Editor’s note: This reflection was published in conjunction with an essay by James Keenan, S.J., entitled, “Helpful tips for LGBTQ Catholics seeking counsel from a priest.”
“I haven’t gone to confession in five years,” I confessed to a friend, “and I think about that every Sunday when I attend Mass. But I want to go back one day.”
While I have never named it to myself, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the year I finally stopped routinely going to confession is the same year that I started a loving, queer romantic relationship with my partner. I could not bring myself to enter a space where I felt like each word I spoke to my confessor needed to be a careful choice of what I conceal or reveal about my identity and relationship. I could not bring myself to this confessional space where what the church may see as a sin that is “mortal” or death-dealing (i.e. my queer relationship) is precisely what gives me life: a relational life of loving and being loved by another person, as God has created each of us to do.
I feel like this because of a number of high-profile episodes of other queer people having negative experiences in confession.
Examples of this include the poignant story of queer Catholic Alana Chen (as explored in Simon Kent Fung’s Dear Alana podcast), who went to confessions weekly after experiencing romantic attraction towards other women. For 14-year-old Alana, confessions was the space where a priest asked her to withhold information from her own family about her sexuality (and instead to confide in the priest alone) and where Alana was referred to conversion therapists who promised to fix her sexuality. Similar stories of queer Catholics receiving hurtful messages with lasting effects are found in popular literature and memoirs, including R/B Mertz’s 2022 memoir Burning Butch which recounts the author’s college-age experience of frequently attending confessions for their queer attractions.
I could not bring myself to this confessional space where what the church may see as a sin…(i.e. my queer relationship) is precisely what gives me life.
My understanding of confession has evolved from when I first became Catholic, at age 19, when I piously stood in the confessional line every other week, counting the number of sins I’ve committed against a rigid, overly detailed list of sins found in an examination of conscience brochure in the church pews. The sacrament of reconciliation felt like like a series of double binds: I would remind myself that omission of sins during confession is a sin, that intending to continue my sinful behaviors after confessing is a separate sin, that receiving Communion without having gone to confession is a sin, that lying or intentionally obscuring details during confession is a sin, that not feeling truly remorseful about the sins I have committed is perhaps yet another sin. The list goes on.
I am thankful for the one nameless priest to whom I confessed at age 21 that I have sinned by disagreeing with the church’s teachings on queer sexualities. I told him that no matter how hard I tried to “defend church teaching” on matters of sexuality, I could no longer do it. The priest asked me whether, instead of confessing this disagreement as a sin, I could instead pray for the strength to walk with the church as it slowly but surely grows in greater mercy and justice in its treatment of queer people and queer relationships.
“Sometimes, the church is an exemplar of mercy,” he said from across the screen, “but in other areas, the church still needs to grow in its own mercy. Sometimes, instead of feeling guilty for not defending the church’s teachings, we can instead walk with the church and help it grow.”
“Sometimes, the church is an exemplar of mercy,” [the priest] said from across the screen, “but in other areas, the church still needs to grow in its own mercy.”
As I grew older, queerer and less “in line” with the church’s many rules on sin and morality, I still appreciated receiving the sacrament of reconciliation. I would like to go back one day because for me, the sacrament of reconciliation beautifully encompasses everything I theologically believe about sin, woundedness and healing: Our human sin inevitably wounds our relationship to God, to ourselves, to our community, and to our human and ecological world. Repairing these wounds requires not just God’s forgiveness given to us alone in the privacy of our hearts, but requires us to heal and grow in community with one another.
Repairing our brokenness requires our vulnerability (through confessing to another person), as it does action (through the form of penance and commitment to material forms of apology or repair). In an age where cultures around the world grow increasingly unrepentant or even boastful about our collective social sins of war, environmental degradation or indifference toward the poor, the sacrament of reconciliation provides one of the few spaces in our world where we are invited to humbly repent and convert toward God and our neighbors.
But I also hold true to the belief that to fully experience God’s mercy in the sacrament of reconciliation requires me to bring my full self before God and others. I still believe now, though in a different way than I did at age 19, as a newly-converted Catholic, that the confessional booth ought not to be a place where I further lie or conceal where I most need healing from God or from my confessor. The more my queer relationships brought me genuine joy and flourishing, the more I slowly faded away from the sacrament of reconcilation.
Repairing these wounds requires not just God’s forgiveness given to us…but requires us to heal and grow in community with one another.
As the church currently stands, I feel that the church—and many priests—do not want to love me and receive me in the confessional space as the queer person I am. Knowing myself like I do, if I were to receive the sacrament, I would hide from the priest an important part of myself, and that if I wanted to confess about the times I have been impatient or angry at my spouse, I would do some careful verbal gymnastics to conceal the gender of my spouse in order to not invite the priest to interject that perhaps it is my marriage itself that is the sin after all.
While I have been frequently advised to “find an affirming priest” to hear a confession—and am indeed lucky to know many kind and welcoming priests in my city who would be happy to do so—the institution of the sacrament, and what it defines as sin, ultimately precludes me from experiencing the confessional booth as a space of freedom and honest openness before God.
But I do know that it is okay to continue to wrestle with both my desire for the immense grace that comes with this sacrament, and with my deep fear of how this confessional space has hurt—and continues to hurt—queer Catholics like myself. I tell myself that it is okay to miss receiving a sacrament while knowing that perhaps I am not ready to go back just yet. And it is okay to want the church to have a better theology and pastoral practice surrounding the sacrament of reconciliation, where the focus becomes not so much on strict lists of sins and frequencies, but on our collective need for God’s mercy, healing and repair.
I do not know when I will next go back to confession, but with God’s grace, I do hope to return.
One day.
