 the summer of 1996 and I was driving my 1980 Olds Cutlass sedan much like the one pictured here down East Leonard Avenue in Grand Rapids, Michigan and I passed St. Alphonsus Catholic Church driving my Oldsmobile green 1980s I said it was a four-door this is a two-door out of four door so I'm passing St. Alphonsus Church and as I look at the church I have this strong desire to stop the car turn into the parking lot get out search through the parish find a priest and ask for confession and that by itself might not be so unusual to you maybe you have in the past you know driven by a Catholic parish or a shrine and it's made you think and it's come to mind that boy I need I need to get to confession there's something I need to get off of my chest but what made it so unusual in my case first of all was that I wasn't Catholic secondly I was the pastor of the Protestant parish three blocks down and so the question arises why would a Protestant pastor drive back by a Catholic Church and want to go to confession and so obviously there's a backstory to what was going on but I was about I was in about the third year of my ministry at a local Protestant Church really more like about four blocks from St. Alphonsus and I was preaching a sermon series on the book of James now you know in Protestant groups you don't have the lectionary so you don't have much of a guide in terms of what to preach on on any given Sunday and yeah sure you can just pick a new text every Sunday and preach on it but after a while you kind of run out of all your favorite texts and it kind of leaves you a bit directionless so I did what many Protestant pastors do and I adopted the practice of doing sermon series so I'd pick a book of the Bible and preach through that book and I had done this on Philippians I had done this on Ephesians I believe I'd done it on Galatians and then I decided I would tackle the book of James and the first four chapters went just fine until I got to James chapter 5 and I started to prepare a sermon on this chapter and I ran stuck on this passage is any among you sick let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord and the prayer of faith will save the sick man and the Lord will raise him up and if he has committed sins he will be forgiven therefore this is the particular line they gave trouble therefore confess your sins to one another and to pray for one another that you may be healed the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects so I'm trying to prepare a sermon for this on this passage for my little congregation of maybe 75 people on a Sunday morning and I had very little oversight in downtown Grand Rapids I had a pretty free hand to do whatever I wanted to do and I was very committed to the literal sense of the scriptures and I was committed to the idea of a New Testament church so I had this freedom with this little parish to kind of go in what direction we wanted to go in and I want to revive just the church of the Bible amen just just apply the scriptures directly just do exactly what they said no mediating tradition no mediating theology just put into effect the word of God well I'm working on this text I'm like okay so how are we going to put this into effect at my little parish it says confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so how am I going to implement mutual confession of sin and I'm like okay maybe we can pass a mic on the Sunday morning service alright it's confession of sin time here we go you know who's first you know my god see that's not gonna work you know that's gonna give scandal first I'll probably nobody's gonna participate and anybody who does participate they're just gonna do they're just gonna confess some sanitized sins they're like some socially acceptable sins like maybe I don't know what lose your temper something like that occasionally who doesn't do that right and we're not really gonna get into anything deep and if we did get into something deep it would cause scandal and trauma and and there would be no confidentiality I mean if somebody mentioned something in the in the church service it would be on the streets by Monday morning so I could just think of all kinds of problems with that so I'm racking my brain like okay passing a mic on Sunday morning is not a good idea well maybe small groups there we go yeah everybody break up into groups of three or four and confess your sins to one another I can see that's gonna go really well you know there's gonna be a teenager and a church elder and a single mom you know and and a retiree in a you know for some and yeah I don't know I don't even want to think about it you know again people are not gonna they're not gonna be forthright or if they are forthright it's gonna cause trouble then probably you know this another problem bad counsel like I can see the teen saying something like oh I did such and such this week and somebody else saying oh that's not really too bad I do that all the time okay great now I've morally malformed one of my teens because he's getting bad advice from some adult in the church now so I'm just going through the options I'm not thinking of anything you know not thinking of any way to do this confess your sins to one another and pray for one or that you may be healed it was really starting to disturb me all the ways that I could think of to try to implement the confession of sin in my Protestant church would involve the problems of scandal bad counsel lack of confidentiality shame and just silent non-participation like how are we really gonna do that and then but you know again I was committed to New Testament Christianity and putting into effect the word of God and just doing exactly what it says so it's really struggling with this and as I was trying to figure out what to say about this text to my congregation I began to reflect on what I knew about Catholicism and of course most of my information came about Catholicism came from where it does for most people which is movies of course so I'm thinking about to all you know the you know Catholic themes and practices they see in movies and that's where I got my information about confession and so I'd seen movies where confession was portrayed and so I knew a little bit about the practice of the sacrament and I began to think to myself you know Catholics actually have a good way of putting into practice what it says here in James 516 the way I saw it Catholics would go to their pastor and their pastor was the spiritual head of the congregation so when they confessed to the pastor it was like confessing to the congregation since he was the spiritual head but they did it in such a way that it was confidential and then since the pastor had been to seminary and had some formation spiritual and theological formation he was not likely to give them bad counsel and I knew a little bit about like the seal of the confessional right because that Hitchcock movie right I confess you know it's all about that so knew a little bit about that and so like and he's bound I know they take that really seriously he's bound not to reveal what happens and so you don't have that problem of shame or lack of confidentiality and I began to really admire the way that you know as I thought it oh Catholics had come up with a way of fulfilling what James 516 says and having a way to confess their sins to the congregation in the person of their pastor and then I began to reflect on my own personal life and the the ways that the way that I you know kind of needed healing it says confess your sins pray for one another that you may be healed and I thought well that's probably not just physical healing that's probably also spiritual healing and in several ways I have plateaued in my spiritual growth you know got stuck in certain ruts they did not seem to be able to get past I thought to myself you know maybe one of the reasons why I'm stuck and I'm not growing in my Christian faith is that I won't do what is stated here in James 516 I won't confess my sins to another Christian and then I began to think you know well who can I confess to okay who could I even go to I started to tick off the possibilities you know I could go to go to somebody else the church like no that would be awkward on the pastor like I could go to my mentor that was assigned to me from the seminary I could go to he was an older pastor I could try to go confess to him like no well he's signing my evaluations I don't think that's a I don't think that's a good good thing to give my wife no no way and I'm just gonna homey don't play that that's not gonna work and I'm not coming up with anything and then finally I thought you know what I'm pretty comfortable with priests now there's a backstory to that my dad was a Navy chaplain and he he always for some reason he always got a what got along really well with the Catholic priests chaplains in fact one of his best friends was father John O'Connor who later retired from the Navy went on to become Bishop of Scranton and then Archbishop and Cardinal of New York very close friend of my dad and so we when I was growing up it was not uncommon for us to have priests over to the home for family dinner because my dad would invite his chaplain friends home especially when we were at the campus of Princeton University my dad was going to school there for a year and there were some priests chaplains there as well that were getting degrees funded by the government and so they became good friends they come over to the house and they got to know a certain father Sal who was a precious blood father and so anyway so I was pretty comfortable on a personal level with priests and I began to think to myself you know maybe maybe that's what I should do maybe I should you know go you know stop at St. Alphonse's parish and that's why I'm driving by and I see St. Alphonse's parish there and thinking you know what I'll bet that if I stopped and went in and went into the confessional and just said father I'm a Protestant but there's some things I need to get off my chest you know I figured he'd probably roll with it you know he'd probably roll with it and I'm sure he wouldn't reveal anything that was said in that conversation so I'm beginning to think about you know seriously pond or doing this but you know what I just couldn't bring myself to do it I drove right past St. Alphonse's and and this was the issue I owned I owned the only dark green Olds Cutlass the only dark green Olds Cutlass in town and sure as shooting if I pulled into St. Alphonse's parking lot with that with that sedan there and one of my parishioners came by and saw Pastor John's car parked in the parking lot of a Catholic Church I would have some awkward explaining to do the following Sunday so I never got up the courage to do so you know I did go to the point of inviting that the priest who was pastor there for lunch we had lunch together at a local restaurant I tried to develop a relationship with him hoping that at some point we get comfortable enough that I could you know get get into the confessional with him never happened anyway there's some other scriptures I want to you know just take a bracket you know my my personal story for a moment I want to delve into some other scriptures that at the time back in 1996 I didn't realize we're in there or didn't realize their full implications but only after coming into the church which is about five to six years later did these passages begin to really resonate with me but first of all Leviticus 5 1 I later came to realize that there was a sacrament of reconciliation in the Old Covenant under the mosaic law and it was right in front of my nose this was the book of the Bible that I did my doctoral dissertation on later in chapter 25 but here in chapter 5 of Leviticus it says if anyone sins when he realizes his guilt in any of these and confesses the sin he has committed he shall bring to the Lord as his compensation for the sin that he has committed a female from the flock a lame or a goat for a sin offering and the priest shall make atonement for him for his sin notice verse 5 that says he shall when he confesses the sin he has committed now the reason why a lot of folks don't get the full impact of this is because it's not explicit to whom must he confess but when you read these passages and think about the implications it begins to dawn on you that he had to confess to the priest the priest that will make atonement for his sin at the end why is that necessary because it was the responsibility of the priest to make sure that he brought the right offering you see different sins require different kinds of sacrifices and there was even a rough income gradation where you know if you were poor for various sins you could just bring a couple of turtle does which is only worth a couple of pennies but if you're kind of middle class and you had to bring a sheep or a goat and if you're a wealthy you had to bring a bull so you had to confess the the sin that you had committed so the priest could know the gravity of it and what animal was therefore required and also kind of your income level and whether you are bringing the right sacrifice and so there was confession to the priest in the old covenant and it was the responsibility of the priest to make atonement and mediate the forgiveness of your sin so if you send under the mosaic law you did not go to the king because the king could not mediate the forgiveness of sins to you you didn't go to the prophet either because a prophet did not mediate the forgiveness of sins the only one who could convey to you the forgiveness of sins was the priest and in order for that to happen you had to bring the proper sacrifice for the deed that you had committed so there was this sacrament of reconciliation let's call it in the Old Testament and then in John 2 22 after our Lord has risen from the dead it says concerning the apostles he breathed on them and said to them receive the Holy Spirit if you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven and if you retain the sins of any they are retained now in seminary we were taught that this just referred to the preaching of the gospel and that the apostles would go out and preach the gospel and those that accepted the gospel would have their sins forgiven and those who refused the gospel would have their sins retained however you can see that that's kind of Protestant Isagesus okay exegesis is when you interpret a passage Isagesus is when you read stuff into the text there's nothing about preaching in this text it's not talking about the proclamation of the gospel now other texts do talk about the proclamation of the gospel but not this one this text is talking about the forgiveness of sins that the Holy Spirit is being given to the apostles to give them the power to do this this is actually parallel to Matthew 16 and Matthew 18 both of which talk about the keys of the kingdom of heaven and binding and loosing which had different meanings but one of the meanings was again the forgiveness or the retention of sins this is a power exercised by the priest in the Old Testament when you confess your sins the priest would make a decision about whether you had properly performed the correct ritual for the forgiveness of your sins offered the right animal in the right way and then the priest would dispense the forgiveness of sins that role was usurped by the Pharisees in the time of Jesus the Pharisees were adjudicating whether people could be forgiven or not and whether they were obeying the law or not and that was a major problem for century Judaism but Jesus invests his apostles with this authority but I never powdered the implications of that you know John writes this gospel at the end of his life why is he telling all his readers that Jesus gave the power to forgive sins to the apostles he's the last apostle alive is he just saying hey you know I'm about to die but just wanted to let you know that Jesus gave us this superpower but I'm the last one with it so bummer you know is that it you know no I don't think so now you know John is aware that this power was shared with the early presbyters that those men that we now call priests and the apostles appointed presbyters as their successors and that apostolic ministry was carried on by the Episcopoy and the presbyteroi that is to say the bishops and the priests who would follow in their footsteps let's look at another text this is an act 19 I like this text because it shows the connection between confession and deliverance so God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirit saying I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Shiva we're doing this but the evil spirit answered them Jesus I know and Paul I know but who are you and the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them mastered all of them and gave them a sound drubbing etc and this became known to all the residents of Ephesus and the name of the Lord Jesus was a stalled extolled many also of those who are now believers came confessing and divulging their practices and a number of those who practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all so the word of the Lord grew and prevailed mightily they look there's a great spiritual revival in the city of Ephesus and what sets off this revival is the confession of sins look at verse 18 many also those who are now believers came confessing and divulging their practices which included magic arts this is not pagans who are practicing magic these are Christians who were practicing magic okay this was moral corruption in the church this was a cultic activity going on within the body of believers and that a cultic activity was hampering the spread of the gospel the spread of the gospel in this area had come to a plateau that they could not get beyond because this was going on and the breakthrough only comes when the Christians come forward and come clean and this this has a powerful lesson for us in the modern church there are so many places in the world where the church seems to have no evangelistic power the church just seems to be decrepit and and disappearing and one of the problems in many of those places is there is moral corruption within the body of believers that goes unconfessed and unacknowledged and as long as we as church don't come to grips with our own sins and with the sinful practices like contraception and divorce and cohabitation and abortion and many other things as well pornography etc that is allowed to go on within the body of believers and it's just winked at and it's not addressed and it's not confronted and it's not acknowledged and it's not confessed as long as it's going on you can forget evangelistic power okay you can forget the power of the gospel because within the body of Christ there is this blockage okay there's this impediment it's as if that you know the the conduit of the Holy Spirit is blocked by these unconfessed sins but when the body of Christ comes clean and owns to what it has been doing suddenly there is this great unleashing all the great revivals in church history have been accompanied by the confession of sin they've been accompanied by public repentance of sin and we will know that we are having a true revival in the church when that comes to be again amen amen so but then we're talking about spiritual warfare here okay we're talking about evil spirits we're talking about good versus evil we're talking about the gospel versus the forces of darkness and the breakthrough comes through confession and when he came to the other side now we're gonna look at another because I want to talk about the reality of the demonic for for a moment okay we're gonna work into this we're gonna be talking about the spiritual warfare dimension of the sacrament of reconciliation and first I just want to lay down the foundation that evil spirits are real this is not some kind of superstition that we haven't gotten over or some kind of fable in the Bible that that we know better now that we have modern science or something like this okay this is extremely real so let's look at some examples of the demonic from the Gospels when he came to the other side speaking about Jesus and Matthew 8 to the country of the Gadarenes two demoniacs met him coming out of the tombs so fierce that no one could pass that way and behold they cried out what have you to do with us oh son of God have you come here to torment us before the time now a herd of many swine was feeding at some distance from them and the demons begged him if you cast us out send us away into the herd of the swine and he said to them go so they came out and went into the swine and behold the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and perished in the waters all right so look at here we see some examples that are the manifestations of the activity of demons supernatural strength okay these two two demoniacs are too strong to be overcome and that is one of the supernatural evidences of the presence of evil spirits also the the presence of other voices and persons who are speaking through a humans vocal cords and mouth etc so these these demoniacs are speaking but it's evident to Jesus and the apostles that it's not the demoniacs speaking in their own person but some someone is speaking through them it's this very weird phenomena and that too is a sign of the presence of evil spirits now a lot of intellectuals or self-styled intellectuals or academics poo poo this whole phenomena and just look down their nose at the possibility of the reality of a spirit world and of evil spirits and kind of a typical condescending opinion is expressed by Luigi Sartori an Italian theologian that's kind of he's past the height of his career at this point but one time very prominent he said it is probable that some of Jesus' healings involved individuals affected by nervous disorders rather than by true demonic possession okay as if he would know but yeah he was like what you were there all right but you were there you saw all right but anyway look at but look at the gospel of Matthew for example look at what actually says he went about all galley teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people so his fame spread throughout all of Syria and they brought to him all the sick those afflicted with various diseases and pains demoniacs epileptics paralytics and he healed them so look at these different categories they talk about the sick they talk about people with different diseases and pains they talk about people that don't have nervous control you know people that like epileptics and paralytics that don't have control over their body so they knew a wide variety of phenomena and they distinguish those nervous disorders and those physical disorders from having a demon they knew the difference and you might ask well how could they figure it out well little subtle clues things like we know who you are you're on the holy water God have you come to torment us before the time that's not a symptom of epilepsy that's not a respiratory infection little subtle things like that you know enable them to distinguish they paid close attention okay between between these various conditions so my point is they knew the difference between between illness and the demonic and they distinguished the two it's very clear separate categories the catechism 414 says Satan or the devil and other demons are fallen angels who have freely refused to serve God and his plan likewise catechism 328 says the existence of angels both the fallen and the unfallen is a truth of faith okay this is this is part of capital T tradition this is part of the deposit of faith is that there are such things as angels and demons and the popes have been very clear about this John Paul the second wrote this in 1994 he says may prayer strengthen us for the spiritual battle that the letter of the Ephesians speaks of be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might Ephesians 610 the book of revelation refers to the same battle recalling before our eyes the image of st. Michael the archangel in Revelation 12 7 Pope Leo the 13th certainly had this picture in mind when at the end of the last century he brought in throughout the church a special prayer to st. Michael st. Michael the archangel defend us in battle be our protection against the wickedness and snares the devil etc. although this prayer is no longer recited at the end of the end of mass although in this area of the country it's pretty much always recited at the end of masses but I think it's becoming a popular custom again anyway he says I this is John Paul the second now says I ask everyone not to forget it and to recite it to obtain help in the battle against the forces of darkness and against the spirit of this world this is John Paul the second is Regina Chaley address 24 April 1994 and he wrote a lot more about about the the evil one and about spiritual warfare and he also performed exorcisms now Benedict the 16th spoke of the reality the devil Pope Francis has been firm about this much to the embarrassment of some of his co-workers and assistants who are among those who have disdain for this idea of a personal embodiment of evil for a person like Satan but Pope Francis has stood strong on this teaching many many times in his pontificate has spoken of the reality of the devil maybe some of you might say but father how old-fashioned you are to speak about the devil in the 21st century but look out because the devil is present the devil is here even in the 21st century and we mustn't be naive right we must learn from the gospel how to fight against Satan Pope Francis says again he says at another address the devil exists and we must fight against him Paul tells us this it's not me saying it the word of God is telling us this but we're not all convinced of this he's being quite honest he knows he knows that there's many bishops he knows that there's many priests he knows that there's large numbers of the lady who don't take the devil seriously and the Pope is urging us to to change our ways if that's how we think now world renowned psychiatrist M. Scott Peck who is quite well known during my childhood and wrote several bestsellers including one from which this quote is taken a book called people of the lie hope for healing of human evil which really goes into the reality of the demonic published in 1985 he talks about how as a professional psychiatrist he said about investigating whether they're really was such a thing as evil spirits and in the preface to his 1985 book he wrote five years ago when I began work on this book I could no longer avoid the issue of the demonic because it was coming up in a psychiatric practice I was left facing an obvious intellectual question is there such a thing as an evil spirit namely the devil I thought not in common with 99% of psychiatrists and the majority of clergy says I did not think the devil existed he's writing in 1985 and already saying you know the majority of clergy don't believe in the devil and almost all professional psychiatrist don't believe in the devil and neither did I five years ago still he says it occurred to me that if I could see one good old-fashioned case of possession I might change my mind so I decided to go out and look for a case the first two cases turned out to be suffering from standard psychiatric disorders but the third case turned out to be the real thing and he goes on to describe that in his book and give references to other documentations of you know historically documented exorcisms so the devil is real and possessions are real although uncommon in other kinds of demonic activities much more common than outright possession and I encountered the reality of evil spirits when I was working in Protestant ministry as an inner city evangelist back in Grand Rapids Michigan in the 90s and so I was working in a downtown area of the city a neighborhood that was rife with petty crime with prostitution with abortion and with drug use and people who are experienced in the spiritual battle like Father Gabrielle Amor the chief exorcist of Rome under the pontificate of John Paul II folks like that will tell you where you get activities like illicit drug use and prostitution and abortion going on you're gonna have the activity of evil spirits as well they just go hand in hand with those kinds of behaviors and sure enough as I was doing urban ministry after really after just a few months in my pastorate I began to encounter people behaving in completely strange and irrational ways that didn't fall into any of the usual psychiatric categories that we were taught in the seminary I began to encounter people who were having things going on in their homes that were inexplicable by you know the principles of science and this kind of thing and of course I was completely unprepared to deal with it because my undergraduate degree had been in classical languages which is Latin and Greek okay and then most of my seminary training was all just in the exegesis of the scriptures so if there's dishes flying around the homes and people are foaming at the mouth all I can do is conjugate a Greek verb like about all I knew how to do and that just was not what the situation called for now thankfully thankfully one of my parishioners had a friend who was a deliverance minister this is how we termed people who were you know essentially informal exorcists within evangelical Protestant ministry we call them deliverance ministers and one of my parishioners knew a deliverance minister who lived out in the suburbs outside of town and she arranged a meeting between myself and this deliverance ministry will deliverance minister will just call him Hank not his real name and I got to know Hank and he inspired my trust and I explained to him the kind of situations that I was encountering in urban ministry and he said okay I I've seen the kinds of phenomena that you're describing here why don't you take your parishioners out to me and and I will pray with them and and we will we will do the practices of deliverance ministry and I think that they can be helped and your congregation can be helped and so that's what I began to do and the first time I took someone out to Hank to get you know delivered I was extremely nervous like I had no idea what I was getting myself into you know where we're gonna go in there was either gonna call up these spirits and then this person was gonna go into some kind of uncontrollable rage with superhuman strength and their head starts spinning around their tongue starts sticking out three feet and all kinds of crazy stuff you know and scratching the walls and all these things that you see in the movies I don't know what to expect so it was much to my relief when we got to Hank's house and I brought in my church member and there are a couple of other Christians there for prayer support to be present and Hank was there and we just chit-chatted and had some soft drinks for a while and got comfortable with the environment and got comfortable with each other and after that little introductory period that Hank said well shall we begin and I took a deep breath and said well I guess so and so we sat down at the table and then the first thing that Hank did was pray and he prayed to bind any spirits that were present that they would not manifest themselves in the name of Jesus and that was a big relief to me I'm like yeah thank you let's bind them and like yeah make sure they don't show themselves and he prayed that and then when that prayer was over Hank took out a big three-ring binder and in this three-ring binder were scores and scores of pages all in page protectors you know clipped into the three rings and on these pages were lists and lists of sins and they were categorized under seven major categories and Hank would take that binder he put it on the table and he turned it around so it was facing the person who had come to be delivered and he pushed it across the table to them and said okay begin reading down this list and if you come to anything that you've ever done confess it and renounce it audibly in the presence of these believers so we're basically doing something very similar to James 516 so it began to read through this list and this took a long time because that binder was a couple of inches thick and just full of everything that Hank had ever encountered ever read in the scriptures ever seen in ministry etc put them all down there and categorized them in these seven different categories and so the whole process took between two and three hours to work through but the end of confessing and renouncing any sin that they had ever done the persons from my church were just like floating on you know the proverbial cloud nine seemed like they are about six inches off the ground they felt so light so free by the time they left and the joy and the peace that was evident on their face was so remarkable that I'm like I want that you know so I arranged and I came back later and went through that whole process with Hank and a lot of other members of my church did so as well even those that weren't having like supernatural manifestations in their house and we all benefited from that process but what does that sound like to you yeah sounds like confession yeah but even more specifically a rare practice that's largely fallen out of the church is a practice that we call general confession okay a general confession is a lengthy confession where you make a very thorough inventory of your sins and you take some some special time to do that it's something that you don't want to do on a Saturday afternoon with that one half hour that your parish schedules for confessions right and there's 15 people in line and you go in and want to do a general confession no you don't want to do that general confessions are actually highly recommended by various spiritual masters of the church figures like St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis to Sales you know widely renowned for their spiritual wisdom warmly recommend the practice of general confession usually once a year to practicing Catholics in the context of a retreat so Francis to Sales and Ignatius Loyola both recommended making annual retreats for like a weekend and then in the context of that retreat when you have some leisure time and the time to devote to it to make that thorough inventory and have a general confession and they speak about the spiritual power that such a practice has well my friend Hank was basically using a non-sacramental general confession to help free people from demonic power and that that actually follows Catholic theology because what that confession was doing was that it was eliciting perfect contrition from people okay it was helping to dispose people so that they had true contrition and we know that you if you have true contrition you can receive the grace of forgiveness even without the formal sacrament and that was what was actually taking place when people came with goodwill in that spirit of prayer and that spirit was supported by their brothers and sisters their baptized brothers and sisters in Christ they were actually achieving the disposition of true contrition and being free to their sins and especially being free from demonic power so Father Amor talks about this I quoted this earlier today many times I have written he says that Satan is much more enraged when we take souls away from him through confession than when we take away bodies through exorcism and in another place in his second book with Ignatius Press Father Amor answered a reader's question a reader wrote in and said my pastor claims the best exorcism is confession and Father Amor widely regarded as the most experienced exorcist in the Catholic Church at the time writes he is right it is the most direct means to fight Satan because it is the sacrament that tears souls from the demons grasp strengthens against sin unites us more closely to God and helps to form our souls increasingly to divine will I advise frequent confession possibly weekly to all victims of evil activities okay Father Amor was a strong advocate of frequent confession so am I so is St. Josemaria Escriva who recommended weekly confession for lay people his his teaching on that was keep short accounts is what St. Josemaria said referring to the practice of accounting when you're a businessman and what you would reconcile your accounts and then retire and archive your accounts so rather than letting your accounts get very long before reconciling archives that keep them short that makes makes that is to say make frequent reconciliations of your accounts before God in order to make progress in the spiritual life again Father Amor writes in his book an exorcist more stories in my experience a good general confession which I always recommend as a starting point in conjunction with an intense life of prayer and grace is sufficient to end the afflictions without prayer and grace exorcisms are ineffective okay so what Father Amor is saying is when people would come to him he had a great renown as an exorcist and when people would come to him with spiritual difficulties the first thing that he would do is a general confession okay it's just like we had backed into by experience as Protestant deliverance ministers this is where Father Amor would start with a general confession and then usually that general confession with intense prayer and in frequenting sacraments would be sufficient to end the problems that people were having he writes elsewhere that the formal exorcism was largely only necessary when people were so much in the grip of evil that they could not they could not make a good confession and when even a good confession was impeded then they needed greater help from the church to get past that hurdle but if they could confess the sins by which the demons had gained entrance they could be free and this is the way I understand it working and I think I'm theological basis here but all sin has a spiritual warfare dimension to it there is no sin that is just utterly passive in terms of the conflict between God and Satan and when we sit when we sin we are saying no to God and we are saying yes to the evil one and sin amounts to a permission for the evil one to work in our life now the evil one can cause external difficulties to be thrown at us but he can't work inside of us unless we grant him permission is this making sense okay it requires the cooperation of our will for the evil one to work inside and we we grant that permission to him to work in us when we sin sinning is like accepting cookies on your browser okay you're allowing that organization or that website or whatever to have access inside okay to get a grip on you and confession is like going into your system and denying all the permissions all the access that you've granted to external entities to work within your system okay so confesses very important in that way your confession is a renunciation of the consent that you have given to the evil one to operate in your life that's one of the things that it is now you know one of the manifestation with particularly troubling manifestations of our tendency to evil is the phenomena of addiction where we get caught up in a certain sin that seems to take control of our life addictions virtually always have a spiritual dimension to them which is why Bill Wilson found he could not get out of his addiction to alcohol without acknowledging God and why classic 12 step programs begin with acknowledging your need for the grace of God I have up on the on the screen a website that I recommend it's specifically designed for men who are struggling to attain purity in their lives but the principles given on that website are very very useful and helpful for overcoming addictions of any kind even kind of mild and annoying addictions like getting addicted to you know watching sports or reading the newspaper or other things that actually take on an addictive character even though they aren't what we usually think of as grave sins so that's a great website run by a Catholic psychiatrist by name of Kevin majors let's talk about a theology of confession together the Greek word for confession is ex homo legato and it's used in the context of both confessing sin and also confessing the faith okay in different senses and ultimately this term confession ex homo legato means to admit the truth etymologically it means to say the same thing okay well to whom are you saying the same thing or who are you agreeing with when you confess well you're agreeing with God okay you're saying the same thing as God and you're calling your sins what God calls them which is wrong and evil and so you're agreeing with divine truth when you confess the truth leads to freedom you will know the truth and the truth will make you free so this is the jubilee dimension of truth and the confessional is the great moment of truth when you walk into the confessional what's going to take place there is pure truth in a in a situation of safety you have the safety to admit what the truth is there before God and before the priest and that truth is liberating it is a personal jubilee on the other hand lies and evil create bondage as Jesus says you are the you are of your father the devil he has nothing to do with the truth because there is no truth in him when he lies he speaks according to his own nature for he is a liar and the father of lies there's something profoundly untrue about every sinful act so confession is this great moment of truth which drives out the falsehood of the evil one that he uses to gain control of our behavior and in confession we manifest that is to say we demonstrate by our words and actions our own desire to be healed of evil and this is key God respects our free will God created us to love him love cannot be coerced otherwise it's not love loved by the very nature of itself must be freely chosen it must be a free and uncompelled act of the will and therefore God made us with free will but the fact that our will is not compelled has the side effect that we can actually choose evil and thus any world in which there's the real possibility of love is also a world that has the possibility of evil and in our world that possibility of evil has very much been realized our first parents as we know from divine revelation chose against God and actualized evil with that gift of free will which is given to them by God so that they could love him but this is the dynamic of our free will and we cannot be healed against our will even when Jesus speaks to the paralytic for example who's lying on the mat next to the pools of Bethesda he says to him do you want to be healed okay he needs the man's consent before he can act so M. Scott Peck the famous American psychiatrist writes even God cannot heal a person who does not want to be healed at the moment of exposure in both of these patients he's talking about exorcism cases voluntarily took the crucifix held it to their chests and prayed for deliverance so let's talk about some pastoral takeaways here some some some some spiritual action points that we can look at okay first of all do we realize that the jubilee is perpetuated through the sacraments in a special way through reconciliation and this morning's talk we talked about Jesus as the divine milk is that who came to proclaim the unending jubilee year perpetually marked by liberation from sin and from Satan and all of the sacraments liberate us from Satan and liberate us from sin beginning with baptism baptism itself includes an exorcism in the right of baptism so all the sacraments like this but especially confession because it particularly aims at removing the consent that allowed evil to take place in our lives so do we think of reconciliation in terms of jubilee in terms of liberation in terms of freedom I think not I think that we often have rather dull and judicial perspective on the sacrament of reconciliation again do we think of confession in legal terms or in spiritual warfare terms what about other people in our life you know what about family members children students etc you know are we conveying to those around us that reconciliation is not about judgment and it's not about some kind of judicial action but it's really about having victory in spiritual combat and attaining the defeat of the evil one in our lives and you know what am I doing in terms of my own practice of this sacrament am I making frequent recourse to it now I have never heard a spiritual a teacher advise less than monthly okay and I've heard several that advised weekly confession so somewhere between weekly and monthly pray about it talk to your spiritual director or somebody who's a trusted spiritual guide or your pastor but set up a practice of regular confession in your own life and then you know become an apostle of confession to those around you so are you making frequent use of reconciliation are you promoting it with those around you by your example and your teaching and what about a general confession maybe some of us should ponder that what about that ancient practice of making an annual retreat as a lay Catholic and in that context of that retreat making a thorough inventory maybe using something like the guide for confession that Dominicans use for their parish missions it's just one of the best that I've ever seen and using that to work through that and and spend some extra time with the priest and make that thorough inventory to get that spiritual healing that may be blocked because we haven't completely renounced the permissions that we've granted to the evil one to work in our life am I am I educated on that issue am I willing to make it a part of my own life and to know when it would be appropriate for others to take advantage of it as well these are some things that we can ask ourselves let's go to the Lord in prayer in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit amen heavenly Father we thank you for the gift of this sacrament we pray that we would be equipped and empowered through the Holy Spirit to be evangelists of the sacrament of reconciliation to make frequent use of it ourselves to understand its spiritual powers to understand it in terms of spiritual warfare and to promote this within our congregations within our families with all those who are coming contact Lord we pray for revival of the church in this country we pray for revival in the church around the world we pray for a spirit of repentance we pray for a spirit of confession to fall upon the church worldwide so that we can experience the fruits of repentance and a springtime of evangelization we pray this through Christ our Lord in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit amen thank you we have some time for questions we have until about 315 so about 12 minutes we got a microphone as well so wait till the microphone comes to you and I'll do my best Dr. Berge great talk why does the Catholic Church allow only or say as a minimum one time a year for confession I can't imagine anyone really only wanting to go to confession once a year so why is it allowed yeah you know that's a great question there's these these very very minimal requirements that are placed by the church on us you know commune once a year confess what it's a year if you only follow those minimal requirements that certainly is not enough to grow and and to flourish in the Christian faith I imagine that the reason the church established these kind of minimal requirements as being so low is because of extreme situations like being in a distant country or on a desert island or something like this where you're you know you're physically prevented from getting to the sacraments and so laying a kind of a very low bar on the general populace but none of the none of the popes or the the spiritual writers of the church would say that you know only doing those mental requirements is is anywhere near sufficient to actually grow in holiness like we're called to do so by the very nature of our baptism okay so the church doesn't want to you know lay burdens and there there's also people that are in situations of you know illness that are homebound and such and so the church is very generous and you know what's formally required but on the other hand what what's encouraged for those who are serious about growing in your baptismal grace is much more than that okay and that you know that's been made clear you know through through the magisterium of the past several popes and again also from the writings of the saints so thank you for that question when I went to seminary back in the early 80s I mean early 90s I had a Dominican Thomistic theology professor really impressed on us that being a priest and confession is is to make judgments so I don't know if I really would think that confession is is both about liberation but also it's a well it's kind of a tribunal not in the Protestant sense that we're snow covered dung but but that it's something more you know because we make a judgment and I say well this is a sin or this isn't you know how do you explain it yeah absolutely so there is that judicial aspect to confession the priest does make have to make a judgment about what constitutes a sin and be able to counsel the person that's come to them but it's not an either or thing you know and I guess I should qualify what I'm saying here I'm not it's not that I'm denying the judicial aspect of it saying that that doesn't that doesn't count but I think for most lay people if we get fixated on that then going to the confession you know has as all the all the joy and excitement of walking into a courtroom and when is that a fun experience but when we realize that you know something ontological is happening here something something it has to do with with with the reality with spiritual reality that we're getting unshackled that we're getting unbound that we're getting freed that we're experiencing victory over evil that a huge step forward is taking place in in the spiritual life that is a much more positive way to understand and I don't you know again I don't deny the judicial aspect and I've gone to confession and I've open you know buried my soul in front of the priest and said you know I'm trying to distinguish subtle movements of my spirit you know and was this a temptation or was this a sin and father do you think that by doing such and such I was giving consent you know and so you examine those questions with the priest and he's trained to do that but still my my primary image when I go into the confessional is that I've given Satan permission to work in my life by what I've done and I've got to renounce that quickly okay I don't want any time to elapse with with that that permission being allowed and his activity within me I want to put an end to that and I want to get back on a firm footing where I have not you know I have not consented to to his activity within my soul and the place that can rectify me and get me back to that good place is the sacrament of reconciliation okay other questions much I guess this is a question but your whole topic of spiritual warfare resonated big time with me one of the things that I've been thinking on awful lot about is nowhere is that more prevalent and or dangerous than in social media yeah and I'm just wondering if the church or any writers or there's any literature kind of examining that battlefield of that warfare that that would be useful to read or to corroborate what what's going on my mind on that topic right yeah your absolutely right there's a lot of demonic activity going on in social media we see this kind of you know very perverse group think among people that get on to the same sites and are kind of spreading very unhealthy downright perverse or evil ideas that kind of are like a like a spiritual virus that will spread within it within a group of people that it get involved in the same sites there's definitely some stuff going on there I regret to say I'm not well read on the literature specifically on you know spiritual warfare in the media but I know people that are working in this area my my good friend and colleague Eugene Gann who teaches here as an expert on Catholic use of the of media and he's done some work and others as well I know some exorcists and assistant exorcists who have talked about at least on a popular level the dangers that are posed by social media I have to do some research or some scratching around but I bet I could find some good articles for you you can reach out to me at J bergs my app franciscan dot edu that's my that's my email let me see if I can put this up on the screen for everybody yep you bet is on my title page not that one there it is you can send send me an email at that address no scratcher I can bet I can find you some good stuff on that yes over here all right with the topic of deliverance and confession I found one point missing which also happened in Jesus ministry as the apostles were powerless of helping the boy who was possessed and Jesus explained that it was the prayer and fasting yeah and I think that the dimension of fasting as preparation for confession it's one of important things for us as well maybe next time you can actually do a little bit longer on this right I totally agree yeah fasting and fasting you know I would take that as a reference to more generally to a life of penitence okay and that's something that we've really gotten away from the value of a life of mortification you know a lifestyle of mortification where we are practicing small mortifications through the day and this is much more common in Catholic piety in previous generations and then we got kind of soft and silly for a couple of decades here and lost that sense that there have to be physical manifestations of our interior repentance for our sins and the classic is a course fasting you're absolutely right and our Lord says at one point these these kind come out only by prayer and fasting so we need to get back to that I know during Lent we we have various fasting practices but fasting is not meant just for Lent you know Lent is where we intensify our personal mortifications but we're meant to practice various forms of self-denial throughout the you know the entire year St. Josemaria Escriva the saint whose spirituality I follow recommended small mortifications that were relatively frequent things like you know skipping butter on your toast skipping sugar in your coffee making small acts of self-denial denying yourself by showing up on time and leaving on time from events using good posture he had whole lists and lists in his spiritual writings of small things that we could do and the advantage that St. Josemaria emphasized with these small things is that they were in little danger of leading to pride because nobody's going to be blown away that you skipped butter on your toast like whoa now you're just like St. Lord to turn me over and cook me on the other side with that that butter skipping of yours you know so these these small mortifications can't lead to pride yet they often require a great exertion of the will it's surprisingly difficult to skip butter you know you think it was some kind of torture chamber like not gonna spread like this but it really they really exercise the will and those those small constant mortifications actually serve very well to train and strengthen our will for for those times also that we encounter a great crisis where we have to make a large self-denial in order to choose the good and to choose God so thank you for for throwing that in yeah prayer and fasting the practice of mortification very important and we got to get back to that as a kind of Catholic lifestyle got a couple questions can just choose where you want to with the microphone yeah we'll choose one more one more question so all confessions are not the same so they say to keep on going to the same person to confess that's not always possible and my second part of that is like if you forgive sins of any they are forgiven if you retain the sins of any they are retained so if you go to a confession is there a point where the priest is gonna say I'm not gonna forgive you or you're not you know so so I'm seeing this right from the Bible so yeah yes excellent question it is very rare but if you go into the confessional and you don't manifest repentance and you don't convince the priest that you're really sorry for what you've done he can decide to deny you absolution and that does happen okay it's very rare but some people will come in to the confessional and they are just brazen and they haven't the fact that they're in the confessional means that they are trying or they know they need to confess it but they have not let it go and they're in the confessional they just say it and they can't manifest contrition to the priest and the priest will have to say look I sense or I you know I can tell that you're not contrite that you're not sorry for having done this and I can't grant you absolution okay so the priest has to see evidence of contrition from the penitent in order to grant absolution and sometimes it just isn't there in general it is best to have a regular confessor who gets to know your soul and can kind of get a sense of your progress and maybe can give you personalized guidance and so on rather than always going to a different person where you're just walking in cold and it's anonymous however it's also good periodically to switch things up and go to a different confessor because confessors have different strengths and different charisms and so on and occasionally it's good to go to a different priest who may be able to sense something different about your soul and you know give you advice in a different area so consistency is good and occasional variety is also good in the practice of confession so all right thank you so much for your questions