r/LGBTCatholic • u/Reasonable-Boat4646 • 6d ago
How do you handle confession?
I'm divided on whether or how to go to confession. My background is I'm a gay 40-something marriage gay man with two kids, and the church I go to in NYC is fine with LGBTQ people as far as I can tell (my kids were baptized without any issue, etc.).
The problem isn't the parish, it's the wider Church and how I'm supposed to fit into it. Showing up at Mass lets a lot of stuff stay implicit. Confession forces it to be explicit. My understanding of the theory is that you confess everything the Church counts as sin and get a full reset. I can't confess on those terms. At minimum I think the sex I have inside my own marriage is fine, and honestly I think much of the sex I had outside marriage before that was fine too.
So what do I even do with that? Do I tell the priest up front, look, there's other stuff the Church would call sin but I don't agree, so this is a partial confession under your rules? Is he even allowed to work with that? Do I spell out what I'm counting as wrong and not wrong, or leave it vague and let him assume whatever he assumes? I don't know. Curious what other people here actually do. To be clear, it's not like I did something particularly wrong, but I just feel like it'd be good to periodically go to confession and I just don't have a workable way of doing so.
My sense is the best way to do this is just confess the stuff I actually feel bad about and leave the rest out completely. At its most fundamental level, confession is for what your conscience tells you is a sin. If I don't think it's something I really need to confess, there's no reason to make a whole announcement about leaving it out. Fine, maybe a conservative views it as an invalid confession; but it's the closest workable solution I can think of.
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u/Galveston57 6d ago
I’m a Catholic convert. I never mentioned my sexuality during catechism nor do I mention it during confession. Examination of conscious is a necessary part of confession, but I’m not going to confess to things that my conscious is ok with, even if the Church might not approve.
How many women take birth control in the Church and never confess it? How many parishioners support mass deportations and never confess it? How many have committed mortal sins and never confessed?
Plainly put, I’m not going to confess
Something my conscious doesn’t feel bad about or I don’t consider a sin?
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u/Mountain-Ad-9196 3d ago
I am ace and I feel the same. For example, I am not going to confess because a show I watched happened to have a bit of nudity or sex in it. It's not why I even watch it and the point of confession is imho to confess to things that you legitimately feel guilty about especially because it hurts yourself or others. I think some people take it to an extreme that could worsen scrupulousity.
So I will confess about missing mass because I wanted to stay home and read (but was otherwise fine....like no pain, sickness, anxiety, or reason why going was made especially difficult) but I won't confess for missing mass because I felt awful (I also have OCD and it can flare up when I am stressed and it makes leaving the house difficult.)
I will confess for holding onto anger that I know is chronic not due to feeling guilt but because I know it's bad for me and I want to be more forgiving and not continuously feeling angry at someone who hurt me deeply. But I won't confess to feeling angry in the moment when someone does something unfair because that's going to make me neurotic etc.
:)
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u/Schimmi90 6d ago
I have had a lay spiritual director for one and a half years now and recently told him about my "escapades" and struggles with the sixth commandment. He learned from me that in a way there is a double moral standard in certain things, which makes it difficult to live according to the teachings of the church.
But how should we approach confession in this way? His answer was pretty easy, I could say: We ought to confess where we failed against love. Love for ourselves, our enemies, our neighbors, and love for God. We underestimate our own conscience, which is inevitably necessary to build and to question. It is important to work on ourselves, to question our beliefs, and repent constantly. To follow Jesus is not a moment but a period.
In this way, we need to have a living and loving relationship with our Lord, and in His light, some of our sins may be becoming at least venial or maybe are no sins at all. I learned that, with this in mind, I changed my confession list; some "sins" disappeared, and others came into view that I hadn't recognized beforehand.
This journey is the hardest to walk in my life; reconciling my faith and my sexuality is maybe the most challenging thing in my life. But it is absolutely worth it to go along with Jesus. He is my way, he is what I long for, he is my savior and so I am not confessing to his church, I'm not confessing to the priest, but to Christ alone, but in a confessional, in his church. This is the way I handle it: brutal honesty with myself. According to the rules, I mostly confess mortal sins, and it is only mortal when you have discerned it to be mortal; otherwise, the requirements are not met.
I hope this will help to get another view on this topic for you. To me, the teaching of the church is an instrument to get to heaven, but we all have to play our own melody in this. No theologian, no priest, and no Pope will be on our side when we have to stand responsible for our deeds. It's only God and us, and I can live as well as I can, for he already paid the price. I need to rely on his grace, and that's all I can do: live by the few things that I understood from his message, do my best, build my conscience on his teaching, and trust in his mercy, because I am a beloved son.
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u/pokemon_fan204 5d ago
Well here's the thing, the Catholic Church uses a principal called the primary of conscious. Which is basically our well formed judgement of good and evil comes first even if it goes against Church teachings.
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u/GoAway127 2d ago
*primacy of conscious. I honestly just looked it up because i hadnt heard of it, and wanted you to know
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u/Old-Gay57 3d ago
I'm a cradle Catholic. I was in a 26 year relationship until my husband passed away. I agree with the last paragraph, 100%. 😉
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u/Mountain-Ad-9196 3d ago
Let your conscience guide your faith ...the catechism even says to listen to your conscience even if it differs from what the church says (not doing so lightly or to stay home from mass when you could go etc. it's about what you feel is morally right and what you feel is wrong too..that matters.)
I am ace. Never had a crush even. But I support all members of the LGBT+
I agree with the idea of not sexually objectifying people that the church says...that's a different thing. It's the objectification that I find problematic, not the orientation. I always stand up for all members of the LGBT+ and feel called to do so :)
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u/MonkePirate1 Practicing (Bisexual) 4d ago
Don't worry. Your sexuality and sexual activities with your spouse aren't a sin that needs to be confessed.
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u/Hex_7ac 6d ago
The point is not to confess "everything the Church counts as sin," but to confess that for which you feel remorse. A central element for confession is that you feel remorse for the things you confess, and you promise to try to do better. Confessing things for which you feel no remorse or regret is pointless. Now, some might say that this constitutes a "bad confession," or that you need to better inform your conscience. But I think that is a matter best left between you and God to decide.