Catholic Confession is Now Called the Ghost Sacrament

I read the book, For I Have Sinned, a couple of years ago and wrote about it. The book was recently reviewed and I enjoyed recalling my experience reading it. The book is sympathetic to the practice. The author experienced confessions. But he also recognizes it is not all that bad the practice has fallen in popularity and is done infrequently today. 

It borders on the ridiculous that any law-abiding citizen would think he/she has an obligation to tell private secrets to a member of the clergy. Why considered clergy better than anyone else? The world of religion is a place full of weird ideas.

The obvious part of this is priests who listened to and forgave sins of individuals in their folk did not confess to molesting children and having affairs with women while claiming to maintain celibacy. Probably Bishops who sent child busing priests to other parishes rather than to the police thought they were doing the right thing. There was no sin in protecting the reputation of the denomination, the risk to other children was nothing compared to the risk of harming God's favorite church.

There were various responses to sins confessed to the priests. To the priests it was long boring hours spent mostly listening to people babble on about nothing. I wonder how many priests brought a book into the booth to make the ordeal more tolerable. In the book, some priests said they ask questions about motives. Others advised just listening and forgiving the sins. If the wife cheats because the husband cheats or because the husband beats her might be going down a rabbit hole. Best was, "You are forgiven."

That other clergy were known to have done criminal things meant that as a group they no longer held the license to be Jesus' reps on earth. They are just guys making a living. The confession ritual is mostly a relic of the past.