is and I went into a booth and said “uh, it’s been all my life since my last confession, I want to talk about something” what would he say? Would he refer me to office hours? (I doubt I’d be refused pastoral care, but that’s just from the Protestant churches of my youth.).
So if I’ve thought about it surely other less savvy people have done it. How often? Often or seldom enough to be a really weird thing?
There’s no way for a priest to know that you aren’t a Catholic. There’s no official ID card and nobody carries their Baptismal Certificate around with them.
The priest may ask you to “make an act of contrition” but only near the end. Memorize this, although by that time you will have already unburdened yourself and can excuse yourself and walk out or just say you’re not sure of the words. The other way to detect a Protestant is to ask them to recite an “Our Father” (which Protestants call “The Lord’s Prayer”). The Protestant version has a few different words and a couple of extra lines at the end.
So there could be a lot of non-Catholics going in and confessing their sins and nobody would really know.
I went to a Catholic grade school (K4-8) and we had to do reconciliation once or twice a year after we did First reconciliation. The only thing we had to recite by memory to the priest was “Forgive me father for I have sinned, my last confession was _______”. If you just needed to unburden yourself, you could just say ‘10 years ago’ or ‘this is my first confession’. Like Alley D. said, no one is going to quiz you. You could go on to tell him about how you cheated on your SO or stole from your workplace and he’ll give you a penance (10 Our Father’s etc) and you’re free to do with that what you will. Hang around the church and say it or walk away feeling better. The only person it matters to is you.
Now that I’ve typed all this, I see the ‘pull a Hollywood’ comment and I have no idea what you mean by that.
If you just really, really needed someone to talk to. My WAG, is that they might just talk to you for a few minutes, but the confessional isn’t about discussion your problems it’s about confessing your sins. He might also remind you that he’d like to keep it free for parishioners.
A lot of it is also going to depend on the priest and the church. If he’s a very nice/open arms kinda guy and he knows he’s only going to have 3 or 4 people in the 2 hours that he’s there, he might be okay to talk for a few minutes. OTOH, if he knows there’s a line, you’re not a parishioner, a church goer or even religious he’s probably going to try to scoot you out of there a little faster.
My stepcousin is a priest in training. His take on it was if you were an obvious non-catholic, and wanted spiritual guidance as opposed to making a scene, would be to invite the person back during office hours.
And they do move things along. Sometimes they have a “mortal sins only” policy if things are busy. I joked with him about the 5 sins or less “express checkout”
Both actually, so long as those problems are somewhat spiritual/emotional in nature, i.e., discussing your mortgage terms is out, but discussing that stress over financial issues is having a negative effect on your marriage and how to avoid that is in (solutions may include “speaking to the bank about better mortgage terms”).
As for reserving the confessional for parishioners, that’s a priest who’d be in need of confession. In big shindings such as those “youth meetings” the Pope holds or in places of pilgrimage, priests are reminded that they should “be easily recognizable as priests” precisely so people can ask for Confession from any of them. I’ve seen people holding Confession on a street in broad daylight, both during a youth meeting and in pilgrimage locations.
Re. those Hollywood scenes, I have no idea what would the incidence be, but Confession is one of the Sacraments that can be given to non-Christians. Its requisites do not include either “being a Catholic” or “being a Christian”. The cases I know of involve declared atheists having a sudden attack of conscience and need for the confessional, but they’d been raised Catholic; I expect someone who hadn’t would be more likely to find a therapist or a barman.
Dude, the lost lamb! That person would be a… better catch for the fisherman than someone who’s always there confessing for the tenth-million time “I get mad when my cat throws up - Father, is it a sin to say ‘throws up’?”
You do need to be baptised; baptism is the “gateway” to all the other sacraments, including reconciliation. That’s not to say that an unbaptised person couldn’t go to confession, confess their sins, pray, receive spiritual counselling and direction, etc, but they won’t (knowingly) be offered sacramental reconciliation.
Absolutely correct. The only sacrament that may be received by an unbaptized person is baptism. An unbaptized person may marry, but that does not create a sacramental marriage.
Not true, Bricker. When people who have been previously married but not baptized join the Church, there is no new marriage, nor does the nature of the marriage change from sacramental to non.
I’m Jewish by birth, I was never baptized nor converted; I married a Catholic woman in a Catholic Church.
The Church made me attend pre-marital Catholicism classes (a very entertaining and informative experience - albeit not quite what I was expecting, as I’ve wrote about elsewhere), but they had no problems perfoming a religious-seeming ceremony.
Was this a sacramental marriage? For her, but not for me, perhaps? What’s the difference between a scaramental and non-sacramental marriage?
Malthus, you were, I expect, required to agree that you’d let your wife raise any children you had as Catholics. Though I’m not sure about the sacramental status of your marriage.
And priests absolutely do not try to reserve the confessional for parishioners. Even among Catholics, some prefer to confess to a priest they know well, while others prefer to confess to one who’s a relative stranger (i.e., from a different parish). Either is encouraged, whatever makes it easier for the penitent.
It’s also worth noting that if you’re cheating on your wife, the priest won’t “just have you say ten Our Fathers and send you on your way”. The first step in the process is that you must, to the extent possible, repair the damage your sin has caused, which means at the very least ceasing an ongoing sin. If the sin is also a crime, the priest can even make absolution contingent on turning yourself in to the temporal authorities.
I don’t know for certain if the following is true, but it’s what my husband was told in RCIA classes. When we got married , he was unbaptized ( and he made no promises about raising children Catholic, he only acknowledged that I had promised to do everything in my power to do so). According to the RCIA instructors, I had received a sacrament when we got married, but he had not. And they specifically told him that upon his baptism, the nature of the marriage itself would change to sacramental.
I went to catholic school as a kid in 60s. We were told that we could baptize someone in an emergency. For example a bad car wreck we could grab any nearby water and baptize someone just in case they might die. Not sure if that is still the case.
That just deals with whether the marriage is valid or not though.
I assume mine is, having been informed as required. However, my question is whether it is a “sacramental” marriage or not, and what the difference is.
According to doreen in the post below yours, the Catholic partner receives a sacrament, but the non-Catholic partner doesn’t - unless s/he baptizes; also, that changes the marriage into a “sacramental” one.
Still not clear on the difference between a sacramental and non-sacramental marriage, though.