.bmp)
.bmp)
Americans are flocking to confess their sins as Protestant churches have joined their Catholic counterparts in modernising the sacrament of penance.Thousands of people are attending confession at weekends and just as many are posting their repentance on videos that are played back to congregations or shared on websites such as YouTube.New technology is fuelling the boom, but so is clever marketing by Churches that are portraying confession as a form of self-improvement-always popular with Americans-rather than some sort of punishment. Church leaders also attribute the boom to the fashion for self-analysis peddled by daytime television programmes such as The Jerry Springer Show and to a wider theological trend in which Christians are looking for firmer moral guidance.Some Protestant churches are trying to make confession less forbidding, allowing people to shred their sins in paper shredders, for example.In a shopping mall in Colorado Springs, three Catholic priests are available to hear confessions six days a week in a small office equipped with a box of tissues and the Ten Commandments.The priests say they hear 8,000 confessions a year, according to the Wall Street Journal.The Pope ordered priests to make confession a priority in February, but the changing attitude of Protestant denominations is more surprising.Although some theologians say that Martin Luther opposed private confession to a priest, the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church-which has 2.5 million members-voted this summer to revive the ritual after ignoring it for a century.The Catholic Church opposes group confessions and those conducted on the internet but some of its US parishes have had considerable success with special confession events.More than 5,000 people attended a "reconciliation weekend" in Orlando, Florida. A "24 Hours of Grace" penitence open house held by five parishes in Chicago drew 2,500 people. A rotating team of 70 priests listened to their confessions.Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando sent out 190,000 pamphlets in March asking local Catholics to confess.He told the Journal: "Every day on Jerry Springer we see people confessing their sins in public and, certainly, the confessional is a lot healthier than that show."Protestant denominations are less averse to using new technology in their confession drives. More than 7,700 people have posted their sins on ivescrewedup.com, a confession website launched by the evangelical Flamingo Road Church in Florida.The XXX Church, an anti-pornography Christian group, videotaped members confessing their use of pornography and put the video on YouTube. It has since been watched 15,000 times.Jordy Acklin, 21, a student who appeared in the video, said: "There's a reason why they talk about confession in the Bible – you're not supposed to keep it inside you. The weight just goes off your shoulders."As in the days of Noah...
