Nice article from a newly ordained priest on confession….

"In a word, what I’ve discovered as a confessor is mercy. I’ve realized that all the reasons I used to fear and delay confession stemmed from my basic distrust of mercy, either the confessor’s or God’s: I thought that if I honestly admitted how I failed to make myself holy, the confessor would make fun of me, or be disgusted or disappointed or annoyed at me for wasting his time, and that it wasn’t worth making time to examine my conscience and confess because God wasn’t going to do much for me whether I went to confession or not."

As a newly ordained priest, I get asked all kinds of questions to which the speaker already knows the answer, things like “What was it like being ordained?” (Indescribable), “How do you like your new parish?” (It’s great), or “How awesome is it to say Mass?” (Like, ridiculously awesome). But no one so far has guessed my answer to the question, “What’s your favorite part of being a priest?” To me, it’s obvious: confession.

Partly, it’s the whole incongruity of the situation. After all, I’m just some guy who has spent more years studying Japanese than studying theology, and suddenly I’ve become an instrument of God’s mercy. There’s no easy way of narrating how the different events in my life have led me to this place: they just have. I’m not uniquely holy or even particularly wise, but thanks to a mysterious thing that happened on May 22, 2015, when someone comes and tells me the personal history of pettiness and pain that has separated him from God, I can say “I absolve you from your sins,” and it really happens.

It’s also got something to do with my own experience of Catholicism. I was not raised Catholic, and in my Presbyterian childhood the notion of confessing my sins to a priest would have seemed outlandish and unnecessary if it had ever occurred to me, which, as far as I remember, it didn’t. Even after I converted (in junior year of high school, for the curious), it took me a while to cotton on to the fact that Catholics were serious about the whole confession thing, and that the requirement even applied to me. Only about six months after I was confirmed did I finally go to confession for the first time, making what had to be one of the lamest and least serious here’s-all-the-sins-of-my-life confessions in human history.

The rest i s here