Welcome back to Seamus Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire.

One of the most common questions I think we get as Catholics, and I'm sure this is true for our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters as well, is like, why do you confess your sins to a priest? Now you're going to get that sometimes from people who aren't Christian at all, who just find the whole thing kind of weird, but then you're also going to get it from non-Catholic Christians, non-Orthodox Christians, like Protestants, who find the whole thing

unbiblical and weird. So what I want to do today is give a short answer to that, explaining in two

parts, why do we do this? What's the biblical foundation for this? And then maybe even go a little deeper

and say, why does the Bible call us to do this? So to do that, I want to tackle

it in two halves. Number one, why confess your sins to another person at all? And then number two is

going to be, okay, if you're supposed to confess your sins to others, why does it matter that you go to a

priest? So let's do the first of those first. Why confess your sins to another person?

The easy answer is because the Bible says so.

So a good verse for you to know the chapter and verse number four is James Chapter 5, verse 16, James 5, 16, which says, therefore, and we're going to get into that, therefore.

Therefore is a connector. It means what came before matters, and we're going to get into what came before.

But right now, just know the verse.

Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.

So we are supposed to confess our sins to other people.

So if somebody says, this is so unbiblical of you going to a priest to confess your

sins, I just confess my sins to God. Well, they're explicitly not following what the Bible says.

They're explicitly going astray. James 516 says, confess your sins to one another, and they're

just not doing it. So we can get into whether they should confess it to a layperson, family

member, priest, etc.

But at the outset we should recognize, confess your sins to one another is baseline.

If you're not doing that, if you're not going to anybody else for confession,

you are not following what the New Testament says on this subject.

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