"I Confess"
After the greeting ― “the Lord be with you!” ― the congregation is led into what is called the Penitential Act. The priest has a few options here, but the most famous is called the Confiteor ― Latin for the prayer’s first words. “I confess [confiteor] to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned…” And so on.
As human beings draw closer to God ― as they begin to know and encounter him more ― they see more vividly the distance between God and themselves. When the Prophet Isaiah encountered God in the Jerusalem Temple, he yelled: “Woe is me! I am lost! I am a man of unclean lips” (Is 6:5). Saint Peter, overcome by Jesus, knelt in his boat: “Depart from me, Lord. I am a sinful man” (Lk 5:8). When one encounters God, acknowledging one’s weakness is a natural and fitting response ― thus the Confiteor.
Encountering God at Mass, one of the first things we do is confess, three times, “that [we] have greatly sinned.” Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa — “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” It is meaningful that we strike our breast. It is something Christians have done since the beginning. In the fifth-century, Saint Augustine said that, by striking yourself, “you wish to bring to light what is concealed in the breast.”1 We are knocking loose and exposing the attachments in our heart that lead us away from God.
The plea for forgiveness is central to the Mass. It does not go away after the Confiteor. “Lord, have mercy,” we will immediately pray. “Christ, have mercy.” Later on, we will ask the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” to “have mercy on us.” In the Our Father we’ll ask that God “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The priest, too, water pouring over his hands, prays to himself: “Wash me, O Lord, from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.”2
This is not to wallow in our sinfulness. It’s possible to look at our weakness and become afraid, to tremble at the thought of God drawing near to us. After the Fall, Adam and Eve “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord” (Gen 3:8). When we ourselves stand “in the presence of the Lord” at Mass, our Confiteor could become a confession that we are afraid of our mistakes, afraid of our guilt, and afraid of God.
On the contrary, when Peter fell upon his knees in the boat, racked by guilt and shame, the first thing Jesus said was, “do not be afraid” (Lk 5:10). For us, at Mass, because we know who Jesus is ― the one who forgives, the one who tells us not to be afraid ― our plea for forgiveness is not made from a position of fear. Instead, all the Mass’s penitential acts are made from a position of trust in God’s mercy. One other reason we strike our breast is because the heart is where our sin hurts us the most. We pound our hearts to show the God who “heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds” the place we most long for healing (Ps 147:3). We then ask “blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the angels and saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.” We know that God will hear. At this moment, the God who forgives, the God who heals the brokenhearted ― no other ― draws near to us. This is the God of whom we should never be afraid.
Augustine, Sermo de verbis Domini, 13.
See Lucien Deiss, The Mass (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1989), 21.