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Why Confess to a Priest Instead of Directly to God?

The Short Answer

Catholics agree that only God forgives sins. They confess to a priest because they believe Christ chose to share that power with His apostles and their successors, saying: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:23). The priest does not forgive by his own power; Christ forgives through him. Confession was practised by the early Church, and it meets a deep human need: to name our sins aloud and to hear, in words spoken to us, that we are forgiven.

Many Protestants see things differently. For them, any believer can confess directly to God and be forgiven through Christ, the one mediator, without any human go-between. That view comes from a sincere desire to honour Christ. Here is why Catholics believe He Himself gave us Confession.

What the Church Does and Does Not Claim

The Church does not claim:

The Church does claim that although only God forgives sins, Christ “entrusted the exercise of the power of absolution to the apostolic ministry” (CCC 1442), and that confessing one’s sins to a priest “is an essential element of this sacrament” (CCC 1424).

Why Catholics Believe It

1. Jesus gave His apostles the power to forgive sins

On the evening of His Resurrection, Jesus appeared to the apostles, breathed on them and said: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:22–23).

This is a real power, given to particular men. And it has two sides: to forgive and to retain. The apostles could not decide whether to forgive or retain someone’s sins without knowing what those sins were. The power to judge implies that sins are made known.

Earlier, Jesus had given Peter, and then all the apostles, the power to “bind” and “loose”: “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:19; 18:18). The Church has always understood this to include the forgiveness of sins (CCC 1444).

2. Jesus forgave sins as man, and shared that authority

When Jesus told a paralysed man that his sins were forgiven, the scribes objected: “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7). Jesus did not deny it. He healed the man to show “that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mark 2:10).

Matthew adds a striking detail. When the crowds saw it, “they glorified God, who had given such authority to men” (Matthew 9:8). The authority to forgive is God’s alone, but God gave it to be exercised on earth, through a man, and the crowd saw it as given to “men.”

3. The apostles understood their ministry this way

St Paul writes that God “gave us the ministry of reconciliation” and that “we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us” (2 Corinthians 5:18, 20). The forgiveness is God’s; the ministry is entrusted to the apostles.

St James tells the sick to “call for the elders of the church,” the presbyters, to pray over them, adding: “if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another” (James 5:14–16). The confession of sins is linked here with the Church’s ordained ministers.

4. The early Christians practised confession

The Didache, a Christian manual from around the end of the first century, instructs: “In the church you shall acknowledge your transgressions” (4), and tells Christians to gather on the Lord’s day to break bread “after having confessed your transgressions, that your sacrifice may be pure” (14).

St Cyprian of Carthage, around 251, wrote: “I entreat you, beloved brethren, that each one should confess his own sin, while he who has sinned is still in this world, while his confession may be received, while the satisfaction and remission made by the priests are pleasing to the Lord” (On the Lapsed 29).

St Ambrose of Milan, around 390, answered the Novatians, who denied that the Church could forgive grave sins: “the Lord willed that the power of binding and of loosing should be alike,” and “this power has been entrusted to priests alone” (Concerning Repentance I.2.7).

The outward form of the sacrament has changed over the centuries, as we will see below. But the conviction that Christ gave the Church’s ministers the power to forgive sins, and that sins are to be confessed, runs from the beginning.

5. The Church’s teaching

The Council of Trent (1551) taught that Christ instituted the sacrament of Penance when He breathed on the apostles and gave them power to forgive and retain sins (John 20:22–23), and that these words are to be understood of that power, not merely of preaching the Gospel (Session XIV, canons 1 and 3). The Catechism sums up that “in imparting to his apostles his own power to forgive sins,” the Lord also gave them authority to reconcile sinners with the Church (CCC 1444).

6. What reason can say

God made us body and soul, and He saves us in a way suited to our nature. We are not pure spirits who can settle everything inside our heads. We need to say things aloud, and to hear things said to us.

Most people know this from ordinary life. It is one thing to feel sorry privately; it is another to say “I was wrong” to someone’s face, and to hear “I forgive you” in return. The Catechism notes that confession, “even from a simply human point of view, frees us” (CCC 1455). Confession gives the penitent what private prayer cannot: a definite moment, a clear word of absolution, and the certainty of having been forgiven by Christ through the minister He appointed.

Common Objections

”Only God can forgive sins.”

Catholics agree completely (CCC 1441). The question is not who forgives but how He chooses to do it. Jesus answered the same objection in Mark 2 by showing that He, as man, had authority on earth to forgive; and then He gave that authority to His apostles in John 20. When a priest says “I absolve you,” he speaks in Christ’s name and by Christ’s power, just as when he baptises.

”But the Bible says Christ is the only mediator between God and man.”

It does (1 Timothy 2:5), and the priest is not a second mediator alongside Christ. He is Christ’s instrument. By the same reasoning, preachers, missionaries and anyone who prays for others would be competing with Christ. St Paul did not think so: he called himself Christ’s ambassador, with God “making his appeal through us” (2 Corinthians 5:20). Christ remains the one mediator; He chooses to work through His ministers.

”James 5:16 says ‘confess your sins to one another’, not to a priest.”

The verse begins with “therefore,” linking it to what comes just before: calling “the elders of the church” to pray over the sick, with the promise that their sins will be forgiven (James 5:14–15). The Church reads the passage as a whole. And confessing to one another is not excluded by confessing to a priest; it is fulfilled in the sacrament Christ gave, in which a fellow Christian, ordained for the purpose, hears our confession.

”Confession was invented in the Middle Ages, at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.”

Lateran IV made it a church law that Catholics confess their serious sins at least once a year. It did not invent Confession. The Didache, St Cyprian and St Ambrose all speak of confession and of the priests’ power to forgive, centuries earlier.

It is true, and worth saying honestly, that the form of the sacrament developed. In the early centuries, serious public sins were often dealt with by a long, public penance, sometimes allowed only once in a lifetime. From around the sixth and seventh centuries, Irish and other monks spread the practice of frequent, private confession to a priest, which gradually became the norm. The form changed; the power Christ gave, and the confession of sins, did not.

”What if the priest himself is a sinner?”

Then he needs Confession too, and he goes. But the forgiveness does not depend on his holiness, because it is Christ who forgives. St Augustine made the same point about baptism: “that which was given by Paul, and that which was given by Peter, is Christ’s; and if baptism was given by Judas it was Christ’s” (Tractates on John 5.18).

In Summary

Only God forgives sins, and Catholics confess to Him directly every day. But Jesus, who forgave sins as man, breathed on His apostles and gave them power to forgive and to retain sins. The early Church confessed sins and trusted the priests’ ministry of reconciliation, and the Church has done so ever since. In Confession, Christ meets us as we are, body and soul, and lets us hear with our own ears that we are forgiven.

See also How Do I Go to Confession?, How Do I Examine My Conscience Before Confession? and Isn’t Communion Just a Symbol?

This article follows the method St Robert Bellarmine used in his Controversies*: state the question fairly, clear away misunderstandings, make the case, then answer each objection. The volume of the* Controversies on the sacraments includes Bellarmine’s own treatise on Penance. See How We Answer Objections.

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