Catholic Confessional Computer App

[ballela-angel]

Catholic Church approves Confession app

Get ready for the iPhone spiritual coach. The Catholic Church in the U.S. has approved an app that prepares Catholics for confession.

Confession: A Roman Catholic App is designed to make confession easier for Christians. Developer Little iApps bills it as "the perfect aid for every penitent."

It offers users a step-by-step guide to the Rite of Penance and is meant to be used in a church confessional. It's not a substitute for a priest.

Users create password-protected profiles and then go through a series of soul-searching questions related to the Ten Commandments. For the First Commandment, for example, the app asks, "Have I been involved with superstitious practices or have I been involved with the occult?"

The app was designed in collaboration with a Church official and approved by Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend as the first officially sanctioned iPhone/iPad app, according to Little iApps.

Confession also lets users create "custom examinations of conscience" and log "custom sins." It also coaches penitents on responses to a priest's exhortations such as "Give thanks to the Lord for He is good."

Prayers stored in the app include such classics as the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, and Hail Mary.

Confession: A Roman Catholic App is available for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch for $1.99 on iTunes. According to Chip Leinen of Little iApps, a portion of the revenues will go to two charities.



Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20030992-1.html#ixzz1DWXh08gm

[Cold tea]

At least the computer would have less sins than the Priest you would be confessing too, have always thought off confession as the biggest load of hypocritical nonsense in the catholic church, and considering some of their doctrines and teachings that is quite an achievement.

[mylestheslasher]

Here is an app the bishops, cardinals and even the pope should have

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lie-detector-free/id356053562?mt=8

[The Iceman]

You don't confess to the computer. It's to help with an examination of conscience.
Maybe if you fully understood what a sacrament was, including confession, you would embrace them as well as your faith.....

[Louth Exile]

Hope the charities being donated to help victims of clerical abuse!

[andoireabu]

You don't confess to the computer. It's to help with an examination of conscience.
Maybe if you fully understood what a sacrament was, including confession, you would embrace them as well as your faith.....

Do you really need a priest to help you examine your conscience though?  Never liked the need for a middle man.

[The Iceman]

You don't confess to the computer. It's to help with an examination of conscience.
Maybe if you fully understood what a sacrament was, including confession, you would embrace them as well as your faith.....

Do you really need a priest to help you examine your conscience though?  Never liked the need for a middle man.

The Priest isn't there to examine your conscience, that's something you are supposed to do in advance of the sacrament, this is what the APP was designed to help with. The Priest is there to give God's absolution as is the tradition and teaching of the R.C Church. There is solid scriptural references for this and documentation that this has been a tradition in the Church from the early days of the first apostles.....

Personally I see it as a great sacrament. I won't push it on anyone but I also can't stand by while someone else rubbishes it because they don't understand it or care to.....

[andoireabu]

You don't confess to the computer. It's to help with an examination of conscience.
Maybe if you fully understood what a sacrament was, including confession, you would embrace them as well as your faith.....

Do you really need a priest to help you examine your conscience though?  Never liked the need for a middle man.

The Priest isn't there to examine your conscience, that's something you are supposed to do in advance of the sacrament, this is what the APP was designed to help with. The Priest is there to give God's absolution as is the tradition and teaching of the R.C Church. There is solid scriptural references for this and documentation that this has been a tradition in the Church from the early days of the first apostles.....

Personally I see it as a great sacrament. I won't push it on anyone but I also can't stand by while someone else rubbishes it because they don't understand it or care to.....

Ah so is it like those wee prayer card type things you used to get when you were younger giving you the idea of what to think of so you could pick examples from your life that matched?  Never really liked confession to be honest.  Always thought that if praying was you talking to God then that would do rather than having to tell a person who would then know it for again.  But thats just my look on it.

[Tony Baloney]

You don't confess to the computer. It's to help with an examination of conscience.
Maybe if you fully understood what a sacrament was, including confession, you would embrace them as well as your faith.....

Do you really need a priest to help you examine your conscience though?  Never liked the need for a middle man.

The Priest isn't there to examine your conscience, that's something you are supposed to do in advance of the sacrament, this is what the APP was designed to help with. The Priest is there to give God's absolution as is the tradition and teaching of the R.C Church. There is solid scriptural references for this and documentation that this has been a tradition in the Church from the early days of the first apostles.....

Personally I see it as a great sacrament. I won't push it on anyone but I also can't stand by while someone else rubbishes it because they don't understand it or care to.....

Ah so is it like those wee prayer card type things you used to get when you were younger giving you the idea of what to think of so you could pick examples from your life that matched?  Never really liked confession to be honest.  Always thought that if praying was you talking to God then that would do rather than having to tell a person who would then know it for again.  But thats just my look on it.

Prod.

[All of a Sludden]

Probably launch their own iPrayer at some point.

[Cold tea]

You don't confess to the computer. It's to help with an examination of conscience.
Maybe if you fully understood what a sacrament was, including confession, you would embrace them as well as your faith.....

Last priest I confessed to went to jail as a Paedophile, faith has nothing to do with it, and faith has absolutely nothing to do with the made up shite of the catholic church!

[Eamonnca1]

"[Vatican Spokesman] Federico Lombardi said: 'It is essential to understand that the rites of penance require a personal dialogue between penitents and their confessor.'It cannot be replaced by a computer application'. 'I must stress to avoid all ambiguity, under no circumstance is it possible to "confess by iPhone".'

The Vatican has warned that an app can never replace visiting a priest."

So now there you are.

Personally I always found these rituals kind of over-engineered. There was so much focus on the mechanics of saying all the prayers, all the standing and kneeling and sitting at the right times, getting to the chapel on time and remembering where to sit down after getting communion, that the actual message got a bit lost. I'd listen to people like my dad recite the prayers, and I swear if you didn't hear the prayer before then what he was saying would just be unintelligible gibberish. I'd be very surprised if he was actually thinking about what he was saying. We used to get forced to say the rosary in our house and my brothers would just mutter the "prayers" out without hardly moving their lips, and nobody seemed to notice that they were taking the piss.

Of the big hitters in modern atheism, Sam Harris has hit on a point I never thought of before. He's as anti religion as Dawkins or Hitchens, but he highlights the value of some aspects of Eastern religions that practice meditation and the search for inner peace and all that good stuff.  You don't have to believe in an invisible man in the sky for that to work.

Out of all the people who still attend mass, I'd be interested in knowing how many of them actually do so out of sincere belief and actually think about the words they're saying, and how many of them are just going out of habit or because they're afraid of not being seen there.

[Cold tea]

Out of all the people who still attend mass, I'd be interested in knowing how many of them actually do so out of sincere belief and actually think about the words they're saying, and how many of them are just going out of habit or because they're afraid of not being seen there.

Nail on head, the Catholic church doesn't give a damn as long as the envelopes keep getting handed in, most people at mass are robots, people talk about coma driving, any mass I have observed it's coma worshiping!

[Orangemac]

A lot of people go becaue they have always went. They have never questioned it and they never will.

From a rational point of view you would not really have any grounds for believing in religion.

However in the last few years I have started going back to mass. I may blindly repeat the mantra like everyone else during mass but it does no harm once a week to have a bit of spirituality.

It is easy to question why other people have faith but what harm does it do? It makes a lot of peoples lives easier.

[Eamonnca1]

Western religions purport to do two things:

1 - Explain how the universe works
2 - Bring spiritual fulfillment to their followers

IMHO they fail miserably at 1 and often fail at 2.  They fail at 1 because science has gotten considerably better at that task and has made religion obsolete as a means of explaining how things work.

They often fail at 2 because of the syndrome I describe above, where people mechanically recite prayers without even thinking about what they're doing.  The repetitive nature of the Catholic mass makes it very prone to this sort of thing.  Ten minutes of proper meditation would probably make you feel a whole lot better.

To answer your question about faith, I think 'faith' is a vastly overrated way of thinking. To me faith is circular reasoning wrapped in ignorance inside wishful thinking. It's okay to wait until the evidence is in before you make your mind up about something. Faith is belief without evidence - why on earth anyone would consider that a virtue is just beyond me.