← The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
Day 200: The Confession of Sins (2025)
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When we confess our sins, we’re not telling God something he doesn’t know; we’re giving God access to something he doesn’t have: permission to heal our wounds. Today we learn why the act of confessing our sins is an essential part of the sacrament of Reconciliation. Fr. Mike also clarifies the difference between absolution, penance, and satisfaction. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 1455-1460.
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Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us revealed in Scripture and passed down through the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a Year is brought to you by ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity and God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is day two of out of 365. Congratulations. We are reading paragraphs 1455 to 1460. As always, I am using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the Foundations of Faith approach. You can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own Catechism in a Year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.comciy for these last 165 days. And you can click follow or subscribe on your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications. Also, quick thank you. It's been 200 days. 200amazing, blessed, incredible days. And I cannot begin to thank all of the people who have prayed for each other, prayed for me, prayed for all of the people who are producing this podcast, those who have offered financial gifts so we can keep making this podcast for free. Honestly, could not do this without you. Couldn't get to day 200, much less day 365 without you. Thank you so much. We have been talking about the sacrament of healing, sacrament of forgiveness, the sacrament of reconciliation. Yesterday we talked about the acts of the penitent, right that we have to have contrition. Now there are two more acts of the penitent, two more things that we all bring to confession. It's not only contrition, that sorrow for sins and a determination to resolve, to turn away from sin, but also, secondarily, the confession of sins. We actually have to disclose our sins. And thirdly, satisfaction. At some point, we desire to make reparation. At some point we recognize that our sin has cost something. And sometimes that thing is a physical thing, sometimes it's a material thing, right? Where, okay, I need to make satisfaction. If I stole from 50 bucks from Bob, I need. I owe Bob 50 bucks. Even though I've been forgiven, I still have to make restitution as much as I possibly can. If I've hurt someone emotionally, if I've damaged the reputation, I need to strive to do something to make that right. And if I've hurt myself like I've Hurt my. I wounded my soul. Well, we do penance as a way to heal the soul, not as it was so much a way to embrace punishment as much as it is to embrace healing. We'll talk about that today. So as we launch into today, let's call upon our God and. And pray in his presence. Call upon his name and pray. Father in heaven, we thank you. We thank you so much for this day. We thank you for leading us and walking us through these teachings of your holy Catholic Church that you established in Jesus Christ and have continued to guide by the power of the Holy Spirit. Please, Lord, help us today to once again approach your teaching, the teaching of your church, not as simply more data gathering, not just simply as another kind of item of interest, something to learn, but something to penetrate our hearts and minds and transform the way we live. Lord God, let this be transformation. Let this be an opportunity for conversion. In this day particularly, I ask you to please move all the hearts of those who have been away from confession for a long time. Help all of us to bring our sins before you, to trust you, to trust your mercy, to trust your love, and to trust the grace of your sacrament. We make this prayer in the mighty name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. It is day 200 and we are reading paragraphs 1455-1460. The confession of sins. The confession or disclosure of sins, even from a simply human point of view, frees us and facilitates our reconciliation with others. Through such an admission, man looks squarely at the sins he is guilty of, takes responsibility for them, and thereby opens himself again to God and to the communion of the Church in order to make a new future possible. Confession to a priest is an essential part of the sacrament of penance as the Council of Trent. All mortal sins of which penitents, after a diligent self examination, are conscious, must be recounted by them in confession, even if they are the most secret and have been committed against the last two precepts of the decalogue. For these sins sometimes wound the soul more grievously and are more dangerous than those which are committed openly. When Christ's faithful strive to confess all the sins that they can remember, they undoubtedly place all of them before the Divine mercy for pardon. But those who fail to do so and knowingly withhold some place nothing before the divine goodness for remission through the mediation of the priest. For if the sick person is too ashamed to show his wound to the doctor, the medicine cannot Heal what it does not know according to the Church's command. After having attained the age of discretion, each of the faithful is bound by an obligation faithfully to confess serious sins at least once a year. Anyone who is aware of having committed a mortal sin must not receive Holy Communion, even if he experiences deep contrition without having first received sacramental absolution, unless he has a grave reason for receiving Communion and there is no possibility of going to confession. Children must go to the Sacrament of Penance before receiving Holy Communion for the first time without being strictly necessary. Confession of everyday faults is nevertheless strongly recommended by the Church. Indeed, the regular confession of our venial sins helps us form our conscience, fight against evil tendencies, let ourselves be healed by Christ, and progress in the life of the Spirit. By receiving more frequently through this sacrament the gift of the Father's mercy, we are spurred to be merciful as he is merciful as St. Augustine. Whoever confesses his sins is already working with God. God indicts your sins. If you also indict them, you are joined with God. Man and sinner are, so to speak, two realities. When you hear man, this is what God has made. When you hear sinner, this is what man himself has made. Destroy what you have made so that God may save what he has made. When you begin to abhor what you have made, it is then that your good works are beginning, since you are accusing yourself of your evil works. The beginning of good works is the confession of evil works. You do the truth and come to the light. Satisfaction. Many sins wrong our neighbor. One must do what is possible in order to repair the harm. For example, return stolen goods, restore the reputation of someone slandered, pay compensation for injuries. Simple justice requires as much. But sin also injures and weakens the sinner himself, as well as his relationships with God and neighbor. Absolution takes away sin, but it does not remedy all the disorders sin has caused. Raised up from sin, the sinner must still recover his full spiritual health by doing something more to make amends for this sin. He must make satisfaction for or expiate his sins. This satisfaction is also called penance. The penance the confessor imposes must take into account the penitent's personal situation and must seek his spiritual good. It must correspond as far as possible with the gravity and nature of the sins committed. It can consist of prayer, an offering, works of mercy, service of neighbor, voluntary self denial, sacrifices, and above all, the patient acceptance of the cross. We must bear. Such penances, help configure us to Christ, who alone expiated our sins once for all. They allow us to become coheirs with the risen Christ, provided we suffer with him as the Council of Trent. The satisfaction that we make for our sins, however, is not so much ours as though it were not done through Jesus Christ. We who can do nothing ourselves, and as if just by ourselves, can do all things with the co operation of him who strengthens us. Thus man has nothing of which to boast. But all our boasting is in Christ, in whom we make satisfaction by bringing forth fruits that befit repentance. These fruits have their efficacy from him, by him they are offered to the Father, and through him they are accepted by the Father. Alright, there we have it. Day 200 all about confession of sins and satisfaction, paragraphs 1455-1460. Where to even begin? Well, it starts with contrition, right? It starts with this sorrow for sin. And a desire to turn back to the Lord has to be expressed through the disclosure of our sins, the confession of our sins. And I love how the catechism reminds us that even from simply human point of view, confession or disclosure of the brokenness frees us and facilitates our reconciliation with others. I mean, think about any human relationship at some point, if there's just hiding, if there's just deception, if there's this wound that exists and no one's going to talk about it, then there's no possibility for forgiveness, there's no possibility for reconciliation. Therefore, what we have to do, just simply as human beings, is we have to disclose our sins. Now one of the things that people can argue at sometimes is like, why doesn't God already know all my sins? Why would I have to say them in confession? Well, first of all we would say, of course God knows all your sins. Yes, definitely, God knows everything. When we go to confession, we're not telling God something he doesn't know. We are giving him access to something he doesn't have. In fact, there's this quote from St. Jerome that Council of Trent quoted, that the catechism quoted today, where it says, if the sick person is too ashamed to show his wounds to the doctor, the medicine cannot heal what it does not know. That sense that here we are, we have to be willing to give God access to our wounds. We have to be willing to give God access to our sickness, to our sin. And if we're not willing to give him access, then no matter how much God knows, no matter how much he knows the entire story, way better than even we know, if we don't allow him to transform our hearts with his mercy, with his forgiveness, with his grace, then he can't. In fact, that is why the one sin that is unforgivable, right, the sin against the Holy Spirit, as Jesus describes it, the one sin against the Holy Spirit, the one unforgivable sin is any sin that we do not allow God to forgive. It's the refusal to allow God to forgive our sins. It's the refusal, in some ways, you could say, to disclose our sins to the Heavenly Father who forgives us through the power of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, right? So this realization. So what we need to do, of course, in 1456 is not merely reconcile with our brother and our sister. That's important. But confession to a priest is an essential part of the sacrament of penance. And what do we have to confess? Well, very clearly, all mortal sins that we are aware of. We have to confess all mortal sins. So what are the requirements for a sin to be mortal? You might know this already. It has to be grave matter, right? The content of the sin is grave. Secondly, I have to know that it's a grave sin. And thirdly, I have to freely choose to do it. So these are the three elements or three aspects of what constitutes a mortal sin. Grave matter, serious sin. I knew it was a serious sin and I freely chose to do it anyways. Why are these important? Well, they're all important because a venial sin or a minor sin, you might say, like in some ways, like this or everyday sin, not all sins are grave. In fact, St. John talks about this. He says there are some sins that lead to death and there are some sins that don't lead to death. We call those mortal sins and venial sins. There are some sins that are grave and there are some sins that are less grave. If I don't know a sin is grave, if I don't know a sin is that category of serious sin, then am I really committing it in the sense that that sounds more like an accident, right? If I didn't know this, I was unaware I was ignorant. Now there's such a thing as vincible ignorance and invincible ignorance. There's the ignorance that I should have known, but. And there's the ignorance that's like, I had no way of knowing this. No one ever told me. For example, we've talked about this a couple times now. Maybe you didn't know that if you're conscious of mortal sin, that we ought not to. We must not receive Holy Communion until We go to confession first. Now, that is a consistent teaching of the Church for, you know, forever. And yet you might not have known that. And it might have been like, no, you didn't harden your heart to that. You didn't try to avoid that teaching. You just didn't know. Well, in that case, yes, the sin has been committed. But I'm not culpable of that sin, right? Yes, that's a grave matter. That's a big deal sin. But I'm not, I'm not responsible for that sin because I didn't even know. It was more like an accident. It was more like a mistake. So first, grave matter. Secondly, I knew it was grave matter. I knew it was a big deal sin. The third thing is I freely chose to do it anyways. So let's go back to like the whole issue of Sunday Mass attendance. Sunday Mass attendance is a big deal. If I intentionally skip Mass or exempt myself from Sunday Mass, that is a mortal sin. But what if here, you're living in northern Minnesota, for example, I don't know anyone who lives up there, up here in northern Minnesota, and you go out to your car to get to mass on, on a Sunday and you're like, I'm going to go to the 6pm Mass on Sunday, no big deal, no problem. And you get out there and your car won't start and you do everything you possibly can. You call a neighbor that was not working. You see if anyone else is going to mass, doesn't work, and you're, you're basically prohibited from going to Mass. Or maybe a more common example for people around the world is, yeah, you're getting ready to go to Mass and all of a sudden you have a child and the child starts throwing up all over the place. Or you have a baby and your baby is sick. In those cases, yes, you didn't go to Mass. But in that case, you're not freely choosing to do this. You're not freely saying, you're not saying. Remember the definition of sin. God, I know what you want me to do. I don't care. I want to do what I want to do. In the cases of a sick child, you're there to care for your sick child. That's not the same thing as saying, oh, you know, it's cold outside, I don't want to, I'm not going to go to Mass. You know what I should do instead? I should go to Walmart or something like that. We'll talk more about that when we get to the actual decalogue and the commandment about honoring the Lord and keeping holy the Sabbath. But just as an example, when it comes to mortal sins, we have to confess all mortal sins that we know of. And mortal sins involve grave matter. They involve full knowledge and free consent of the will. And so that's, that's the piece. We are obliged to reveal all of those sins that we know. And I love how the Council of Trent states this. It says, when Christ is faithful, strive to confess all the sins that they can remember, they undoubtedly place all of them before the divine mercy for pardon. But those who fail to do so and knowingly withhold some place nothing before the divine goodness for the remission through the mediation of the priest. That's important for us to understand because the temptation is, okay, I'm going to confess these sins, but, ah, that's an embarrassing sin. I'm not going to say that one, I'll confess these sins, but that one over there, I'm going to hold on to. What the Church is saying here is if I confess all these other mortal sins, but I knowingly withhold even one, ultimately I'm really placing nothing before God's mercy. I'm not forgiven essentially of any of them. Why? Because if I'm going to go back home, I have to go back home. Like, really, if. Remember the reference to the parable of the Prodigal Son the other day? The Son returns to the Father. He doesn't kind of keep a place in this far off land and say, I'm going to go back over there. He returns to his Father fully. He lives in his Father's house. And so if we're going to come back home, we have to actually come back home. If we're going to return to the Father, we have to actually return to the Father. And I have to reveal all the sins, all the mortal sins that I'm aware of. We have to do all of them or else I'm revealing none of them. Now, if I didn't knowingly withhold, but I just accidentally forgot that I meant to confess this sin, that sin, and the other sin, but I forgot the second one. All the sins are forgiven. Yet when I go to confession, the next time I should bring that sin and say, oh, Father, by the way, I forgot to mention this sin in my last confession because there's a huge difference, right? One is, I'm withholding this, I'm not letting God have access to it. The other one is I simply forgot that. And one is, I'm hardening my heart, God, I know what you want, but I don't care. I want what I want. The other is God. I know what you want. And I want to do it all. But I'm weak. I'm forgetful. I sometimes don't do it perfectly. And God makes up for our weakness. He makes up for our lack. But he can't or he won't. He won't unharden a hardened heart. He won't force his way in. Does that make sense? Hopefully that makes sense. Okay, a couple last things before we move on. Paragraph 1458 has this beautiful quote by St. Augustine, and I love this. Whoever confesses his sins is already working with God. God indicts your sins. If you also indict them, you're joined with God. And I love this. He uses these terms, man and sinner. He says, man and sinner are, so to speak, two realities. When you hear man, that's what God has made. When you hear sinner, that's what man himself has made. So destroy what you have made so that God may save what he has made. I love. That's incredible. So beautiful. The last thing here is satisfaction. We recognize, we mentioned this in the intro, that whenever I have sinned against my neighbor, I must do what is possible in order to repair the harm. So the examples they give here in 1459, if I've stolen something, return stolen goods. If I've hurt the reputation of someone, restore the reputation as best I can. If someone's been injured, to pay compensation for the injuries that I've given to them. And that's simple justice. In fact, the catechism says simple justice requires that much. So keep that in mind. I'm not going above and beyond. If I take something from someone, if I injure someone and I pay them back or try to make restitution, that's not above and beyond. That is simple justice. At the same time, my sin always injures myself. My sin always weakens my own soul, as well as my relationship with God and other people. Therefore, I have to do something to restore that. Now, keep this in mind. Absolution takes away all sins, yes, but there's always the consequence of sin. We all have to endure the consequence. Sometimes that consequence is outside of ourselves. So, yeah, I said that really cruel and mean thing to my friend, and now I may be forgiven, but there's a consequence there. I can say, oh, oh, friend, I went to confession. It's okay, I'm forgiven. Like, okay. But no, no, we have to work to restore what I broke when I said that cruel Thing. So absolution takes away the sins, but there's consequences we experience. The example that I always like to think of is imagine you had a torn ACL or some kind of, you know, injury that no matter how much rehab you do, it will not heal on its own. So what do you have to have? You have to have this invasive surgery. So you have a torn knee and I have this invasive surgery. Now my knee is fixed, right? My knee has. The acl, has been reattached to the knee. Awesome. Great. So something that I could not do myself has been done for me, right? That's like I go to confession and Jesus, by his power, by his grace, he heals me, he forgives me in a way that I could not do on my own. At the same time, if you've ever had surgery like this, you know, you can't automatically go back onto the basketball court or go for a run. You have to do physical therapy. Now, yes, your knee has been healed, the surgery has been successful. But in order to be able to run again, in order to be able to jump again, you have to get strong again. Sin wounds us in such a way that only God's grace can heal us. That's in the sacrament of reconciliation. But we've also been wounded in such a way that now I walk with a limp, that now I love with a limp, let's say it like that. And so what we do is when we're given the sacrament and reconciliation, we're given a penance to do. And that penance is not meant to be punishment. That penance is meant to be remedial. It's meant to strengthen the knee, right? It's meant to strengthen us so that we can run again, so that we can have that relationship reestablished in an even stronger way than it was before. Again, absolution takes away the sins. We're healed. But oftentimes we experience the consequences of our sins. And that's what the penance is for. And it says here in 1460, that the penance the confessor imposes must take into account the penitent's personal situation and must seek his spiritual good. Goes on to say, it must correspond as far as possible with the gravity and nature of the sins committed. And so, yes, that's, that's the ideal. And a lot of times we know that the real is not always that. For example, maybe you go to confession and you confess some big deal sin that you didn't realize is a big deal sin. And the priest says, okay, three our fathers and then the next time you go to confession and you confess something that's much more minor, maybe you're confessing your venial sins and he says, okay, Three Our Fathers, you're like, wait a second. That doesn't really correspond with the, the severity or the seriousness of the first set of sins versus the second set of sins. Ultimately, the priest ought to take into account the personal situation and seek the spiritual good. It should correspond as far as possible with the gravity and nature of the sins committed. So you might have, you know, someone comes and they confess something along the lines of something that has wounded their own trust in the Lord, something like that. Or maybe they come and they, they bring sins of pride to confession. It would make sense to say, okay, I want you to, I would like you to pray the litany of humility. That makes sense, right? Because if I, if I'm confessing pride, well, how about this? Grow in humility. If it's a matter of, yeah, I've been really short tempered with my family members. A penance could be, I would like you, but before the end of the day, as far as possible, to say three kind things to your family members. Something like that, right. I'm just making this up as I'm going along, but it should correspond as far as possible with the gravity and nature of sins. Because, right. If I've had knee surgery, the physical therapist is not going to work on my elbow, they're going to work on the knee. If I've been wounded in the area of lust, then my penance should work on the area of love. If I've been wounded in the area of anger and I've acted out in anger, then my penance should consist of maybe patience, right? Does that make sense? That's the goal. Again, the way it actually shakes out in real life isn't always that way. Sometimes us priests are less than creative when it comes to our penances. And sometimes it's just, you know, what we're trying to do is take into account the fact that here's a person, they are asking for God's mercy. I don't want to add any extra burden to them. Instead, I just want them to be able to be free. For example, when I mentioned the other day when I went to confession and the priest said, okay, your penance. He gave me my penance if it was super easy. And his penance he, he took on himself, was fasting for 30 days. He was communicating to me, I want you to trust in the Lord's mercy more Than I want you to maybe fool yourself into thinking you're earning his mercy. Right? Sometimes we can be convinced of, like, if I have a really hard penance, then, yeah, I'm doing my best to earn this. And if the priest has a sense of, oh, the penitent here is trying to earn forgiveness, maybe they'll say, actually what I want you to do is simply, you know, pray one Hail Mary. Like, wait, I need something harder. Like, well, I think you have a tendency to devalue God's mercy and overvalue your work. If that's the case, maybe an easier, lighter penance would be the kind of thing that pierces the heart more to learn how to trust in God's freely given grace and trust less my own ability to kind of quote, unquote, earn that grace. Because we can't earn grace. Does that make sense? Anyways, this is. This is the point of paragraph 1460, and it says the satisfaction we make for our sins is not ours. As though it were done without Christ. We can do nothing ourselves. We do it all with Jesus, even our physical therapy. We do with Jesus. Wow, you guys, today, another long day. When you get me started on confession, you guys, I don't even know when to stop because it is an incredible sacrament. And I want everyone to know not only the overarching, the heart of confession, but also the nuts and bolts. So the next time you go to confession, you and I can experience just absolute grace, freedom, no fear, and be able to lay down every one of our sins before our Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, who loves you and loves me so much. I am praying for you. Please pray for me. My name is Father Mike. I cannot wait to see you tomorrow. God bless.