Now You Can Confess Your Sins Online

As a Catholic boy I attended Catechism class every Saturday. Once a month the nun marched us to the sanctuary, where we would stand in line to say our confession. “Bless me Father for I have sinned, my last confession was a month ago. These are my sins: “I swiped a Hustler magazine, I looked down my teacher’s blouse and I called my younger brother a f***head.”
 
I thought it a great bargain that a few “Hail Marys” absolved me of my transgressions. It’s interesting how the priest never ordered me to return the Hustler to its rightful owner or to throw it away.
 
Sometimes the kid ahead of me in line stayed a long time inside the confessional, and I wondered what horrible crimes he had committed. Now we can know what sins other commit; there are Web sites popping up all over the Internet that allow penitents to publicly confess their sins.
 
From MiamiHerald.Com:
 
“A woman kept her secret for nearly two decades.
 
Finally ready to confess, she turned not to a minister, but to her computer.
 
”I am sorry God for not keeping that baby,” her anonymous confession reads. ‘I had an abortion and had kept that secret for over 18 years. I feel so ashamed. Please forgive me!”
 
The confession appears at ivescrewedup.com, a website launched by the Flamingo Road Church in Cooper City. It’s one of a growing number of such sites across the country — some secular and others church-sponsored — that offer a place to spill out ugly secrets or just make peccadilloes public.”
 
Online confessions are a wonderful thing for a poor soul burdened with guilt; it allows him to clear his conscience without the mediation of a priest. When a sinner confesses his evil ways to his favorite deity, he doesn’t receive an email notifying him that his prayer has reached its destination. But when you post your sins online, they are visible to the whole world, and at the very least you know that others have read your confession.
 
If you feel the need to confess your shortcomings online, feel free to visit dailyconfession.com or mysecret.tv.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Religion, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 16 views | Trackback | Print this page |

I write a weekly column for a small town newspaper in Virginia, and I also write for several Web sites. Please leave a comment or send me an email at: rreyes4966@aol.com | More from Robert Paul Reyes