April 23, 2012 – Catechism 1480-1484

If you believe you are very sick, you will go to a doctor.  If you need help with a legal matter, you go to a lawyer.  If you need your bathroom fixed, you call a plumber.  If you want forgiveness of your sins, you can do that on your own.  That just does not fit.  Thinking you can read the Bible and ask God to forgive your gravest sins and all is right with the world is naive.  Can you read a medical book and then operate on yourself?  Can you read a book on law and then go into court and defend yourself? (Technically yes, but not usually with any success)  When your bathroom is broken, can you read a book and fix it?  You can try, but you may actually make things worse, not better. 

If you really believe that sin is something that effects you, separates you from God, keeps you from being who you want to be, and is a serious problem, why would you rely totally on yourself to try and fix it.  The thing that is blatantly obvious is that you are the one that sinned.  If you have enough wisdom to work out forgiveness for yourself, you should’ve had enough not to sin in the first place.  And if all you have to do is ask for forgiveness to yourself, that really makes it very easy to just go around and sin, knowing that you can just ask for forgiveness and it will all be ok.  It really is not that far removed from a “once saved, always saved” idea.  Just one little step, and all I have done wrong is gone. 

Doesn’t it make more sense that God would set up something that we could go to an expert to help fix our problem.  Like in all the worldly examples, the experts know what to do, can fix the problem, and we are better off for going to them.  Here, the expert is Jesus Himself, in the person of the priest.  He is there to heal you, strengthen you, instruct you and bless you so that you can go and sin no more.  When we go to someone for help in the material world, why would it be any different than dealing with the Spiritual world, with our soul, and our eternal life.