PENITENTIAL
PERILS
Index
CHURCH DECREES ON THE SACRAMENT
BIBLE SAYS WE CAN GO STRAIGHT TO GOD
CHURCH DECREES ON THE SACRAMENT
The Roman Catholic Church
is notorious for its claim that its priests can forgive sins as if they were
God.
The Roman
Catholic Church claims to be infallible and in the decrees in which it
exercised this alleged charism it said that the
sacrament of penance was authorised and empowered by God.
The
quotes come from Salvation, The Bible and Roman
Catholicism.
Chapter One of the Fourteenth Session of the Council of
Chapter Five says,
“From the institution of the sacrament of Penance, as already explained, the universal
Church has always understood that the entire confession of sins was also
instituted by the Lord, and is of divine right necessary for all who have
fallen after baptism; because that our Lord Jesus Christ, when about to ascend
from earth to Heaven, left priests his own vicars, as presidents and judges,
unto whom all the mortal crimes, into which the faithful of Christ may have
fallen, should be carried, in order that, in accordance with the power of the
keys, they may pronounce the sentence of forgiveness or retention of sins. For it is manifest that the
priests could not have exercised this judgment without knowledge of the case”
(page 149).
REFUTATION FROM THE BIBLE
The Church assumes that
when Jesus gave the Church the power to bind and loose so that what it bound or
loosed would be bound or loosed in Heaven he meant it could forgive sin. This is nonsense. The power was given in the present tense
before the time after the resurrection when
When Jesus told the apostles after his resurrection
that if they forgave the sins of any they were forgiven he may have had the
non-literal interpretation in mind (John 20:23). Just as John
can’t forgive Marty for hitting Sean for he is not Sean so priests could not
possibly literally forgive as if they were the offended God. Jesus knew that though the paganism of Roman
Catholicism has forgotten that.
Moreover, the Bible occasionally speaks of declaring an act like it was
performing it (Jeremiah 1:10; Isaiah 6:10).
The John text could have been using this peculiar method of
expression. It may just mean that to
successfully declare a person pardoned by God is to forgive.
2
Corinthians 5:18-20 says that the apostles had the ministry of reconciling
people with God. Do marriage guidance
counsellors who have a ministry of reconciliation forgive the estranged husband
and wife?
The
final Catholic proof is the alleged mention of Paul absolving the sins of an
incestuous man in his letters (1 Corinthians 5; 2 Corinthians 2). Paul judging, excommunicating and pardoning
this man is hardly the same as giving him the sacrament of penance!
The
Council of
If
Jesus gave the priests judicial authority to forgive and retain sins then how
can we explain his hatred of authoritarianism when he said that whoever would
be Lord must be the servant of all? The interpretation is faulty. If need be, we would have to hold that the
text of John 20:23 has lost its clarity or has been inaccurately preserved for
us.
Both the Old and New
Testaments have people going straight to God for forgiveness.
If Catholics want the
priest to pardon them in the cheerless semi-darkness of a box then they should
burn their Bibles for being Protestant.
Nobody should want the forgiveness of a God or Church that holds that
God is right to withhold the power to forgive sins from laypersons even in a
state of absolute necessity. I mean that
if a person is dying you cannot absolve them unless you are a priest. No matter how holy you are even the lowest
scoundrel of a priest is needed to save the person’s soul. This is extremely offensive to reasonable
people.
BIBLE SAYS WE CAN GO STRAIGHT TO GOD
The
Psalms and the Old Testament have people praying straight to God for
forgiveness and getting it.
When
the Gospel is supposed to be good news it is clear that God could not and would
not have changed this structure to make it harder leaving one having to look
for a validly ordained priest and remember sins and fight the shame of
confessing to that priest.
Jesus
told his apostles that they must pray the Our Father which pleads, “Forgive us
our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The prayers at the start, “Hallowed be thy
name, thy kingdom come”, are by implication prayers for pardon too for they ask
that God be fittingly praised and his reign of righteousness will come. How could you want the name reverenced and
the kingdom to come now as Jesus wanted us to when you mean “forgive me God but
not now and wait until I get to confession”?
Rome
says the Lord’s Prayer will get venial sins forgiven if you sincerely mean
it. The Lord’s Prayer would be
meaningless to a person who had no venial sins never mind mortal sins but Jesus wants all to use
the prayer. It speaks of no
restrictions. The Lord’s Prayer refutes
the idea that some forgiveness is the priest’s domain.
The
Catholic forgiveness system contradicts the urgency of the New Testament
message of conversion and even more so in the past when there were no cars and
when there was much persecution of Christians.
If a person needed absolution in times of persecution it was very hard
to get and caused much terror.
REASON AGAINST ABSOLUTION
The
Church of Rome claims that priests can forgive sins. When the priest absolves you in the name of
God, God forgives the sins. Jesus is
supposed to have told the apostles that whoever’s sins they forgive are
forgiven by God (John 20:23). The
institution of the doctrine of priestly absolution is ascribed to him.
It
is ludicrous to suggest that a priest can forgive sin as if he were God who was
sinned against for he is not God. Even
God cannot equip a person to forgive such for it is illogical.
Half-Protestant
Catholics might feel that is not a case of priests forgiving you as if they
were the God that sin offends but one of priests letting God pardon
you. They want to say that it is God who
forgives not the priest. But then they
think Jesus said to the apostles if you forgive the sins of any they are
remitted meaning absolution. The priest
says, “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit.”
It
is the priest who forgives and not God for God is compelled to obey the priest
when the priest says that such and such a sin does not
exist anymore.
When
God won’t forgive the sins until the moment the priest pronounces absolution
then the priest is letting God forgive you.
Some say the priest is not letting God forgive what he is doing is
something that coincides with forgiveness from God. They say God set up the entire arrangement so
he has it all planned and forgives because he wants to not because he is
allowed to by the priest. But God is
giving priests the power to allow him. If
a priest refuses absolution to somebody who should get it God won’t forgive. Of course the priest lets God forgive.
If God absolved one
person who couldn’t find a priest then he would have to absolve everybody that
couldn’t get one. This would lead to
priests being unable to forgive anybody because no sinner can get to confession
as soon as he or she repents! It is a
crazy God that gives grace to those who can’t make it to Mass and who won’t
forgive the sin of one who can’t get a confessor. He forgives forgotten sins (page 215, Apologetics
and Catholic Doctrine, Part 2). They
don’t matter to him. They have not even
been repented of. Then he evilly refuses
to forgive a person who really wants it and repents. This God does not do all he can to keep us
from sin and Hell and anyone who asserts with Rome that this is not the case is
trying to deceive.
Mortal
sins are sins that keep the sinner from being God’s friend. Imperfect contrition is repentance for the
love of God and a less noble reason.
Persons who have only imperfect contrition for their mortal sins cannot
get forgiven without the priest. If God
can forgive them during confession then he can do it himself without the
priest. He won’t. He is forcing them to stay in sin. The Lord is making them continue to oppose
him. It is not right for God to keep
persons who are fit for forgiveness out of his friendship just because the
priest is not near at hand. It is
vindictively holding that they should be pardoned and refusing to pardon. God is not love if he is not forgiving. To trap a person in iniquity even for a
moment is to stoop as low as that person has for it is sinfully sustaining his
or her sinful responsibility. The
Catholic Church cannot say that God is entitled to refuse forgiveness when
Jesus paid the sinners’ debt to God’s justice.
If she does then she is denying her infallible dogma that Jesus died for
all.
If
God is infinite good then he doesn’t deserve to be opposed so he is being
unjust to himself. God must like sin
when he does that. Every bad person has the
right to be reformed, which
It
is blasphemous to teach in union with the pope that people with tremendous and
superior quality attrition – imperfect contrition – for sins should be made to
stay in them by God because they can’t get a priest while saying that persons
with barely any attrition that is barely repentance truly get forgiveness from
God through a priest. This makes finding
a priest more important than being sorry.
It is insulting the penitent for nothing. Reason shows that the sorrow for sin should
come first. A forgiving God would not be
more interested in penitents meeting the priest than in their sorrow. If he is then he snobbishly thinks that
priests are something special and everybody else is muck.
The
Catholic God acts strangely for one that is said to do all he can to keep the
human race from falling into the everlasting damnation of Hell. If those people die suddenly God will be
guilty of trapping them to get them thrown in Hell. (Then Rome has the gall and the viciousness
to criticise Prods for teaching that God plots to get some sinners
damned.) Even Rome agrees that that is
unloving. They will be tempted to commit
more mortal sins when they are stuck in mortal sin. When one is a mortal sinner and going to Hell
one need not shrink from adding another to the collection. The Bible says that God never directly does
what tempts one to sin (James 1:13). He
would sin against himself if he did and then he would be all-evil.
All
Roman Catholicism can say to our charge that her absolution system is evil is
that when we don’t deserve God’s mercy it is up to him to decide the manner in
which we will obtain pardon. That is
only true if it is a loving way. The
Bible says forgiveness is a gift. You don’t
inconvenience your wife or degrade her even for a moment in the process of
delivering a gift to her. In that case
the gift is not much of a gift at all.
The
doctrine of absolution makes priests look outrageously selfish and
arrogant. If getting absolution from a
priest is essential for eternal salvation what would the sincere priest do? Never leave the confessional, that’s
what! The lesser evil of living in a box
is to be preferred to letting souls commit more sins, the greatest of all
evils, and fall into Hell. To leave the
confessional is to force a mortal sinner to stay in sin for a while. And people are sinning this way all the
time. It is a mortal sin for a priest to
keep a person in mortal sin even for a minute.
That is preventing someone from being God’s friend. To approve of this for a minute is refusing
to do God’s will if he loves the sinner for he will want him back as soon as
possible. Rome approves of delays
provided they are not too extreme. If
the priest has to visit a sick person and send those waiting in the chapel for
confession away she doesn’t mind. That
is inconsistent with love as the Church interprets it. Healing souls from the worst evil comes
before consoling the sick or absolving many sinners matters more than going
away to absolve one. It is accusing God
of doing evil at the bidding of the Church.
The
Catholic absolution doctrine infers that we should be more grateful to the
priest than God. It is the priest who
makes God do what God wouldn’t do without him. This is part of the hierarchy’s plot to be
preferred to God and to truth.
The
sacrament of reconciliation is extremely evil for it puts going to confession
and receiving absolution before doing good.
Jesus would rather a person was conditionally absolved and then made
that absolution active by doing some big good work. For example the idea could be, “I absolve you
from your sins now but that absolution will only take effect when you will
visit the hospital and take some lonely sick people out.” The Jesus of the Sermon of the Mount could
not approve of a system in which you display your repentance to a witness without
verification. He wanted such things
private and for people to be God-centred and other-centred and not to do good
in front of others unless unavoidable.
When
God comes first according to the Catholic Church it follows that you should not
forgive anybody who says they are sorry for hurting you until they go to
confession first. That is in case you
are forgiving somebody who God has not forgiven. That kind of blackmail proved useful in the
gullible past.
No
mature person could accept the priestly pretensions to having the power to
remove sins as true.
Jesus
said we must firstly love God with all our being and in second place our
neighbour as ourselves. When God forbids us to put anything or anyone alongside him in our
affections he really only cares about himself. That is all he made us for. It also means that those who do not believe
cannot find any satisfaction in being helped by a Christian for that help is
not given for their sake but for God’s so it is harmful to unbelievers. So when God is like that it is none of his
business what we do and he has no right expecting us to come to him for pardon.
What
business is it of God’s if I hurt another person? This is a big problem for the sacrament of reconciliation
which plainly says it is his business and the business of the Church officials who
are invested with divine judicial authority.
Christians say God made the person and loves the person so to hurt the
person is to insult his work and his love for that person. You are abusing the gifts God gave you so
that you can hurt this person. You are
insulting God.
So
God is not worried about a person being hurt.
He is worried about the insult to the gifts he has given to the person so
he is worried about what he has done for the person being desecrated.
If
a doctor saves the life of X and J seriously injures him does J have to express
more sorrow to the doctor than X? Of course not.
Some
say God doesn’t demand an apology from you to him when you hurt a person because
the person is a person but because he loves the person. Religion claims that God alone matters and is
to be loved which proves this. It is not
the person who matters but God being offended.
The scandalous thing about this is that God is not literally
offended. He is perfectly happy and
cannot change and cannot feel pain. He
only intellectually asserts that the sin should not happen but it does not harm
him or make him sad. The scandal is that
something beyond pain is put before something that can experience
suffering. That is not the kind of
morality we want by any standard.
It
cannot be God’s business when we hurt a person simply because that person is a
person with feelings. In other words, it
is not God’s concern if a person is hurt even if it is his concern that his
love and gifts for that person have been affronted. God is not the person but the victim is the
person therefore it is the victim’s concern only. God may disapprove of the person being hurt
but that does not entitle him to be requested for his forgiveness. He is only forgiving for the insult to
himself and his gifts but he is not forgiving for hurting the other person for
that is not possible. That is between
you and the other person. To go to
confession instead of pleading for forgiveness from the person you have hurt is
disgusting. If everybody knew that it
was none of God’s business when we hurt another person nobody would follow
religion anymore. The doctrine of the
forgiving God who can forgive what is none of his business is dangerous for it
suggests that God’s thinking is not ours and that we should follow his whether
it makes sense or not or hurts or not.
A
person should be ashamed to go to confession and confess that they have hurt
another person when they won’t go and confess and express sorrow and try to
make amends fully to the victim FIRST.
You would be proven more genuine if you did that. It is easier to admit you are wrong to God
than to the other person. It is
therefore egotistical to confess sin to God and not others as the Catholic
Church has you doing it. God should not
reward this insult to the victim by forgiving the sin in confession.
Jesus
had a point when he said that you must keep your sacrifice to God until you
make peace with your brother you fell out with first and then go and sacrifice
(Matthew 5:23-24). Confession and
winning God’s forgiveness in the absolution are offering yourself
as a sacrifice to God to live in service of him. Jesus meant animal sacrifice but that makes
no difference. If you have to reconcile
with the people you have hurt and the people you have made insufficient effort
to heal their animosity towards you in relation to animal sacrifice, how much
more will you have to do it before confession or before going to Mass in which
the Church claims to offer the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary to God? How much harder you will have to try! And you have to be reconciled with yourself
by obtaining God’s forgiveness for your own sins first. And how hypocritical it is for Catholic
priests to be celebrating Mass every day when the standard of nobility is so
high? The sacrifice of a person who
hasn’t asked forgiveness of the people he has hurt and who hasn’t tried to make
amends is an insult to God. the heart is
more important than any sacrifice. It
is like giving the queen tea but expressing no respect for her.
It
is scandalous to teach as Roman Catholicism does that if I hurt another person I
will be forgiven in confession even if I never go near them first. And especially when that cult says that if I
hurt a person and instantly make amends in a state of repentance, I will not be
forgiven until I go to confession. So
the person who hasn’t made amends yet is better off than the person who
has! Roman Catholicism is an evil
religion and the enemy of right and wrong.
FORGOTTEN SINS
The
Catholic Church holds that if you forget to tell a mortal sin in confession
that is all right. You can tell it the
next time.
The
Church is misleading us for a person could write them down and destroy the
paper after emerging from the confessional.
There is no excuse for forgetting so forgotten sin will not be pardoned.
Deliberately
forgetting a mortal sin and forgetting you forgot must be fine because when you
forget it you can’t really mean to refuse to repent it. When you forget your sin you sincerely
believe that it does not exist anymore.
The Church says God cannot punish you for sincerity. Confession is just superstition.
Confession
is a waste of time when you don’t have to remember and confess everything. It is evil for it forces a priest to listen
to you saying you will bomb the shopping cetire
tomorrow. He could save lives if he
could tell it. The rules of confession
force him not to divulge it. And for
what?
You
cannot repent of each forgotten sin because you don’t remember what it was and
you might feel differently if you remember it.
It is no use simply praying, “God, forgive my forgotten sins”. It is better to make a list of all the sins
you possibly could have committed and say after each one, “If I have done this
then I am truly sorry.” That is the
nearest you can get to confessing and repenting the sin.
With
the other way it is like somebody saying, “I hate lying”, forgetting that they
like to tell white lies. Obviously,
there is no hatred of sin or prudence in a person who simply does not worry
about forgotten sins and does not specifically repudiate each one.
It
is a mortal sin not to use the list method because if you don’t then you don’t
care if you have committed a forgotten mortal sin. To accept mortal sin is a mortal sin.
We
see that the dread of death that Catholics have over the confessional which is
directly caused by being afraid that they have forgotten some sins is
justified. One cannot be pardoned unless
one does the list method of repenting mortal sin first which means that
unexpected death could put you in Hell even if you have been absolved because
you cannot do the list method. Everybody
commits the mortal sin of neglecting the list method. If confession puts you in a state of grace
then it only lasts for a few hours or less – until the possibility of
committing a forgotten mortal sin is started.
If
God passes over forgotten sins he can punish nobody even one who temporarily
forgets or is distracted from sin. It
implies that God hates sinners by sending suffering to get them to repent.
Imagine
what terror such teachings instil.
ATONEMENT PREVENTS ABSOLUTION
The
Catholic Church believes that Jesus somehow earned forgiveness for us and that
this pardon is distributed in confession by the priest.
Now,
when our sins are paid for, what right does God have to keep the freedom from
sin we are entitled to from us until we go to confession? It is different for men to make conditions
for legal pardon but that is because we don’t see into people’s hearts but God
does and so he can do the right thing easily and the moment the person is open
to his grace. The sacrament of
reconciliation contradicts God’s love and willingness to keep us out of Hell. There is no need for the sacrament.
If
Jesus paid for our sins then we are not forgiven in confession because instead
of being forgiven our sins are punished though someone else had to pay. So, the atonement means that priests cannot
really forgive sins. They are told to
intend to but how can they? And their
absolution is invalid if they don’t.
Top of the Document
THE PARDONING OF VENIAL SINS
The
Catholic Church teaches that you can make a holy and good confession without
being sorry for all your venial sins provided you have no mortal sin. But this teaching is the mortal sin of heresy
for one sin defiles all you do and that is that.
“We are not bound to confess what we know to
be only venial sins; but if a penitent has only venial sins to confess, he must
be truly sorry for at least one of them, or his Confession would be null and
void; and only those venial sins would be forgiven for which he was truly
sorry” (page 320, The Student’s Catholic Doctrine).
If
you have another sin that you are not sorry for, then you can’t be pardoned for
your “attempt” at repentance is a sin and a mockery. You can’t repent of a sin unless you reject
it for it is evil but you can’t reject it for that reason in all seriousness if
you stand by another evil. Everything
you do in attachment to sin is a sin for it is defiled by the sin. The Church says that if you repent all your
mortal sins in confession but one the confession is no good for you are
attached to evil and pretending to be sorry.
But the same could be said of venial sinners. For the Church to say that the good of mortal
sinners is really evil and not to say the same of venial sinners is unjust
discrimination.
A
God who delays pardoning venial sins is especially mean. To say confession is the best thing a venial
sinner can go to when he could get sins pardoned by doing a good work is a
terrible thing. It is saying the offence is more important than the person who
was helped.
As
a religion that believes in different levels of the gravity of sin, Catholicism
should teach that it is a far bigger offence to God to refuse to forgive a
small sin than a big one. You deserve
forgiveness better for a small sin. But
it does not. So-called venial sinners
are welcomed to communion which forgives any sins they are sorry for. “Just as our bodily food insensibly repairs
what we lose by daily wear and tear, so likewise is this Divine food a remedy
for the spiritual infirmities of each day.
But, it must be remembered, it is a remedy for those venial sins only
for which we no longer retain an affection” (page 296, The Student’s
Catholic Doctrine). So, God
withholds pardon from venial sins in a person who is fit or communion and
forgiveness until they receive it. He is
more worried about the time they get to the altar than about their dispositions.
CONCLUSION
Jesus did not give
priests the power to forgive sins in confession. Nobody should encourage anybody to go to confession
or to believe in the sacrament.
www.tracts.ukgo.com/loraine_boettner.htm
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BIBLE VERSIONS USED
The Amplified Bible
Sunday, 09 December 2007