IS PRIESTLY ABSOLUTION BIBLICAL?
BIBLE SAYS WE CAN GO STRAIGHT TO
GOD
The
Roman Catholic Church is notorious for its claim that its priests can forgive
sins as if they were God. Catholics have
to confess their sins to the priest.
The quotes come from Salvation, The Bible and
Roman Catholicism.
Chapter
One of the Fourteenth Session of the Council of Trent declared that since we do
not remain faithful after baptism we need another sacrament, the sacrament of
penance. It said, “The Lord…principally
instituted the sacrament of penance, when, being raised from the dead, he
breathed on his disciples, saying: Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose sins you
shall forgive, they are forgiven them, and whose sins you shall retain, they
are retained. By which action so signal,
and words so clear, the consent of all the Fathers has ever understood that the
power of forgiving and retaining sins was communicated to the apostles and
their lawful successors for the reconciling of the faithful who had fallen
after baptism” (page 148).
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).
So
the power of the keys comes from the Bible where Jesus tells Peter he will give
him the keys of the
The
Council of Trent decreed, “Whosoever shall affirm that the priest’s sacramental
absolution is not a judicial act but only a ministry to declare that the sins
of the party confessing are forgiven let him be anathema”. The priest is a judge and has the power to
pass sentence and to decide if the person should be granted pardon. Obviously, the priest then is to be respected
and obeyed by the laity and treated like Christ himself. The man that has the right to judge you and
hear your sins should be obeyed like he was a king.
The
magistrate can forgive your crime against the law because he has judicial
authority and can make judicial acts.
The magistrate in this way is on a par with the law. He treats the law as if it was his personal
creation so that anybody breaking the law is offending him and needs his
mercy. He decides that other people who
have been hurt by this person should forgive them too for he has taken the
offence away.
The priest can forgive sins even if he is bad
himself, “Even priests, who are in mortal sin, exercise, through the virtue of
the Holy Ghost which was bestowed in ordination, the office of forgiving sins,
as the ministers of Christ; and that their sentiment is erroneous who contend
that the is power exists not in bad priests” (page 150).
Canon 6 said that those who denied that priests
could forgive sins in the sacrament of penance were accursed. Canon 7 said, “If anyone saith, that, in the
sacrament of Penance, it is not necessary, of divine right, for the remission
of sins, to confess all and singular mortal sins which after due and diligent
previous meditation are remembered, even those [mortal sins] which are secret,
and those that are apposed to the two last commandments of the Decalogue, as
also the circumstances which change the species of a sin; Let him be anathema”
(page 152).
Canon 12 condemns anybody who says that “God always
remits the whole punishment together with the guilt” (page 152) because they
want you to believe that you can be punished after being pardoned by God for
the pardoned sins.
Roman priests claim to possess the power to make God
forgive our sin in the sense that God won’t pardon certain penitents’ mortal
sins until the priest says, “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the
Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” to which the grateful reply is
simply, “Amen” (Council of Trent, Session 14, Chapters 1, 3, Canon 6, 7 and
9). He says, “I absolve you”. He does it by his own authority. Catholics
tell their sins to the priest and say they are sorry and then the priest
forgives their sins after giving them something to do as a penance in order to
make up for their debt of temporal punishment.
Today, this sacrament is called the sacrament of
reconciliation, but the older term, the sacrament of penance, is still
occasionally used.
The Church says that Jesus gave priests this power
to forgive sins for the gospels say so.
But the texts may not mean what
Here are the lesser ones with their refutations
following them:
In Matthew 9:8,
When one opens one’s Bible here one sees that the
authority God is praised for giving men is not stated. It may be the power to forgive sins or the
power to heal cripples and probably means the latter for the line only appears
after the cripple was said to have started walking. You need to tell what something means by the
lines NEAREST around it. The authority
to heal filled the people with awe. Absolving
sins wouldn’t do that for no one can see if it really worked so it must have
been the miracle of healing. In Mark’s
parallel passage, he says that the praising and the awe were sparked off by
seeing a paralytic walk by Jesus’ power.
Because Catholics believe that Jesus didn’t establish the sacrament of
absolution until after he returned from the dead, as John’s gospel allegedly
says, many of them cannot accept this verse as proof for priestly
absolution.
Jesus may have meant by saying “Your sins are
forgiven” that he was not removing the man’s sins for that was God’s job. But if you cancel the punishment of somebody
you have already forgiven that is forgiveness in a sense. Jesus forgave the man by making him
walk. He had already told the man before
he made him walk that he was forgiven.
Jesus was accused of forgiving sins but he had perhaps only announced
that the man had been forgiven by God.
Then he objected to the Jewish assertion that he could not forgive sins
and decided to prove it by removing the punishment there and then instead of
letting the man get better the slower and natural way.
In Matthew 9:5 Jesus asks the Jews what they think
is the easiest, to make a cripple walk or to say to him that his sins are
pardoned. He didn’t answer it. But he cured the cripple to show he could say
this to the cripple. Nobody can see
forgiveness so he needed to give evidence that the man was really pardoned.
Matthew 18:18 where we read that whatever the
apostles bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven and what they unbind on earth
shall be unbound in Heaven. Since this
passage refers to whatever not whoever it is taken as confirmation that Jesus
conferred on his entourage the ability to take sins away.
But there is no reason to suppose that he meant
sin. The promise was made in the context
of talking about Church discipline.
Catholicism should stop taking verses out of context. Jesus promised his disciples the ability to
accept only those he approved into his Church and to put the unwanted out of
it. This could only be done if they were
infallibly inspired by him from Heaven.
The apostles needed this gift to keep unity among themselves and the
Church and unity is more important than doctrine in the sense that true
doctrine is lost to some degree if there is too much schism and it is brought
into disrepute. (
Yet the promise may be one of another kind of
infallibility, protection from error in order to teach the word of God and to
have it written down. The Catholic
Church has no right using this text here to justify absolving when she also
uses it to persuade folks that she cannot err in her ecumenical councils and
when her pope speaks ex cathedra or from the chair of Peter.
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! Paul never met
this man and when he was able to judge him he must have been able to read his
mind by the power of the spirit.
Catholic absolution demands that the penitent be present for
absolution. In 2 Corinthians 2, Paul
wrote that he forgives in the person of Christ whoever the Corinthians
forgive. He means forgive in the matter
of Church discipline because if he meant absolution how could he absolve”
persons absolved by the Corinthians?
Notice too how, “If you Corinthians forgive the sins of any I forgive
them” which matches what Jesus said in John “Whoever you forgive I
forgive. And Paul is definitely not
telling the Corinthians that they can forgive for him as if they were him so
how could Jesus be doing that either?
The Catholic Church says that distant absolutions are futile for the
person has to be near the absolver. A
Presbyterian minister could say the same as Paul concerning a reconciled rebel
who has broken Church law and he does not absolve.
There is no justification for the Catholic
interpretation of the passages.
It is asserted by a few that since the texts could
mean absolution they must mean it. They
argue that it is the simplest interpretation and that when a text has more than
one meaning the simplest and safest must be taken. It is not safe to start absolving people in
case it is nonsense just because a text merely seems to command it and looks
can be deceiving.
Catholic theologians challenge us to direct them to
a Bible verse that proves them wrong on sacramental absolution. We don’t need to. If the Bible does not say it then somebody
after Jesus’ made up the sacrament. The
Bible teaching that God is love is the only disproof. A loving God would not keep forgiveness from
penitents until the priest chants a spell over them.
Most
Protestants see the Catholic sacrament of absolution as a superstitious
hoax. Some of them think that if the
Catholic really believes in it that God will understand that he wants God’s
forgiveness from the priest and will pardon the person even though the priest
cannot pardon sins. But the Bible warns
that sincerity alone can’t put you right with God. Proverbs 14:12 says that there is a way that
seems right but it leads to death and the verse before goes on about the house
of wicked people being overthrown so it means the wrong way that seems right
will lead to spiritual death and divine retribution. See also Matthew 7:13,14. Protestants believe in once for all salvation
when you repent all your past and present and future sins. But the Catholic system only repents the
first two so it is fruitless.
Getting
forgiven is the most important act of worship there is. You can’t give God any love if you adhere to
sin for sin is hearty opposition to God.
When God won’t accept prayers addressed to false Gods he will be even
less likely to accept a person who goes to a priest for pardon. The priest's forgiveness is the same as an
idol if it is fake.
The
Catholic claims to be in sin. We know
that all sin is mortal so priestly absolution cannot work for the Catholic is
really in mortal sin and the Church says that adhering to one mortal sin and
repenting the rest is no good and actually mocks God’s mercy. A mortal sinner cannot sincerely repent some
mortal sins and not others for she or he is the enemy of God and accordingly
cannot get pardoned.
The
Bible says that all are sinful and all are mortal sinners so it agrees with all
this. With this view of sin, how could
Christ have authorised priestly absolution?
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.
Contrition
means repenting for the love of God and for his sake alone – this is called
perfect contrition. Imperfect contrition
means repenting for the love of God and some other reason. Attrition means repenting without any concern
for God at all. If you resolve to get
forgiveness for sin and not to sin again simply because you want something from
God say health or his blessing or are afraid of eternal damnation that is
attrition.
The
Church says that a sincere act of perfect contrition made by the dying person
is not as good as confession for he has to intend to confess if he is able and
since the sacrament can forgive sins even without perfect contrition it is more
powerful and trustworthy than it. The
problems are that it is easy to make an act of perfect contrition which implies
that you hate sin so much that you would do anything to make up for it and
avoid it and then one hour later you find that you are sinning again which
shows that you were only deluding yourself.
Confession is the only way to be sure you are really forgiven (page 14, Confession
Quizzes to a Street Preacher, Fr Carty or Question 831, Radio Replies,
Vol 1). This seems like magic but
The
insistence on confession is occultism.
It also suggests that Protestants who do not have confession know in
their hearts that they might not be forgiven at all despite the promise of
Christ which would make them to be self-deceiving hypocrites. What kind of Church would tell a dying man,
woman or child that their salvation is not very certain when the priest won’t
be able to make it in time? The Church
may not say that to them when they are lying there dying but it says it to them in life.
Roman priests say, "I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit." The Church teaches that to say, "I forgive you your sins in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" is illicit. This is not just because it is changing the words. It is because absolving and forgiving are not exactly the same thing. Absolving does not necessarily forgive. It only declares that a person is hopefully freed from their sins. Whether they are or not depends on whether or not they are repentant for the right reasons. Forgiving does necessarily forgive. The Church says that only God can forgive. Yet it still says priests forgive sins.
Only one place in the Bible seems to unambiguously agree with Catholicism that priests can remit sins, John 20:23, where the risen Jesus tells the disciples, “Receive the Holy Spirit! [Now having received the Holy Spirit, and being led and directed by him] if you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of anyone, they are retained.” AMPLIFIED BIBLE.
But the doctrine that absolving and forgiving are not the same implies that here, Jesus is not giving the power to absolve at all. Thus the verse does not support Roman Catholic teaching. The only way the apostles could forgive sins is if they did more than just absolve but actually saw the person was ripe for forgiveness and forgive on that basis. It presupposes a supernatural knowledge of the penitent. Roman Priests do not have such powers of knowledge.
John 20:23, where the risen Jesus tells the disciples, “Receive the Holy Spirit! [Now having received the Holy Spirit, and being led and directed by him] if you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of anyone, they are retained.” Compare John 20:23 with John 15:7 and Matthew 18:19,20. There Jesus promise that whatever is prayed for in his name will be done and advises you to ask for whatever you will. This can be taken to be promising that you will get everything you ask for in prayer. But Jesus used language that seemed to say that but he certainly did not mean that. Jesus promised the disciples in Matthew 18 that whatever they tied up on earth would be tied up in Heaven and whatever they released on earth would be released in Heaven and then immediately after said that they would get whatever they pray for. He meant that whatever they tried to restrict or open up through prayer would be done. This is the context. When you think of all this and the parallels you see that John 20:23 is not the great text that proves Catholic doctrine that it seems to be.
The Catholic Church teaches that Jesus forgave sins by saying, "Your sins are forgiven." See Matthew 9. The Church says the gospel says Jesus forgave sins by saying that. But notice Jesus does not say, "I forgive sins" but "I declare your sins have been forgiven." Jesus is not saying he actually forgives sins as if he were God - he only says he realises God has forgiven the person and is assuring the person of that. In early Christian custom, forgiving sins means declaring that God has forgiven. It does not mean absolution. So "If you forgive the sins of any" does not support Roman teaching. Priests forgiving sins is totally unbiblical. The burden of proof is on the Roman priesthood to prove it can forgive sins. It cannot. Or if you prefer to say the burden of support is on the Roman priesthood to support the belief and make belief in their power justified it makes no difference. The Catholic priesthood makes a very very serious claim that it can't justify. Thus in going to priests for forgiveness one is going to men not God.
The John verse says nothing about the Catholic practice
of priests forgiving as if the penitent did wrong against them. There is no room for the idea that priests
can forgive as if they were the God that was offended by the sinner.
Jesus had to have meant: “If you cause God to forgive sins etc”, for you can’t mean, “You can forgive sins in God’s place as if you are God,” any more than you can say, “John loving his daughter is precisely the same as his wife loving her” for they are two different people and John can’t love for her. Jesus was talking about the apostles who forgivingly welcomed the sinner and prayed God to forgive the sinner that God would really forgive. That is not the same as Romanist absolution.
God is a
personal being with free will. He is not if a priest can control God's forgiving power
and make him forgive when he says. God
cannot consent to such treatment for it is him ceasing to be God and a free
person. The Catholic doctrine is totally
blasphemous. Only one gospel seems to
teach the blasphemy and if it does the gospel should be eliminated from the New
Testament as a fake scripture of human and not divine origin. The rule of scripture is that at least two
independent firsthand witnesses are necessary and with such an important and possibly
dangerous and immoral doctrine you would need more than one gospel
testimony.
The Catholic Church does not teach that it priests just
give God’s forgiveness in confession. It does more
than that. It claims they forgive in the
person of God for Christ said, “If you forgive the sins of any” and the Church
says, “I absolve”. That is why its claim
to the Protestants that when they believe that baptism in water takes away sin
they should not disparage the Catholic sacrament of absolution for there is no
significant difference is trickery.
Many
Protestants teach that God forgives sin in baptism not the
minister. The minister is not forgiving sins but
only giving a rite in which God has agreed to administer forgiveness. Catholicism teaches that the
priest forgives sin in the sacrament of absolution, it means that he is making
a decision for God as if he were God. It
is different. Its appeal to baptism is a
plot to prevent Protestants from seeing how horrific and blasphemous the
Catholic teaching is. The difference is
plainly that in baptism God forgives sin directly himself which is the only way
sins can be forgiven for if you are not God you cannot forgive sin directly for
him. But in absolution it is the priest
that forgives directly.
If Jesus said, “Make a square circle”, you would not
take him literally and you would know he did not mean it literally. Making a square circle is as impossible as
forgiving sins against God as if you were God when you are not. So because a priest cannot give God’s
forgiveness but only lets himself be part of the circumstances in confession
when God resolves to forgive sins and that is the nearest one can get to
forgiving sins it follows that Jesus must have meant to allow God to
forgive. If he meant Catholic type
sacramental absolution, he did not mean the priest would directly forgive for
only God can do that for the forgiveness is God’s. So it was indirect.
If it is indirect, then if you cause God to forgive
sins you can cause this without performing absolution. So what Jesus said could mean what the
Protestants say it meant: “Forgive sins by preaching repentance by the power of
the Spirit for all who repent by the grace of God will be pardoned” for that is
indirect pardon.
In Catholicism, it is a man forgiving sin so to use
Catholic style forgiveness is to live without the forgiveness of God. If you commit a crime and seek a pardon from
the king a pardon from your next door neighbour will be ineffective. Roman Catholicism then by having men
forgiving sins instead of God is anti-God and anti-Christ. It is pure bigotry to base all that absolving
on one Bible verse and especially one that is so ambivalent. This cult is being irresponsible. The Catholic who thinks he or she is getting
forgiveness from God in confession is wrong and misunderstands the doctrine for
it comes from the priest. The priest
forgives for God and makes God’s decision like God can’t make his own.
Some think that Jesus was telling the apostles that
those they had decided to forgive are now forgiven by God and that those whose
sins they retained or held unforgiven were not.
So he was not giving them any power but making a statement of fact. He breathed the Spirit into them so that they
would go to the forgiven and bring them the gospel message. This means that
rather than Jesus giving them a power it was a once off thing. The “those who sins you forgive or retain”
referred not to anybody they wished to forgive but only to those they
perceived, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who had been forgiven
already. To accept former pagans and
sinners into the Church is to forgive them but not to forgive them as if you
were God – an idea that Jesus never hinted was right. The gift was Jesus helping the disciples
organise the Church and choose the right people to form it to get it started
off. Evidence for this view is that the
Church hadn’t been doing absolutions and yet Jesus said, “If you forgive the
sins of any they are forgiven.” Had he
meant absolution he would have said, “If you WILL forgive anybody their sins
WILL be forgiven.” However whatever
Jesus meant it is certain that when he didn’t use the future tense that he had
no intention of having his apostles doing Catholic style priestly absolutions.
Perhaps Jesus meant, “The Holy Spirit gives you the
supernatural power to look into the heart of rebel who asks your forgiveness
(for he who insults God insults his Church too and needs her forgiveness) to be
admitted back into fellowship with you and the Church to see if he is
sincere. When you sense by clairvoyance
that he is, you forgive him and I forgive him at the same time. When you see that he is not you retain his
sin and so do I.” The forgiving and
retaining done by the apostles – and to be done by apostles only - and by God
may coincide but the apostles are not making the decisions about how God is to forgive
like Catholic priests.
The apostles needed the charism to prevent scandal
to get the Church off to a good start.
Bringing in covert heretics could strangle the truth in many and plenty
of these would have been seeking admission having been paid off to discredit
the Church. And the Bible acknowledges
that a good God could give the gift for he says he did. It says he made his apostles know what was in
the hearts of others which nobody with normal powers can know (Acts 5:3; 8:20;
Galatians 6:13). The fact that the
apostles did not know what to make of Paul (Acts 9) shows that God sometimes
made exceptions for his own secret purpose.
Exceptions prove the rule but Paul never asked for their
forgiveness. Once the Church got off to
a start for the clairvoyance was taken away.
Catholics may object that they had no such gift for it is needed today
but they forget that God knows what is best and does the unexpected.
In the Greek originals of John the words translated
pardoned and unforgiven are in the perfect tense who means an act completed in
the past whose effects still exist.
Literally Jesus said, “Those who sins you forgive have been forgiven”
(page 12, Roman Catholicism What is Final Authority?). He is telling them that they will forgive
whoever God has forgiven and not to forgive sins in the Catholic
understanding. The Catholic idea is just
too absurd, a person forgiving sins as if he were God, to have been meant.
This interpretation fits the view that the verse is
really just about not giving God’s forgiveness but Church forgiveness or
disciplinary forgiveness. It could still mean that even if it said if you
forgive the sins of any they are forgiven.
The fact that when somebody sinned, because the early Church couldn’t
see if they had sincerely turned to God for mercy and received it or not, the
person was not considered a proper member of the Church but left out of many
things and compelled to do penance until the bishop reconciled them to the
Church at the end of their probation.
Jesus in Matthew 18:17 commanded that the Church must not forgive or
have any friendly relations with unrepentant sinners. So if John 20:23 means disciplinary
forgiveness, then Jesus was authorising the practice. He is saying he will sanction the decision
the Church makes on earth. He is not
saying it will necessarily make the right decisions all the time but he
recognises the need for his Church to make some decisions based on its own
judgement and in accordance with the principles he gave. He is saying then, “If you forgive the sins
of any in this disciplinary way I forgive them that way too. If you retain their sins I retain them
too.” This makes more sense than saying
he meant he could enable them to forgive sins as if they were God for only God
can pardon sins.
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 pardon is to forgive.
In the original Greek, the Bible says that if the
apostles forgive the sins of any and any being plural they are forgiven (Ordination,
Rev Willie Bridcut, Irish Church Missions).
Jesus had no reason to use the plural.
The single would do. Unless the
plural would imply that if a group of people were forgiven they are
forgiven. The plural does not
necessarily imply that the single will be forgiven for the apostles were busy men. And busy men like them have the job of
reconciling break-offs from the Church to the Church and deal with groups. So the forgiveness was only meant for
schismatic or sinful factions in the Church not for individuals. The verse then does not support Catholic
style secret confession or individual absolution. It forbids them.
If the apostles and whoever else was in that room
that day got the power to forgive sins that does not mean they could have
passed that power on. There is no
evidence that the infant Church practiced absolution – even Ignatius who wanted
to put bishops on a pedestal never spoke of bishops being able to pardon
sins. Such a doctrine would have been
his delight.
The Catholic interpretation of John that it
authorises priests to decide who should be forgiven by God is unlawful for
there is no need to go that far. We must
take the simplest interpretation which is that the author did not have the
Catholic doctrine in mind.
A reserved sin is a sin that a priest cannot
forgive, you have to go to the bishop or even the pope. If the priest absolves anyway the absolution
won’t work. The Church says that if you
go to an apostle or bishop for absolution you are going to be saying you are
sorry whether you mean it or not so retaining sins in John 20:23 must mean more
than just refusing absolution to the impenitent and must mean reserving sins.
There can be no doubt that if John 20:23 authorises the evil Catholic practice
of retaining sins as reserved or having reserved sins then the Gospel should be
excised from the New Testament. The Church
says that when Jesus said the apostles retain sins he wanted the bishop to
reserve some sins to himself that nobody but a bishop could absolve and the
pope reserves the sin of defiling the Holy Eucharist by tramping on the host
deliberately and that to himself so only he can forgive it. This practice is wholly evil and contradicts
the gospels where Jesus keeps saying come to me now and don’t delay. In
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? We would
have to hold that the interpretation of the verse saying he gave judicial
authority 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.
Nowadays the Catholic Church gives general
absolution without confession in cases of necessity. Yet its own interpretation of John’s words
imply that the priest has to hear the case before he can forgive for he is in
the position of judge and has to decide if the penitence is real or
feigned. It doesn’t take the
interpretation very seriously does it and the interpretation is supposed to be
infallible. And the official doctrine
still is that the priest has to examine the evidence and judge (page 13, Penance,
Sacrament of Reconciliation).
The priest has to spend ages with each penitent
trying to judge their guilt, the degree of guilt and the sincerity of their
sorrow. When you sin it is only a
symptom of many other sins. For example,
if I confess to an act of adultery, a mortal sin, with a woman who is not my
wife. It is not enough to confess
that. I have to confess the first time I
felt the attraction when and why I decided to do something about it. When I first kissed her and what happened
after for there is a whole series of sins surrounding it. Normally small sins that I commit to
encourage the adultery to happen are thereby turned into mortal sins for
adultery is a serious matter. So if
Jesus meant to start a sacrament based on confession and absolution we reach
some ridiculous and harmful conclusions.
It means that the apostles and their delegates who he commissioned to
preach the gospel first and foremost were to be bogged down with this sacrament
in those precarious and difficult early days.
The absurdity of Jesus doing this proves that the Roman Catholic
interpretation of the verse from the John gospel is wrong.
Allowing confession without absolution which has
happened in the Vatican II Church is anti-Catholic and heretical. It denies the meaning of the sacrament. If the sacrament is judicial no exceptions
can be made to the confession rule under any circumstances no matter how
grave. It is just like if you can’t give
a person a fair trial then you must give them no trial at all. The real reason the popes allow this
absolution in mission countries is because their rules about priests having to
be unmarried males who follow the mind of the pope completely means that only a
tiny number of dysfunctional men can become priests so there aren’t enough to
go round. They know this looks bad so
they pretend to care about allowing the forgiveness of sins to be
provided. But the power of controlling
these men and making sure they have nothing in life to mean anything to them
but the Church is too much for them to resist.
It gets a hundred times worse when one realises that
the idea that venial sin exists is foreign to the Bible which says that even
sins that do little or almost no harm are still serious hell-deserving offences
– mortal sins.
For a man to decide whom God is going to forgive
would be intolerable to God. God could
not allow it even if he wanted to and if Jesus said he did he would have
committed the only slip necessary to show he was a fraud and not from God
according to the strict decree given by God in Deuteronomy 18. God would not refuse to pardon a person just
because a priest or apostle did not consent to it.
For a priestly sinner who may be worse than the
penitent to judge that penitent seems totally contrary to the Sermon on the
Mount which forbade self-righteous judgement of other people. Some say that it is not sinful or wrong
because the priest can judge for the person’s good and wish he was as holy as
the person is becoming. But it is
hypocrisy for anybody bad to praise a good or better person for he is saying,
“I approve of the hard work you did to become good but I am glad it was you and
not me”. That is really saying you don’t
like goodness and that it is bad for you but you are glad for somebody else to
have this badness of goodness.” The
praise is false and deceptive and vicious and it is still judgemental. Jesus never said it was sometimes okay for an
evil person to judge an evil person. He
denounced it across the board. And he
was right. The bad person who judges
somebody as good is actually more malicious than the one who judges somebody as
bad as themselves. At least the latter
is not denouncing goodness.
“If you forgive the sins of any”. The if means, on the condition that. If John had meant absolution in the Catholic
sense he would have been careful to prevent people thinking that the only way
to forgiveness after that was by absolution.
He was not so he did not mean the Catholic understanding for even Catholics
do not go that far.
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”?
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.
Conclusion
Priests forgiving sins is just another Roman
Catholic doctrine that emerged from its control freak antics despite being in
contradiction to the Bible.
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS CATHOLICS ARE ASKING Tony Coffey, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 2006
A PATH FROM
BLESS ME FATHER FOR I
HAVE SINNED, Quentin Donoghue, Linda Shapiro, McClelland and Stewart,
CATECHISM OF THE
CONFESSION OF A ROMAN
CATHOLIC, Paul Whitcomb, Tan,
CONFESSION QUIZZES TO A STREET PREACHER, Frs Rumble
and Carty, TAN,
CONFESSION, WHY WE GO,
James Tolhurst, Faith Pamphlets,
DIFFICULTIES, Mgr Ronald
Knox and
ENCHIRIDION SYMBOLORUM ET
DEFINITIONUM, Heinrich Joseph Denzinger, Edited by A Schonmetzer,
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
THEOLOGY, Edited by Karl Rahner, Burns and Oates,
GOING TO CONFESSION
TODAY, Patrick McCarthy CC, Irish Messenger Publications,
LIFE IN CHRIST, PART 3,
Fergal McGrath S.J., MH Gill and Son Ltd,
LIVING IN CHRIST, A
Dreze SJ, Geoffrey Chapman, London-Melbourne 1969
NEW CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA, The Catholic University of
America and the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., Washington, District of
Columbia, 1967
ORDINATION, Rev Willie Bridcut,
PEACE OF SOUL,
PENANCE CONSIDERED
Michael S Bostock,
PENANCE SACRAMENT OF
RECONCILIATION, Kevin McNamara, Archbishop of
ROMAN
CATHOLICISM WHAT IS FINAL AUTHORITY?
Harold J Berry, Back to the Bible,
SALVATION, THE BIBLE AND
ROMAN CATHOLICISM, William Webster, Banner of Truth,
SECRETS OF ROMANISM,
Joseph Zacchello, Loizeaux Brothers,
THE
THE CODE OF CANON LAW,
Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland, William Collins and William B
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983
THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS, James Cardinal Gibbons, Forty Ninth Edition, John Murphy and Co Publishers, Baltimore, London, New York, 1897 (TAN Books keep this book in print)
THE QUESTION AND ANSWER CATHOLIC
CATECHISM, John A Hardon SJ, Image Books, Doubleday and Company,
THE SECRET OF CATHOLIC
POWER, LH Lehmann, Protestant Truth Pamphlets, Agora Publishing Company,
THE STUDENT’S CATHOLIC
DOCTRINE, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates,
TRADITIONAL DOCTRINES OF
THE
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HEAVEN? Dave Hunt, Harvest
House,
BIBLE VERSIONS USED
The Amplified Bible