How I Learned to Love Confession

When I converted to Catholicism in 2023 after eighteen months of RCIA, I was almost totally ignorant of the mortal sins I would need to confess before taking communion. My RCIA priest had said that we were required to confess once a year, or any time we’d committed a serious sin. The sins that struck me as serious—theft, murder, trafficking—were too outré to be relevant to me, and the topic was dropped. He probably also said that confession could be “very beautiful,” but I retained a sense that it was optional and a little weird, something people didn’t really do anymore. The word “required” is itself meaningless to a secular liberal American used to making her own decisions about her personal life. It was only by accident that I learned, a few weeks before my baptism and confirmation, an item of enormous practical significance to my future: As a divorced woman, I wouldn’t be allowed to remarry, and if I did so, I’d be barred from receiving the Eucharist.