Fr Z's article: If I confess to watching porn, must I say it was homosexual porn?

I’m a huge advocate for confession since my return from my lukewarm confusion and lack of exploring the faith as an adult. During the worst part of my struggle I was honestly the weekly face waiting for the priest to arrive.

In my experience it is best to NOT do the face to face confessional. Stay behind the screen. Face to face is not required as Christ stated confession must be “heard.” It also in a way protects your relationship with Padre. Yeah he’s a priest who has the duty to hear your sin and grant absolution but he is still human too and we can all get burned out.

Any priests on here? Am I wrong on this?

Second thing. I always felt the squeakiest clean on the inside the more SPECIFIC I was. It is that crushing of the ego that we are looking for just as wheat must be crushed to spring fourth new life.

I’m a cop by vocation and honestly when a criminal actually does confess a crime to me, which is rare, the more specific they are about the details the more compassion I feel for them. Even though I have to still make the arrest the whole process become much easier because a wall of false pride and ego has been torn down between us.

So you looked at gay porn. Go confess it and be done with it. Satan will extort your shame if you don’t. Get it off your soul. All of it. The truth, the WHOLE truth, and nothing but the truth so help you God.

 

I would say to confess it. The reason is experience. I feel that I have not made a good confession if I did some depraved thing, and simply said "porn".

After I started doing this, I found that the threat of having to tell a priest what these depraved things were, prevented me from doing them. Saying "porn" is a common thing and not hard to do for many. Saying that your problem has gotten so bad you started doing X... That's a good way to teach yourself not to do it, because I am very uncomfortable stating details.