Where the traditions land
Answer | Seated traditions | By population |
Yes — confession to a priest, who holds the power of absolution through apostolic succession, is a required sacrament | Catholic | ~63% |
Yes — confession to a priest (spiritual father) is central, normal practice, though the priest explicitly serves as a witness to a confession made to Christ, not as the one who forgives | Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox | ~16% |
Not required, but retained and valued — private confession to a minister is available and can bring real comfort, though confession made directly to God is sufficient for forgiveness | Anglican, Lutheran | ~8% |
No — confession belongs directly to God alone; no priestly office holds special power to absolve, though confessing struggles to fellow believers is valued for accountability | Reformed/Presbyterian, Methodist/Wesleyan, Southern Baptist Convention, Pentecostal (Trinitarian), Seventh-day Adventist | ~12% |
Confession is made directly to God for most sins, but serious sins are also confessed to a designated body of local leaders as part of a formal repentance process, though forgiveness itself comes from God, not that body | LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses | ~1% |
Population figures are each tradition's own most recent published count. Eligibility is set against the World Christian Database, the standard reference for global denominational data.
Why the disagreement
This question splits along how much power a tradition attributes to the person hearing a confession, ranging from a priest who formally absolves, to a priest who only witnesses, to no distinct confessing role at all, to a lay leader who investigates without absolving.
Catholic teaching holds confession to a priest is a required sacrament for anyone conscious of serious sin. The priest, ordained through apostolic succession, exercises the power Christ gave the apostles directly — "whose sins you forgive are forgiven" — pronouncing formal absolution, not merely reporting God's forgiveness back to the penitent.
Eastern and Oriental Orthodox teaching also treats confession to a priest as central, ordinary practice, but frames the priest's role more modestly. The traditional Orthodox confession prayer has the priest say to the penitent directly: "Lo, His Holy image is before us and I am but a witness, bearing testimony before Him of all things which thou dost say to me." Christ, understood to be invisibly present, is who forgives; the priest, usually called a spiritual father, witnesses and offers counsel rather than pronouncing absolution in his own voice the way Western sacramental language does.
Anglican and Lutheran teaching retain private confession as a real, valuable option without requiring it. Anglican practice is often summarized in a line attributed to the theologian Richard Hooker: "all may, some should, none must" — available to anyone, recommended for a troubled conscience, obligatory for no one — and the 39 Articles explicitly remove Penance from the list of true sacraments. Lutheran teaching reaches a similar practical landing by a different route: the Augsburg Confession states that "private Absolution ought to be retained in the churches," while explicitly rejecting the Catholic requirement to enumerate every sin, on the grounds that no one can actually recall or recognize every sin they've committed.
Reformed, Methodist, Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, and Adventist teaching reject a priestly confessional role of any kind. Confession, on this view, belongs directly to God, who alone forgives sin, with no ordained office standing between the two; confessing struggles or sins to fellow believers is often valued for accountability and mutual support, but that's a different thing from a sacramental rite requiring a member of the clergy specifically.
LDS and Jehovah's Witness teaching both hold a real, two-tier structure: private sins are confessed directly to God alone, but more serious sins are also brought to a designated body of local leaders — a bishop in LDS teaching, a body of congregation elders in Jehovah's Witness teaching — as part of a formal process of repentance and correction. In both cases, the leaders explicitly don't forgive sin themselves. LDS teaching states plainly that a bishop "cannot and does not forgive sin," but can guide the repentance process and determine standing within the church, while Jehovah's Witness teaching holds elders provide scriptural counsel and correction after confirming a person has "prayerfully confessed to Jehovah" directly.
Solving the disagreement
The difference between Catholic and Orthodox teaching is more a difference in theological register than in practice — both make a priest central to ordinary confession, and diverge mainly in how comfortable each is describing what happens in explicitly causal, declarative language versus leaving it as an act witnessed rather than performed. That's the same recurring pattern in this format where a shared practice gets described with more or less philosophical precision depending on a tradition's broader style, not a live dispute over facts.
Between the traditions requiring or retaining a priestly confessor and the ones rejecting the office outright, the dispute is a specific, centuries-old exegetical one: how to read Jesus telling the apostles, "Whoever's sins you forgive are forgiven them; whoever's sins you retain are retained." Read as instituting an ongoing office transferable to future ordained ministers, it supports Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran practice. Read as words addressed personally to the apostles, or as describing the church's general proclamation of the gospel rather than a specific transferable power, it supports the Reformed, Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, and Adventist rejection of the office. Both readings are grammatically available, and nothing in the verse itself specifies which one Jesus intended — the same kind of open exegetical question this format runs into whenever a single verse has to carry the weight of an entire institutional structure.
LDS and Jehovah's Witness teaching's shared structure depends on a different kind of claim: whether a specific body of leaders — a bishop with priesthood authority, or a body of appointed elders — has real, God-given standing to investigate and correct serious sin within the community, short of forgiving it themselves. That's less a dispute about a Bible verse than about the same recurring premise elsewhere in this format: whether the specific institutional authority each tradition claims for itself is legitimate, a question neither side's own internal logic can settle for the other.
Sources
Same standing source per tradition on every post, not hunted per question.
- Catholic — Catechism of the Catholic Church
- Eastern Orthodox — Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (binding across all jurisdictions); The Longer Catechism of St. Philaret of Moscow (widely used, not binding on every jurisdiction)
- Oriental Orthodox — Catechism of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty (Amazon — no full free text found)
- Anglican — Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
- Lutheran — Book of Concord
- Reformed/Presbyterian — Westminster Confession of Faith
- Methodist/Wesleyan — Articles of Religion
- Southern Baptist Convention — Baptist Faith & Message 2000
- Pentecostal (Trinitarian) — Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths
- Seventh-day Adventist — 28 Fundamental Beliefs
- LDS — Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants
- Jehovah's Witnesses — What Does the Bible Really Teach?