Quote

The gospel frees us to confess our sins without fear of condemnation.

Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul.

To be fair to the Inquisition, they only used confessions extracted after the torture had ended, which let them claim that admissions had been freely given; the fact that the torture would have started again if they hadn't confessed was a minor detail.

Confession has been my habitual homecoming since I was a child. It is a consolation and a joy, and such joy, our faith teaches us, is meant for everyone. It is our vocation to bring it to as many people as possible.

I have hardly detained the reader long enough on the subject, to give him a just impression of the stress laid on confession. It is one of the great points to which our attention was constantly directed.

The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.

If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions.

Confessions are not processed or analysed; they're told in a moment of desperation to a priest or to somebody interrogating you about a crime.

I think now there's much more of a confessional culture. That's not my bag. I come from a slightly older school of thought: 'give 'em nothin.' You don't plead guilty.