Confiteor

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The Confiteor is the formal confession of sin recited near the beginning of the Roman Mass, named — as Latin prayers usually are — from its opening word, Confiteor, “I confess.” It is not the sacrament of penance but a general acknowledgment of fault, spoken communally to prepare those present for the rites that follow. Brief and fixed, it belongs to the order of the liturgy rather than to private devotion.

In its received form the prayer confesses sin to almighty God, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, to the angels and saints, and to the gathered assembly, naming among the saints the archangel Michael, John the Baptist, and the apostles Peter and Paul. It owns sin committed “in thought, word, and deed,” and at the threefold admission mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa — “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault” — the speaker strikes the breast. It then asks the same company to pray to God on the penitent’s behalf. Historically the priest and the ministers recited it in alternation, each confessing and each in turn interceding for the other.

The form took shape gradually. Confessions of this kind accompanied the priest’s approach to the altar from the early medieval period, and the wording varied widely from place to place; the list of saints invoked, in particular, differed by region and religious order. The text was standardized for the Roman Rite in the sixteenth century and held that shape for four centuries. The revision of the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council shortened it, dropped most of the named saints while retaining Mary, the angels, and the apostles in general terms, and set it among several penitential options at the start of Mass; the older, longer form survives in the rites celebrated in Latin.

What the prayer enacts is confession as a public act rather than a private reckoning. The Church holds that grave sin is remitted only through sacramental penance, and the Confiteor does not claim to absolve it; its work, in Catholic understanding, is the cleansing of lesser faults and the disposition of the heart toward the sacred action about to begin. The gesture of striking the breast, older than any of the prayer’s surviving wordings, carries that meaning without speech — the body locating fault in itself.

The instinct behind it is widely shared: that one does not approach the holy unprepared, and that approach begins with the admission of having fallen short. Comparable acts of confession open the worship of many traditions. The resemblance is genuine, and it is also limited — the Confiteor is exact about whom it addresses and what it asks, and means those things in the particular grammar of the Roman Mass.

→ Related: Michael · Sacramental · Consecration