Confession Video

I somewhat hesitated sharing this video.    Watch it first, if you are interested and want to avoid “spoilers”.

So you watched it?

Are you sure you don’t care about spoilers?

Ok – you have only yourself to blame at this point.

I loved this video.  From the lady using confession to gossip about her snotty neighbor the the anguish of the priest when he realized that the penitent before him was the man who killed his father.  And I get that he was lifting a burden by lying.  But he was lying.  I don’t think it was necessary for the story and there were other ways that it could have been dealt with.

When I considered sharing the video I hesitated.  Do I really want to share this with such a problematic bit in the ending?  It is human nature to pick these sorts of things apart and blow them up far past what the deserve.   But in the end this video has several qualities that I think make it worthwhile.

First: the priest is just a guy — who at that moment is acting as God’s active conduit of mercy and love.   It is a struggle for him,  he does it (arguably) badly, but he does it.     I think it is valuable for us to keep in mind that our priests are men, men who love and hate and weep and laugh.   Media has a tendency to often either idolize priests or debase them.  This video does neither.

Second: the penitent really needs confession and illustrates the need for confession.   It is one of those common “Ask a  Catholic Questions”: “Why do I need to confess to a priest, I can just confess to God.”  Sure you can, but when you are heart torn and painfully aware of the magnitude of your sin, when you question the very possibility of  redemption then you need to hear in the physical world the comfort of absolution.  The penitent could have prayed for forgiveness a thousand times, but until he heard the words he would never be able to start letting go of the sin and the despair that  accompanies it.   One of Satan’s most successful lies is the idea that you don’t need to speak your sin to anyone but God.   I chains us in despair and prevents us from acting forward in mercy and forgiveness.

Now for the problematic part.

We can look at the idea of lying to the penitent in a few ways.  One rather artistic idea from the comments on the video was that our sins are washed away in confession to the point that in the eyes of God they never happen – so in a certain sense the priest’s father wasn’t killed by the penitent.  But that is really  an Obi Wan “certain point of view” moment and not really satisfactory.

We could also attempt to view it as just an act of Mercy.  The priest lied to comfort a dying man   There is no denying that the man who is relieved of this burden feels immense joy, but the joy was based on a lie.   At the very end the priest even postulates  that it might be worse that he lied as a priest.   In the end if the priest had maintained honesty, forgiven the penitent  both in the sacramental and in his own heart and had communicated that to the penitent we could have had a very powerful ending.  Not the joy that the penitent shows, but a something based on reality and truth.

So in the end I decided to share this, not because it is perfect, but because its imperfections make me think and make for a good conversation.  Is a lie ever worthwhile?  If this is not such a case what would have been better and what would have looked like?  How would Christ have approached this differently?