Why confess your sins to a priest when you can just go straight to God?

That's a common question Catholics get asked and today we're going to look at three reasons

why you should confess your sins to a priest.

Before I do that, I want to be

absolutely clear that the Catholic Church does not teach that priests forgive

our sins. Only God forgive sins. Paragraph 1441 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says the following.

Only God forgives sins.

Since he is the son of God, Jesus says of himself,

the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins, and exercises

this divine power, your sins are forgiven.

Further, by virtue of his divine authority, he gives this power to men to exercise in his name.

So God forgives sins, but he does so through a minister of the church.

In fact, Protestants already believe in this concept to some extent.

Consider baptism.

Nearly all Protestant denominations believe that you cannot baptize yourself. Instead, someone else has to baptize you, and ideally it is a minister of the church you attend.

For Protestants who believe baptism saves us from sin or baptism regeneration, they believe that we need the involvement of a minister of the church to take us from a state of sin to a state of grace or salvation. If we need that the first time

we go from being dead in sin to being alive in Christ, why wouldn't we need a minister of the

church for the other times we fall from grace and seek to be reconciled to God?

Paul even says in 2 Corinthians 518, Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. I'm not saying

you're going to go to hell if you're unable to confess your sins to a priest.

God can save people in extraordinary ways if they are unable to seek him through the ordinary ways he gave us.

For example, most Protestants say the ordinary way we are saved is by faith. But that children who die in infancy can still

...