I Am a Confiteor, How About You?

by Randy Kiel | May 21, 2025

The Confiteor. This prayer blows me away.

When I was outside the Church in the Evangelical side of things, this prayer (which begins “I confess to Almighty God…”) would have been seen as a cheapened disgrace to God, because it was written by someone other than the speaker, therefore not representing any authenticity from the heart.

When I first heard this prayer (anew), as an adult, I knew my heart was being set straight again. I say “anew”  because I had been raised in the Catholic Church but left it during my teen years to seek Jesus. I know, this sounds ludicrous now, but it is true. In trying to discover more, I got lost for quite a while. I’ll bet that many of you readers have known similar stories like mine.

During my junior year of high school, I ended up at a Billy Graham revival with friends where I learned that the non-Catholic view of my faith was that I wasn’t really a Christian after all. This was  because I had been raised Catholic and baptized as a baby. The folks there went on to tell me that Catholics don’t really know Jesus and that I should pray like them for salvation.

I began to pray the Lord’s Prayer out loud when I was stopped and told, “You never have to pray that prayer again. You must pray from your heart.”

I was stunned, but did not want to go to hell as they told me I would, so I prayed what they told me to pray: the four spiritual laws. I was told that night that I was saved and would go to heaven now if I died.

Whew! What a relief that was.

From that point on, for the next 25 years, I spent my life serving the Lord from many skewed theological perspectives that eventually ran their course.  I had gone to Bible college (seminary, for you Catholic folks), become a Southern Baptist minister, “witnessed” on the beaches of southern California, saved members of gangs, and traveled many states singing Gospel songs.

It was many years later that I told my wife that I didn’t like church anymore, but I still believed in Jesus.

“So, let’s keep trying new churches until we find one that we like,” she said. It was in this statement that I discovered a problem. I was looking for what I liked, not for what Jesus was asking of me.

It was then that I knew he was asking me to come back home to the Catholic Church. It was time to study. I read everything I could get my hands on. If you think I was shocked by this, you should have seen the look on my wife’s face. I’ll graciously save that story for another time.

We finally made it into a local Catholic Church to try a Mass with our four children. A few things from the Mass felt familiar to me, but not much. As for my family on the other hand, they knew nothing. My littlest two daughters were used to dancing in the aisles during the worship music at their “other” church, so they felt quite restrained. One of them even yelled out ,“I hate this church!”  I wanted to run but the pews were full.

Then another prayer began. Everyone prayed it at once.  They said that they all confessed their sin to one another regardless of what they had done.

This was so foreign to me as evangelical because at the “other” churches, nobody would ever even think to admit that they sinned, let alone freely confess a sin. In fact, admitting to a sin was shameful and left people ashamed and more afraid of sin rather than what I saw when people freely confessed their sin in this prayer. 

It seemed to me that as we progressed through the Mass,  people’s hearts got softer with each passing prayer until the big finale. Everyone walked toward the altar in common union. They were experiencing communion. I felt as though I had never seen this before.

One thing I knew for sure was that a message came from deep within myself, “I want more of this!”

I asked the priest later for the name of that beautiful prayer at the beginning and I tried to explain it to him as the sinner’s prayer and he told me it was called the Confiteor, meaning the confessor.

Internally, I heard the word resound, “Yes”, and I knew I was on my way back home.

So, I tell you all from the bottom of my heart, I am oh so glad to be home with all of you. May we all be good confiteors!

And truly, if any of you, young or old, feel like leaving the Church, please give me a call first! My love to you all!