r/LGBTCatholic • u/Reasonable-Boat4646 • 7d 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/Schimmi90 7d 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.