Catholic confession: Creepy or "sooooothing"?

Post Reply New Topic

I have not been to confession since my tweens. Reason being that I find being in a dark closet, with priest behind the screen, the priest who often spoke harshly at the audience, who gives you the "silent treatment" to be creepier than anything on Halloween. It frightened me as a child and even today, still seems creepy. It also made my devout Catholic father angry that I was so afraid of confession but if it were not in a church wouldn't anybody be scared?

Is this because of autism?
Reason I ask is because my sister who really likes Catholic tells me for her that the silent treatment is "soothing" and so is being in a dark room. And it is a way to get "therapy without paying for it".

Now when she talks to me she kind of says that she is better because her Catholic priest treats her well and ours are mean to me so I want nothing to do with the church. I guess she is "better" than I am?

If you take your faith (and Catholicism values the confession highly) seriously, it never hurts to change churches/priests if such a possibility exists. Religious figures are unlikely to bully you, but they may not acknowledge the existence of autism as an actual factor that affects you in many ways. Surely you'll find a nicer one if there's more than one option.

Since it has been this long, maybe you could do like Rousseau, and put all of your confessions in a book. You're off to a good start, with your confession about being creeped out by confessions.

Until I was in my early 20s, I was very pious. I went to mass most Sundays, said the Rosary regularly and really bought into the whole thing. Anyway, despite this, I never went to Confession, from when I was a young teenager. I found the whole thing completely embarrassing. The priest is a man, there's no getting away from that. I could never feel comfortable telling another human being my inner most thoughts. I never actually had any proper sins to confess, so everything would have been things I was thinking (bad thoughts about other people, etc). It just seemed wrong. The only problem was that missing mass is a sin and you're not supposed to take communion, if you've sinned and not been to confession. So, every so often I'd not take communion, as I'd missed mass the previous week. But, then I'd start taking communion again, giving the impression that I'd been to confession. All the time, I hoped the priest thought I just went to another church to confess, because they know who's behind the curtain. The stress that it all caused me was part of the reason that I stopped going to mass altogether.

Creepy. Big time.

The is no rational account of what some people consider necessary or desirable.

ruveyn

I think it is intimidating and creepy.

When I was a kid I would just tell some fairly mundane thing like not doing my chores.

I didn't like being nudged toward Confirmation either. It seemed the Church could say "Ha! we got you now!. You're Confirmed."

when i used to tell the Priest my first world problems i would feel relieved and lighter in step.

I can only imagine all the dirt the pastor has on people in the community...

It is at best completely useless and at worst a fabricated rule invented by the clergy in the dark ages to gain political leverage out of the things they learned thanks to the confessions.

Also, you can be Catholic and completely disregard it. That's what I did anyway.

I've been to Confession once. The priest seemed bored and mostly indifferent. He told me to read the 66th Psalm and meditate on its meaning.

I did see the benefits of it, back in my catholic days.

That may be, in large part, because of the fairly close friendly relationship I had with the priest I'd go to (once I met him, he was the only one I'd confess to). All around good guy who helped me with a lot of crap I was dealing with. I liked him and, over time, came to trust him quite a bit.

But I can definitely see how the experience could have less meaning, or be entirely unpleasant, for someone who does not have that kind of relationship with their priest.

As a former catholic (by family), confession is controversial even among Catholics.

It is not really a sacrament. Even my grandfather, who was an ardent catholic, and felt guilty all his live for a divorce, and not getting an annulment from the Pope, and went to church several time a week despite remarrying, believed that holy confession was invented during the early inquisitions.

In fact many of the ideas in the catholic church have very little to do with early Christianity. For instance original sin something entirely invented by a sex crazed pope (by his own admission).