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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.
I'll try to combine two different replies into one here.
I admit this is a somewhat odd position for me to take, because in my experience, almost all of the Catholic priests I've known have been, though possessing their various human flaws, genuinely warm and faithful men offering up their lives for the sake of the gospel, and the Protestant ministers I've known have been an incredibly mixed bag, ranging from people I genuinely consider non-Christians or heretics to people who just seem to be interested in social status and conforming to trends while seeking high status to, thankfully, the small minority of devoted servants of Christ. If I were just judging by what I think of them as people, Catholicism would have a very easy win over Protestantism.
I also agree in principle that the quality of the priest as a person is not the important thing. I am not a Donatist; the sacraments are valid even if they are performed by people who are inconstant, foolish, un-virtuous, or in the most extreme cases, even unbelievers. I tend to think there is a tension here in the church. The efficacy of the sacraments does not depend on the priest's holiness, but nonetheless we do validly want priests to live holy lives. We want all people to live holy lives, after all, and priests are seen as representative of the community, and their lives affect many others. So the tightrope to walk is that priests must strive to be good and holy men, learned, faithful, compassionate, good speakers and wise counsellors, etc., but that priesthood does not depend on any of these things.
However, all that said, I do stand by the observation that, in my experience, lay Catholics do not know their priests as well as lay Protestants tend to know their pastors. I think Catholic priests are often felt to be interchangeable in a way that Protestant equivalents are not, and I take that to be because of the role of the wider ecclesial structure. In general I think Catholics care more about the structure and institutions of the church than Protestants, so the specific individual priest in front of you can be less important than the office he represents and the function he performs.
In defense of the Catholic position, you could argue that's the way it should be. You go to mass to meet Christ, not the priest. I myself think about my role in those terms. (I don't want to get into institutional details, for reasons of privacy, but I am a kind of pastor.) My role is to be 'transparent' - I want people to look through me and my service and see God. All ministers must, in a sense, be like John the Baptist: "he must increase, but I must decrease". We make ourselves small for the sake of the gospel. Protestantism is much more vulnerable to 'celebrity pastors' than Catholicism is. There are celebrity priests, unfortunately, but I think Catholicism has resisted that more effectively than Protestantism has.
That said, no human being is ever fully interchangeable, and ultimately we encounter Christ not through ecclesial offices, but through other living human beings, and sometimes I do worry that the human is lost. Sometimes I do speak to a priest and realise that somewhere beneath his ministry is a very lonely man, and I feel a compassion for him. I remember one priest telling me once about how precious he finds the friendships he has that go back to before his ordination - people who are still able to know him as just 'my friend X', not 'Fr. X'.
At any rate, as far as individuals go, I think the average of Catholic priests is better than the average of Protestant priests/ministers/pastors. No doubt standardisation helps with that. Possibly it's also just because my background has exposed me to a great many mainline Protestant leaders who have been slowly selling out the gospel. In my case, therefore, it has been very important to distinguish between the church's representative (frequently corrupt), the visible institution of the church (also frequently corrupt), and the invisible church (resplendent throughout eternity, terrible as an army with banners). So I put an especial value on practices of resistance, which allow one to remember and hold to the gospel even in the face of straying leaders and institutions.
I largely agree.
There is also a weird dynamic in that Catholic priests are celibate men and I am a woman, so I have to try to balance friendliness with...
One of the new, younger priests at my parish looked tired during mass one day. I know he's active with hospice ministry which often involves being called at night and I started praying for him that God would help him meet the challenges of his role. He mentioned once in a talk about an experience he had with a dying man and I gave him my CD of David Crowder Band's "Give Us Rest; or, A Requiem Mass in C" because his talk reminded me of the album so much. When I was having trouble with assessing my autistic daughter's ability to receive sacraments, I went to him for help.
I had confession with him and at the end he told me to keep up the good work and I realized... I needed to create distance here. No one did anything wrong, but there is a danger inherent in a friendly woman interacting with a lonely man. I started going to a different confession line. I still pray for him.
I don't think it would necessarily be different if more priests were married though. I wonder if it's similar in Protestant congregations with solely male ministers.
I don't know what it's like for men. Why don't men befriend priests more?
I don't know. I suspect that if you're Catholic, it's difficult to have an open relationship with your priest, because there's a hierarchy between you.
Some years ago, when I was in my late 20s, I remember having a chat with a local priest, a man in his 50s. In theory we met so that we could have a chat about my own spiritual life and my engagement with the parish (I was, at the time, in the church's choir), but after half an hour we got to talking more casually, and he told me about the departing parish secretary. He had apparently been very disappointed with her, and as he was bellyaching to me, I realised that the roles had switched and I was giving him pastoral care. I'd guess that he just didn't have people to casually talk to like that. Most of us do have people in our lives who will listen to us if we need to just get something off our chest. It's often unfair, but we need friends, a spouse, family, etc., who will listen sympathetically if we need to say, "Ugh, I had a terrible day at work, can you believe what my co-worker said to me?" It may not be virtuous (and perhaps this priest was guilty of the sin of gossip), but it's nonetheless something that a priest, living alone in the presbytery, may not have access to.
I think people do see priests as like islands sometimes, separate from the rest of society? I once ran into that same priest in the supermarket in the evening one day, after mass. I was shocked - wait, you're a priest, what are you doing wearing normal clothes wandering up and down the aisle putting food in a shopping basket? - and then felt stupid for being shocked. Where did I think priests got food? I felt ashamed of myself for thinking of him as another species.
Unfortunately he's since been rotated to another parish and I never see him any more. I hope he's still doing all right.
Every now and then I hear homilies, or bishops' messages, reminding parishioners to pray for their priests. I encourage them to do so, and more than that, if it's possible to do so in a safe way, be kind to priests. They need friends too.
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