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Notes -
Well, from my Protestant perspective, I do think that the sacrament of penance and reconciliation is unnecessary, but I would say that's because it's got a mistaken ecclesiology. Mutual confession and forgiveness is, of course, essential to the Christian life and to any Christian community, but I think the sacrament of penance institutionalises that in a way that is unnecessary.
If you'll pardon a personal story, I've flirted with conversion to Catholicism a few times, and something I found very odd, psychologically, was the idea that I should be recording or making some sort of mental list of my sins for purposes of confession. I think that often I am not conscious of my sins, or I do not recognise sins even in the process of committing them, or that both my motives and my actions are mixed, combining sin and righteousness in ways beyond my ability to extricate. There are some unambiguous sins - I know if I have stolen, or murdered, or committed adultery! - but those are very much the minority. Thus when I confess my sins, both in a church context and privately to God, I name (or bring to mind) specific sins that I feel guilt for, but I am also conscious that those are only the tip of the iceberg. I ask God to purify and transfigure my mixed motives, to make me aware of the sins I have not recognised, to correct and chasten my wayward heart toward those sins that I struggle to regret, and so on. I find the - pardon my language - mechanical nature of the sacrament of penance and reconciliation to be an obstacle to this holistic view of sin.
I don't think that, in general, I am in a state of grace right up until I impair it with a grave sin, which I think need a priest to absolve. It doesn't seem that binary to me. I think that I am constantly in a process of metanoia - I pray that God, through his grace, is mysteriously at work in me healing and transforming my sinful nature.
Naturally I don't expect a Catholic to agree with me. In principle I have no objection to a person making a confession to a priest or minister, and that priest or minister offering absolution. In fact I have no objection to a person doing that to another layperson. It is salutary in each case. So I don't think a Catholic is doing himself or herself spiritual harm by going to confession.
But I do think that the visible economy you get in Catholicism, the ledger of sins accumulated and absolved that I felt I was asked to start recording, is not the right way for Christians to think about sin, reconciliation, and grace.
I can speak to my experience with confession, examinations of conscience, etc. I have found it very positive for a lot of reasons, and like anyone who found the "one weird trick that works" I will extol its virtues without self-restraint.
It is good hygiene to do an examination of conscience before bed. I like the Ignatian way of reviewing the day and praising God for all that you did that was good, asking forgiveness for the good you failed to do, etc. I don't see how anyone can progress without these kinds of progress reports. Or maybe that's the point in contention itself, is progress possible or desirable?
I think progress is both possible and what God wants for us. God calls us to prayer and deep prayer is only possible by hating that which is antithetical to God - sin. There is no sin in God. That's putting it mildly. God hates sin. We cannot enter deep communion with God while still harboring deep attachments to sin. The sin in us will repel us from God. This is something I have experienced in myself and witnessed in others.
Is progress possible? Yes, it is. I understand your repulsion towards the idea of listing sins like they're a grocery list or something like that. That is unappealing to me as well.
For a penitent, they might start with a written examination of conscience, with a list of sins and checkmarks next to them. That's fine for someone still learning. But what most people discover, if they actually go with the recommendation of confessing every month (and this is probably only around 10% of active Cathoilcs who do this) is that they check fewer and fewer boxes until eventually they show up to their monthly confession and stare at the paper and realize... they don't know what to confess!
This happened to me. It's happened to many others I've spoken with. I had a few mortal sins that I kept repeating, or things that I hadn't realized was a mortal sin but once I learned that it was I found it hard to stop the habit. To be forthright about one of the sins, I lied a lot. Often because someone would assume something and I would go along with it because it was easier. Or because I made a mistake and wanted to cover it up. Little lies, big lies, it was hard for me to face the truth. I did this since childhood.
One family dinner, when I was 6 and my sister was 9 months old, my parents were asking if anyone would finish off a loaf of bread. I said, "I'll eat it!" but in a quiet voice. My parents thought it was my sister who said it! And I just went along with it, even after my mom would bring it up over and over again the next couple decades as a sign she knew my sister would be a great communicator.
It honestly felt like I couldn't help myself, this was a trait ingrained into me.
When I came back to the Church as an adult, I wanted to get serious about pursuing holiness. This meant regular examinations of conscience and regular confessions. And for the first time in my life I took it very seriously, humbling myself to say everything wrong I could think of without trying to excuse or justify myself.
And over the course of about two years, slowly, painfully, sometimes dragging myself to confession every week, sometimes once a month, finally, these persistent sins were uprooted in me, to the point where they are no longer even tempting.
And then what happened? Was I perfect? Oh, no.
Instead, examinations of conscience started to look very different. What was I failing to do? What virtues did I lack? Where did I resist the call of God today? The better I became the more there was to see. I may have remained in a state of grace for years now, but that doesn't mean I'm "done."
The sacrament of confession keeps you on that spiraling path of going forward, going further, seeing new things and new horizons. Healing your soul, hating your sin, finding God in unexpected places.
Once you're not confessing mortal sins, you get freedom and latitude to focus on a specific area of failure in your life. "I get distracted by my phone too much." "I'm being called to pray more and I'm not setting time for it." "My finances are ordered towards my own gratification instead of what is best for the Kingdom." Etc.
And then you hunker down and just focus on that one thing for the next however long it takes. The same way you got rid of your mortal sins, repeated confession, absolution, examining your conscience every day, keep going, keep progressing, see the virtue grow.
TL:DR, I don't think confession would impair what you already have going on, but add more horsepower to what you are already doing. If it's real, if Catholics are right, it actually is a means of getting graces you wouldn't get otherwise. It doesn't mean you stay on a checklist confession forever, or ever need to go to a checklist at all.
Firstly, thank you for the generous and eirenic response. I'm glad that we started with a disagreement but now appear to have reached a point where we're sharing personal experiences and giving each other advice for how to grow in holiness.
I join you in wholeheartedly endorsing a daily examen. Ignatius was definitely one of the figures who appealed to me and prompted me to investigate Catholicism! I think the idea of pausing to consciously look back at your day is a good one, and for what it's worth I wouldn't say exclusively Catholic. For example, I'd say that Wesley's twenty-two questions are approaching a similar idea. I approve of the way that link puts it in terms of spiritual accountability, and I can see how personal confession would serve the same end.
One of the risks of the approach I laid out, after all, is that it might make sin generic, abstract, and universal. The more a believer contemplates sin and holiness in glittering generalities, the easier it is to ignore the small everyday duties. It is easier to say, "All of my motives are partly mixed with sin" than it is to say, "I lied to my friend Kevin today".
All that said, I notice that one word was missing from your post. There is no mention of the priest in your post. I would have thought that the priest is the most distinctive element of confession in Catholicism. I wholeheartedly endorse a regular examination of conscience, and confession of sin before others and corresponding penitence is obviously meritorious. In Catholicism, though, we are talking about a rite done with a priest, who represents the institutional church and absolves you in Christ's name. (Indeed, in the very person of Christ.) I'm curious what your experience of the priest's role has been. I'd suggest that for most people raised Protestant, the idea of making yourself vulnerable and telling your shameful secrets to a priest seems alien and uncomfortable.
As Shrike mentioned, many Protestant churches technically have liturgies for confession to a priest or minister. In my experience, however, these are almost never used. For that matter, confession is decreasingly popular even among Catholics - you gave a 10% figure for monthly confession, and frankly I think that's optimistic. I've talked to Catholic priests about this locally and they've told me that it is more and more neglected (at least here in Australia), and to an extent it has become 'a sacrament without a theology'. It still exists and is still offered, but there is minimal felt sense among the people of its purpose, much less its necessity. I can't bring myself to approve of that, because even though I don't think that confession to a priest is necessary, I think that what's going on here is probably a society-wide amnesia around the very concept of sin.
The priest is physically present and a necessary part of it functioning, but he's not at all the point of Confession. If confession was just telling my sins to another Christian, even a priest, it would not be as efficacious. I believe when I am stating my sins aloud during confession I am saying them to Jesus, that he hears me not just in the way that God knows everything but Jesus has human ears and is hearing me with these physical ears, Jesus is loving me with His perfect human heart. The fact that the priest is physically present forces me to grapple with the fact that there is another human here, a fact that can be too easy to forget or overlook. It does increase the gravity of the situation. But the human that matters isn't the priest.
It also is not the case that the power of confession is solely the power of saying sins aloud. There is a grace that comes from it that needs to be experienced to be understood.
I gave that estimate of active Catholics, people who follow the precepts of the Church. By definition, this group 100% consists of people who go to Confession once a year at minimum. It's probably 1% of Catholics who claim to be Catholic on a survey who go to monthly confession.
At my US parish, we have confession every day for an hour, sometimes twice a day, with up to four priests hearing confession simultaneously, and there still are often people left over in the line when the time is over. This isn't a completely dead letter.
There are other parishes where they only offer confession for a half hour a week and the priest doesn't seem to care about improving this at all. This is frustrating to a lot of people, but also a symptom of the priest shortage.
Likewise, I think people have forgotten how horrible sin is. They explain it away psychologically or simply think it's not that bad. If God isn't bad, then He'll forgive you, even if you never stop to be actually sorry. If you never reflect on your failures and mistakes, then you will be ignorant of your sin and God can't actually punish someone for being ignorant, right? That wouldn't be fair. So it's best not to think about it and remain in ignorance as if ignorance is the same as innocence.
I am sometimes surprised how much, in Catholicism, the priest both matters and does not matter. Protestants, on the one hand, have significantly less formal need for a minister. There can be entire lay congregations, and most functions of an ordained leader can be done by a layperson in extremis. The priest is an essential part of the ecclesial machinery in Catholicism in a way that he is not really for Protestants. On the other hand, Protestants listen to their pastors much more than Catholics listen to their priests. Protestants seem to take pastors and ministers seriously as a source of moral guidance more than Catholics take priests seriously.
(For example, here is a survey about role models in faith from a 2016 Australian survey. The main difference that stands out to me is that Catholics are much more likely to say that their parents are their role models, and to a lesser extent school teachers are more important to them, while Protestants are significantly more likely to say their pastor/minister/priest, as well as other Christian leaders like speakers or authors. I think that does reflect a difference in attitudes toward church leaders. There may be a lot of reasons for this - the Catholic school system exists while Protestant schools are much rarer, but also adult converts are much more common for Protestants than for Catholics, which I imagine brings down the family numbers.)
What I find anecdotally is that Catholics are more likely to think of the priest as something like a technician. The priest is a kind of 'sacrament dispenser' - he the person trained and authorised to provide a specific, limited service for the community, and outside of that service you do not particularly care what he thinks. Meanwhile I think Protestants seem to want to have more of a relationship with their pastor, seeing the pastor as a friend as well as a teacher.
Thus even the way you present it here - the sacrament is what matters, and the priest as a person is a kind of adjunct to that.
That sounds plausible to me. The anecdotal figure I hear from priests is that they expect maybe 10-20% of the children they baptise to be anything more than Christmas-and-Easter Catholics when they grow up. And of that number, people who go to confession more often than the mandatory once a year are an even smaller minority.
I think that's true. I worry a lot about how I preach about sin. If you come on very strongly with it, you can provoke too much resistance and people will stop listening, or adopt a hostile position to you and close their hearts. But the alternative to preaching about sin is to adopt a purely therapeutic position, and then people forget about it entirely. That way is the broad and easy path that leads to the fire; sleepwalking into hell.
The gospel convicts us. It makes us aware of our own failings and limitations. The Christian life is one of constant repentance. There's an extent to which the churches have forgotten how to speak about sin, but an even greater extent to which the people have forgotten how to hear words about sin.
Sorry for the double response, thought about editing the first comment but this is turning into a proper thought:
I think part of it is also that there is a centralized authority in the Catholic Church. My priest is teaching under the authority of our diocesan bishop, who receives his authority through his Holy Orders but maintains his authority by remaining in communion with the Bishop of Rome.
My local priest either is teaching what the Catholic Church teaches or is not. If he is preaching what the Catholic Church preaches, then it's redundant in the Information Age. Everyone who cares will have already looked it up, everyone who doesn't care about doctrine has already tuned the priest out if they were ever tuning in at all. If he's good, he'll be able to synthesize something from the readings and the present age and pull together some kind of advice or insight.
If a priest is not preaching what the Catholic Church preaches, then ignore him. If he is in heresy, try to be charitable, correct him in private, write a letter to his bishop if he persists. But there are lots of various mediocre steps between "teaching in lockstep with the Church" and "outright heresy." And when that happens you just kind of grin and bear it.
My pastor is just one person in a network of people with teaching authority I have regular access to. 100 years ago, or even just 50 years ago, I think Catholics did take their parish priests more seriously and have to trust them a lot more, just because of technology.
I'm skirting around The Scandal, but that has a lot to do with it, too. Lots of devout Catholics told God, "I'll take The Church, You can keep Your priests" because that was the only way to resolve the angst there.
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Catholics tend to move priests around every few years so that no one priest gets a "cult of personality" around them. A priest is hopefully knowledgeable about matters of faith, might be able to dispense good advice, might be well read enough to give a decent homily, but the essential thing is that they live out their ministry in obedience and love.
I wouldn't say that a priest is only supposed to be a technician. Ideally he is someone who can guide the people in a parish towards a better relationship with God through his words, actions, and prayers. It is a creative vocation, requiring thinking on your feet about how God is calling you to be here for a wide variety of people, often strangers.
But, if the priest isn't very quick witted, isn't a master theologian, maybe commits more than the average amount of sin, is a drunkard like the Whisky Priest of Graham Greene, or has even lost his faith entirely... he's still a priest. To a Catholic that means he can still say Mass, hear confessions, anoint the sick, provide a blessing. That's infinitely better than going to a church where none of that happens, even if there's a preacher down the street with sermons that box your soul. (I've always said that a homily should be like a punch to the face - fast, it came out of nowhere, and it's all you can think about for the next hour. And the punch connects, of course. Alas, my current pastor is one of those who likes to put three sermons in one and thinks he's really clever doing it.) Because Jesus is the best, and His power is made perfect in weakness.
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