Priests can’t forgive sins! Only God! Answers to common objections II, seriatim.

uppose you owed a debt you could not repay. Sup­pose fur­ther that my father is a very wealthy man, and because you are a good fam­i­ly friend, he decides to pay off this debt for you. He entrusts the mon­ey to me to pass on to you. I give you the mon­ey, and you pay the debt. In an imme­di­ate sense, I gave you the mon­ey; in an absolute sense, how­ev­er, the mon­ey came from my father. He paid your debt, not me. He just did so through me, as an inter­me­di­ary.

That is how Catholics view the sacra­ment of penance. Priests, of them­selves, do not for­give sins. God alone does, act­ing through the priest, through the sacra­ment.

So when an anti-Catholic says, “Hey, you know, priests are only men, they can’t for­give sins, only God can,” the right answer is, “Yes, we believe that too.”

How­ev­er. It is impor­tant to add that a priest’s author­i­ty to for­give sins comes from God. We find this in John 20:21–23:

Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soev­er sins ye remit, they are remit­ted unto them; and whose soev­er sins ye retain, they are retained.

When Christ says, “I am send­ing you,” he is giv­ing them a com­mis­sion. He is giv­ing them author­i­ty. When he breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spir­it,” he is giv­ing them pow­er. And then he tells them that the author­i­ty he is giv­ing them is the author­i­ty to for­give sins.

Priests have this author­i­ty because Christ gave it to them. But the for­give­ness of sins orig­i­nates in God.

St. James says, “Con­fess your sins to one anoth­er.” Go to con­fes­sion! This is not some weird idea super­im­posed on Chris­tian­i­ty lat­er; it’s right there in the New Tes­ta­ment. (The King James has it “con­fess your faults, but the Greek word ἁμαρτίας, hamar­tias means “sins,” and the KJV trans­lates it that way every oth­er time it is used in the New Tes­ta­ment. Only in James 5:16 does it trans­late it “faults.” I find that curi­ous.)

But the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church (§1441) makes it clear: “Only God for­gives sins.” We already know this. “But,” the Cat­e­chism con­tin­ues in §1442, “he entrust­ed the exer­cise of the pow­er of abso­lu­tion to the apos­tolic min­istry” (that is to say, the priest­hood). On this point, the Cat­e­chism cites 1 Cor. 5:18: “All things are of God, who hath rec­on­ciled us to him­self by Jesus Christ, and hath giv­en to us the min­istry of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion.”

Pope St. John Paul II, in his apos­tolic exhor­ta­tion on the sacra­ment of penance, Rec­on­cil­i­a­tio et Paen­i­ten­tia, tells us once more what the Cat­e­chism has:

God is always the one who is prin­ci­pal­ly offend­ed by sin—Tibi soli pec­ca­vi–and God alone can for­give. Hence the abso­lu­tion that the priest, the min­is­ter of for­give­ness, though him­self a sin­ner, grants to the pen­i­tent is the effec­tive sign of the inter­ven­tion of the Father in every abso­lu­tion and the sign of the “res­ur­rec­tion” from “spir­i­tu­al death” which is renewed each time that the sacra­ment of penance is admin­is­tered.

The Church says that God gives priests the author­i­ty to for­give sins. The Church says that God acts through the sacra­ment of penance, just as he acts through every oth­er sacra­ment. But it is no objec­tion to say, “Only God for­gives sins.” We know that.