Why Do We Confess to a Priest?

When it comes to confession, there are quite a few misconceptions of what it truly is. People see the sacrament of Reconciliation as something where you tell a priest what you did wrong and that's the whole thing. But that's not the whole picture. Rather, we are to serve penance in an effort to rectify our sin. But the question that most commonly arises is why we have to confess to a priest. I'll show the first reason in a two step process, then give some general reasons afterward.

The quick answer is "penance." Penance is how we repay God after our sins. So why is penance necessary? Here's an example. A nine year old kid is playing baseball in his backyard and hits a ball into his neighbor's window. The window shatters and you quickly hide the evidence of your baseball game. After a couple of days, you feel guilty and tell your neighbor it was you. Is that the end of the story? No. Of course not. You're gonna apologize right? Maybe mow his lawn for free a couple of times. That's the penance. Saying "sorry" is the part that actually matters for forgiveness.

So where do priests come in? Well, priests are objective evaluators. You tell them your sins and they tell you what your penance should be. We can't just confess directly to God because we wouldn't be able to have a metric to objectively evaluate our penance. That's like a job applicant evaluating whether or not he gets a job. Of course he's gonna give himself the job! In the same way, we need a priest to objectively evaluate what our penance ought to be. Because of that, we confess in front of a priest.

Here come some interesting justifications as well. Similar to that of the previous paragraph, we cannot evaluate if we have sinned objectively. How on earth could we confess our sins directly to God if we can't objectively evaluate them? Because of concupiscence, and our inherent sinful nature, we cannot objectively evaluate what's right. That's why we sin in the first place. As such, we need someone else to objectively evaluate our sin.