To all you RCs out there, do you remember your first confession?

[carla]

I just wept at mine! Nothing terrible to confess, just the shadow of a person on the other side!

My first confession was fine. Face to face with a nice priest. However afterwards, I refused to lend my pencil sharpener to someone on "my table" and the whole lot of them hissed "On no! Now you've got a sin stain on your white soul!" Was v traumatised.
God, why do they do it to 7 year olds?

7 years old? Do kids really go that young?

I'm not a RC btw so do forgive my ignorance. I am a Christian though, so do understand repentence for forgiveness of sins, just dont know about the process of confession.

Nas, yes, they do. DD1 did it this week. No signs of tears from any of them, though , only me!

lol, eg!

I certainly do, and very traumatic it was too.

I went to non-denominational infants school and started at my RC primary at 7 - all my classmates had had their First Communion the previous year so I had to do Communion classes with the year below.

One Sunday before the Big Day, my best friend's mum invited me to come to their church with them for Mass then for lunch afterwards. As they all headed off to receive communion I hung back, but friend's mum - assuming I must have had my First Communion already - made 'Come Along' faces and gestures. Torn and embarrassed, I relented and went and took communion.

So at my first confession, I was too frightened to confess this, and spent many of my childhood years convinced that this precipitous action had condemned me to hell.

I'm lapsed now, would you believe?!!!

Yup, i went in, realised i would be forgiven for everything so just told them my mum had asked me to hoover and i said no. Job done, 10 hail mary's

I remember mine well. We'd spent the previous few weeks in class 'practising' telling our sins so there were plenty of good examples going around that I remember coming out with. The priest must have killed himself laughing at the number of times children had 'played with the gas cooker'.

I don't really remember mine at all, so i obviously wasn't traumatised by it

Don't remember my first, although most of my confessions were to do with lying and teasing my younger brother.

I didn't find it that intimidating because we went to Church every Sunday (and Holy Day and sometimes just cause mum felt that we should!) and we knew the two priests there quite well.

Those were the days! We had a parish priest AND a helper!

dh has just said he remembered his, very scary he says, stepping into a dark black box, you had to walk down a little bit before you turned the corner, but you couldn't see a thing! He is obviously very traumatised by it!

Remember mine clearly - we had a whole series of classes (RC school which shared grounds with RC church) leading up to the 'event'. I didn't find it scary - I was already an alter server so quite familar with the priest who was lovely. I liked the idea of being forgiven for anything I confessed, but it was mainly things like having bad thoughts about my sister :)

We had a script to follow stapled to the inside of the workbook we'd completed on confirmation and confession. My mum went to confession shortly afterwards for the first time in ages and had to borrow my 'script' to mug up before she went :o I haven't been for about 15 years, so I'd be in there for ages if I went now!

Petrified,will never forget it

Sorry to butt in, am not RC so have no experience of this whatsoever.

I always thought the confession box was ummm like a cupboard, I had no idea you had to 'walk down and turn a corner'....
Also what's a hail mary, does it simply mean you have to repeat 'hail mary' however many times pescribed by the priest to be forgiven???

Some confessional boxes were quite large, you went in a door and had to turn a corner to get to the bit where the priest sat, behind a screen.

The Hail Mary means saying the full prayer. You usually had to say one Our Father and 3 Hail Mary's to atone for your sins and promise to try and not to sin again.

Ah, fuzzywuzzy, the confessional box is actually a bit like a tardis!!

The hail mary is a prayer and you say it as many times as the preist tells you, it's often combined with other prayers too.

The Hail Mary prayer is this:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed in the fruit of thy womb Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

The first bit is based on what Elizabeth said to Mary, her cousin, when she saw her.

oooh thank you.

I was thinking it sounded pretty cool to just repeat hail mary a few times to reach salvation...oh well.

"blessed is the fruit" that should be!

As a baptist I was always envious of all the RC mates I had. All that stained glass, and confession, and rpiests in robes! We just had plain white washed walls and hour long sermons! And I alawys had a hankering to say a Hail Mary....but we were not 'into' that sort of thing in the Welsh Baptists!

mine always were "I lied, swore and was disobedient" whether it was true or not it seemed to cover everything.

My parents were always telling me I was trying to act too old for my age (in a bad way) and so in one confession I seriously confessed to comitting adultery as I thought this was trying to act too old and knew it was a sin.

jampots!

PMSL jampots!

I am RC and have been to confession a few times, but, get this, NEVER IN A CONFESSIONAL! I do know however, that my old parish church had a confessional where you could go in and kneel down at the screen in front and remain anonymous, or you could sort of walk round the screen and come face to face with the priest in which case there was a nice comfy armchair for you to sit in. I know which one I would prefer!

yes i remember mine clearly we practised for weeks - i shat miself that iw ould forget the words.

really annoys me when they change things and do things differently, at the church i go to things are said differently but i still say things as i was taught.

we had two priest when i was young, father wilsona and father gun. we also had 2 nuns in school sist kamilas - she was stern and sister amelda she was young and "cool"

met some nuns at church - they wernt even wearing habits - whats that about then?

and . and they hold hands at church when saying the "our father" - but only on sunday.

and they sing bits - which IMO shouldnt be sung.

think i'm getting old

Ummm Jampots, so how many hail marys did you get for that particular sin???