The Beauty of Confession

By Caroline Jackson
Pacelli 11th Grader

This past week, before Pacelli students were released for Spring Break, one of our principals came over the intercom and intermittently released each grade to attend and participate in the Sacrament of Penance. While our school does not require Confession - since not all students are Catholic - our administrators strongly encourage the experience. The formal Penance Service is held twice a year for St. Anne-Pacelli students, during Advent and Lent, and on each occasion, Catholics and non-Catholics alike come to cleanse themselves of their sins or seek spiritual guidance.

The Penance Service is a unique aspect of attending a Catholic school, so I wanted to dive deeper into the tradition and explore what makes it so special. When I offered to write this article, I made a promise to myself: this year, I would join my Pacelli peers. 

Now, if you’ve been reading closely, you may have realized that I have yet to go to a Penance Service in my 17 years of life. That likely makes me one of the least qualified people to speak on the fruits that can grow from uprooting the weeds of sin. However, I began to see it differently. If I could use this opportunity to convince myself - as a non-Catholic - that working up the courage to go could become a habit, and a habit that could change my life for the better, then perhaps I am exactly the right person for the job.

To do this, I decided to approach this opportunity from two perspectives: the confessee and the confessor. Luckily, I had access not only to research, but to an actual living, breathing priest (one of the best, if I do say so myself). 

St. Anne Church’s Parochial Vicar, Fr. Kevin Braski, graciously agreed to speak with me about what happens on the other side of the confessional screen. I eagerly asked him questions, ranging from the inner thoughts of a priest to the role he plays as a vessel of God’s mercy. His answers were both insightful and beautiful. Although anyone can come to the priest, he said, priests can only absolve Catholics. He noted those coming who aren’t Catholic would be seeking guidance or spiritual counseling. 

Fr. Braski described the humility required to hear confessions, as well as his own practice of going to Confession twice a month. Along with this humility, he spoke honestly about the exhaustion that can follow hearing many confessions. There is a real weight, he explained, in listening to another person open their soul, and in offering them the patience, care, and mercy they need. Even with God’s help, it is not an easy task.

To help me better understand, Fr. Kevin shared an analogy first introduced by theologian Thomas Aquinas. He compared a priest’s role in Confession to an axe in the hands of a lumberjack. In this analogy, God would use the priest as an instrument or vessel of his mercy to forgive sins as a lumberjack would use an axe to cut down a tree. The axe cannot cut down the tree without the strength and will of the lumberjack, just as the priest cannot forgive sins without God allowing him to do so through his ordination as a priest. It is God who is ultimately forgiving the sins, but the priest is also forgiving sins by being used as a vessel or instrument of God’s mercy. The priest is not forgiving sins in his name but in God’s name as a priest. 

Even after this, I still had questions…especially about my own hesitations. I asked how a priest feels when hearing a particularly deep or difficult confession. Not because I feared my sins were too great, but because I wanted to confront a more universal fear: the fear of being seen.

Fr. Kevin’s response immediately put me at ease. He explained that each priest experiences Confession differently - some forget what they hear quickly, while others may mix up confessions simply because of the volume they receive. But more importantly, he shared what goes through his mind as he listens.

He said he never feels anger or disgust toward the person confessing. Instead, any sense of frustration is directed toward the darkness that may have influenced them. What moves him most, he explained, is the realization that someone may have believed that darkness was their only option. He feels a kind of sorrow, not for the sinner, but that he couldn’t have been there beforehand to remind them that there was always another way, a light they could have chosen instead.

Hearing this left me speechless. It felt as though his words carried something greater than himself, as if they echoed the voice of God. In that moment, any doubt I had about the sanctity and beauty of the Sacrament of Penance began to fade.