A usual sight in a Roman Catholic Church is the confessional box. On the box is clearly marked the name of "Father" So-and-so, and yet Scripture clearly says: " And call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your Father, which is in Heaven " (Matt. 23:9).
This clearly cannot refer to our father in the flesh, for Scripture is very insistent that all respect should be paid to one's earthly father and mother. It most clearly refers to calling anyone on earth "father" in a spiritual sense, standing in contrast to the Father in Heaven. To call anyone "father" in a religious sense is an insult to the great Father in Heaven. But the Roman priesthood sets aside this prohibition. That theirs is a religious fatherhood is clearly manifest, for they are celibate. By the laws of their Church they are not allowed to marry.
In support of the practice of confession, a Roman Catholic Author cites two Scriptures: " That it is a good thing to confess our sins appears from the following passages of Holy Writ: ' He that hideth his sins shah not prosper; but he that shall confess, and forsake them shall obtain mercy' (Prov. 28:13). St. James writes: ' Confess therefore, your sins one to another' (5: 16). If open confession is good for the soul,' how particularly advantageous is it to confess to a priest to whom God has deputed power to forgive our sins. We must bear the shame of showing our wounds and bruises and festering sores, if we wished to be cured " (Catholic Belief, pp. 68, 69).
The first passage surely means that we should confess our sins to God. For this we need no earthly mediator, no human priest. As to the latter passage, it clearly means that if we sin against any person our duty is to confess our wrong-doing to the person we have wronged and seek his forgiveness. Out of these simple verses Rome has built up a great system, a money-making affair, which fastens upon its dupes a priestly domination, totally foreign to Scripture.
God has deputed power to forgive sins to no priest except Christ Himself. When Christ said to His Apostles " Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them," by no stretch of imagination can the words be taken as deputing to the priests of the Roman Church the power to forgive our sins in the manner claimed. Not thus did Peter himself interpret the words. He preached "through His Name whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins" (Acts Jo: 42).
To back up this pretension, the translator or translators of the Douay Bible have altered the word "repentance" to "penance" in a good many instances. This tampering with the very letter of Scripture is made worse by the addition of man-made notes, seeking to support what has been so daringly done. The word " repentance," as given in the Bible, is represented by the Greek word, metanoeo, meaning to have "another mind" It does not mean to change one's mind as to some particular point, but the whole change of a man's mind, brought about by the sense of sinfulness, and therefore of being out of touch with God, and altering his whole attitude in this respect.
"Penance" is a word that does not occur in the Bible. The Romanists have introduced it to cover external acts, being the penance or penalty apportioned by the priest in satisfaction of the offense.
To show the difference between this and the wholesome repentance Scripture inculcates, we give here a sample of the foolish and degrading penance a priest may impose on a penitent: " I had to go on my knees every day, during nine days, before the fourteen images of the way of the cross, and say a penitential psalm before every picture, which I did. By the sixth day the skin on my knees was pierced and the blood was flowing freely, I suffered real torture every time I kneeled down and at every step I made. But it seemed to me that these terrible tortures were nothing compared to my great iniquity. I had refused for a moment to believe that a man could create his God with a wafer, and I had thought that a Church which adores a God eaten by rats must be an idolatrous Church" (Fifty years in the Church of Rome. Father Chiniquy, p. 256).
Can anyone imagine the Apostles Paul, Peter and John setting any penitent to such a senseless and degrading task?
Father Chiniquy likewise gives his testimony as to the evil of auricular confession: " There are two women who ought to be the objects of the compassion of the disciples of Christ, and for whom daily prayers ought to be offered at the mercy-seat—the Brahman woman, who, deceived by her priests, burns herself on the corpse of her husband to appease the wrath of her wooden gods, and the Roman Catholic woman, who, not less deceived by her priests, suffers a torture far more real and ignominious in the
confessional-box, to appease the wrath of her wafer-god. For I do not exaggerate when I say that for many noble—hearted women, well—educated, high—minded women, to be forced to unveil their hearts before the eyes of a man, to open to him all the most secret recesses of their souls, all the most sacred mysteries of their single or married life, to allow him to put questions which the most depraved woman would never consent to hear from her vilest seducer, is often more horrible and intolerable than to be tied to burning coals. More than once I have seen women fainting in the confessional-box. Not hundreds, but thousands of times, I have heard from the lips of dying girls, as well as married women, the awful words, ' I am forever lost! All my past confessions and communions have been so many sacrileges! I have never dared to answer correctly the questions of my confessors! Shame has sealed my lips and damned my soul ' " (Fifty years in the Church of Rome, p. 402).
Again we read: " Father Chiniquy, who was for over a quarter of a century a confessor, says: 'I have heard the confessions of more than two hundred priests, and to say the truth, as God knows it, I must declare that only twenty-one had not to weep over the secret or public sins committed through the irresistibly corrupting influences of auricular confession. I am now seventy-six years old, and in a short time I shall be in my grave. I shall have to give account of what I say now. Well, it is in the presence of the great Judge, with my tomb before my eyes that I declare to the world that very few -yes, very few—priests escape from falling into the pit of the most horrible depravity the world has ever known through the confession of females ' " (The Roman Catholic Church in Italy, pp. 16o, 161).
Suffice it to say that such testimony to the evils of auricular confessions could easily be multiplied. It is well known that Roman Catholic priests are instructed to ask a number of searching questions on sex matters that introduce, to the young and innocent, thoughts that pollute their minds, and often acquaint them with the knowledge of sins, they had no conception of, till the time of their first confession, doing them irreparable harm for life.
Well does Dr. Wylie say: " History testifies, that for every offender whom the confessional has reclaimed, it has hardened thousands; for one it may have saved, it has destroyed millions " (The Papacy, p. 329).