The Church says that there is no greater evil than mortal sin. Mortal sin is serious sin. It deserves the unending punishment of Hell. It is serious because of the insult and defiance it offers God more than anything else. Murder is not as bad for ending a life so much as it is for killing somebody that God does not will to be killed.
The Church says sin is the greatest evil even when it does not result in eternal damnation. It says the damnation is irrelevant to how bad the sin is, for it is the natural consequence of the sin. Sin is bad because of what it is, not just because of its consequences. A mortal sin is still a mortal sin if you plan to get rid of it in a few minutes. It is still a mortal sin if you repent and can undo all the consequences soon after committing it.
If sin is worse than any crime before earthly law and a crime against God, the Church fails to convince us that it really thinks that.
The real meaning of confessing sins is not merely reciting a list of misdeeds, but offering full context, details, and the underlying motivations behind one’s actions. True confession is an act of complete transparency—an unburdening of the soul, where the penitent reveals the real reasons for their wrongdoing. This is only natural, for there are differences between one person stealing a chocolate bar and another. Choice is complex. No two crimes are exactly alike.
Yet the Church has historically avoided requiring this full, detailed confession of crimes, and the reason lies in the intersection of canon law and civil law. By compelling someone to disclose criminal acts in detail, the Church risked exposing itself and the penitent to the judicial system. Civil law has long affirmed a right to privacy, protecting individuals from self-incrimination and mandating that certain communications remain confidential. If the Church demanded full factual confessions of criminal behavior, it could face legal liability, or its clergy could be subpoenaed to testify in court.
Thus, while confession is framed spiritually as a path to reconciliation and moral accountability, in practice the Church has had to navigate the limits imposed by civil law, carefully avoiding forcing penitents to reveal specifics that could entangle them in the legal system. The fear of judicial exposure has historically constrained the Church from asking for the kind of full, factual disclosure that would constitute a “real” confession of crime.
To keep a sinner in mortal sin must itself be a sin.
The Church says God can forgive one anytime as long as one exercises repentance rooted in perfect love for him. It is claimed that this perfect contrition removes sins instantly as long as one resolves to confess. But the problem is that nobody knows anybody truly repents for God's sake alone much. It is reputedly rare.
This teaching is not an exception to needing the priest to forgive. It is a compromise with it. It is like an advance.
So it is the case that Catholic doctrine is that the priest is needed to forgive mortal sin in confession in the name of God. Outside of that there is no pardoning even if you repent - and it is not perfect contrition. It implies that God wants people forced to stay in sin when there is no confession. The clergy are guilty of a great sin when they let this happen, for it forces people to stay away from God. This shows the clerical caste is a human, not divine, creation. To go to the priest for forgiveness of your sin implies that God is more interested in putting the priest in a position of power over your soul, sanctity, and eternal destiny than in pardoning you, for He will do nothing until the priest gives the sanction. That is blasphemous.
Jesus stated that he who attributes the works of the Holy Spirit to the Devil will never be forgiven; this blasphemy is unpardonable. He said this to the Jews who denied that God helped Jesus perform an exorcism. Surely, to make a devil of God by saying He is behind the priestly system of forgiving sins is a more serious and dangerous blasphemy. If any sin is eternal, it is this one. At least the Jews did not accuse God of being evil. A religion not admitting its God is evil does not mean the God or religion is good. It means they are evil for not admitting it.
Catholic theologians challenge us to direct them to a Bible verse that proves them wrong on sacramental absolution. We don’t need to. If the Bible does not say it, then somebody after Jesus made up the sacrament. The Bible teaching that God is love is the only disproof. A loving God would not keep forgiveness from penitents until the priest chants a spell over them.
Most Protestants see the Catholic sacrament of absolution as a violation of privacy and even superstitious. Some of them think that if the Catholic really believes in it, God will understand that he wants God’s forgiveness from the priest and will pardon the person even though the priest cannot pardon sins. But the Bible warns that sincerity alone can’t put you right with God. Proverbs 14:12 says that there is a way that seems right but it leads to death; the verse before goes on about the house of wicked people being overthrown, so it means the wrong way that seems right will lead to spiritual death and divine retribution. See also Matthew 7:13-14. Protestants believe in once-for-all salvation when you repent all your past, present, and future sins. But the Catholic system only repents the first two, so it is fruitless.
Getting forgiven is the most important act of worship there is. You can’t give God any love if you adhere to sin, for sin is hearty opposition to God. When God won’t accept prayers addressed to false gods, He will be even less likely to accept a person who goes to a priest for pardon. The priest's forgiveness is the same as an idol if it is fake.
The Catholic claims to be in sin. We know that all sin is mortal, so priestly absolution cannot work, for the Catholic is really in mortal sin, and the Church says that adhering to one mortal sin and repenting for the rest is no good and actually mocks God’s mercy. A mortal sinner cannot sincerely repent some mortal sins and not others, for he or she is the enemy of God and accordingly cannot be pardoned.
The Bible says that all are sinful and all are mortal sinners, so it agrees with all this. With this view of sin, how could Christ have authorized priestly absolution?
If Catholics want the priest to pardon them in the cheerless semi-darkness of a box, then they should burn their Bibles for being Protestant. Nobody should want the forgiveness of a God or Church that holds that God is right to withhold the power to forgive sins from laypersons even in a state of absolute necessity. I mean, if a person is dying, you cannot absolve them unless you are a priest. No matter how holy you are, even the worst priest is needed to save the person’s soul. This is offensive to reasonable people.
Contrition means repenting for the love of God and for His sake alone—this is called perfect contrition. Imperfect contrition means repenting for the love of God and some other reason. Attrition means repenting without any concern for God at all. If you resolve to get forgiveness for sin and not to sin again simply because you want something from God—say, health or His blessing—or are afraid of eternal damnation, that is attrition. Attrition or imperfect contrition can be simply or partly because the sin is heinous. It can do a good job of seeming like true repentance, but it is more worried about how you have degraded yourself than about how bad the act is.
The Church says that a sincere act of perfect contrition made by the dying person is not as good as confession, for he has to intend to confess if he is able, and since the sacrament can forgive sins even without perfect contrition, it is more powerful and trustworthy than it. The problems are that it is easy to make an act of perfect contrition, which implies that you hate sin so much that you would do anything to make up for it and avoid it, and then one hour later you find that you are sinning again, which shows that you were only deluding yourself. Confession is the only way to be sure you are really forgiven (page 14, Confession Quizzes to a Street Preacher, Fr. Carty, or Question 831, Radio Replies, Vol. 1 by Rumble and Carty). This seems like magic, but Rome is compelled to teach it, for it says imperfect contrition can only help you if you go to confession. It puts disposition and sincerity in second place to a ritual, for even if there is doubt about the sincerity of the penitence, a ritual isn’t going to make any difference, for it can’t work without penitence! You can delude yourself with attrition as well as contrition, so the confessional does not afford any greater certainty. This shows that if Jesus gave the power to forgive sins to the apostles, they could only use it when the Holy Spirit told them that the person was in the right spiritual state to receive absolution, which would indicate that it was the apostles' power alone and could not be passed on.
The insistence on confession is occultism. It also suggests that Protestants who do not have confession know in their hearts that they might not be forgiven at all despite the promise of Christ, which would make them self-deceiving hypocrites. What kind of Church would tell a dying man, woman, or child that their salvation is not very certain when the priest won’t be able to make it in time? The Church may not say that to them when they are lying there dying, but it says it to them in life.