Have You Confessed Your Sins? There’s an App for That.

Have you gotten lazy with your confessions? Good news for you: the Catholic Church has approved an iPhone app that will help you confess your sins!

It appears the Pope has realized that less and less people are attending confessional regularly. So, in a move of forward thinking, the Catholic Church decided to help your forgetfulness by giving you an app to track your sins.

And before you stop reading: no, this is not a joke…

Confession: A Roman Catholic App” is described as, “the perfect aid for every penitent.”

The app’s official description,

“With a personalized examination of conscience for each user, password protected profiles, and a step-by-step guide to the sacrament, this app invites Catholics to prayerfully prepare for and participate in the Rite of Penance. Individuals who have been away from the sacrament for some time will find Confession: A Roman Catholic App to be a useful and inviting tool.”

But don’t get your hopes up, the Pope still expects you to visit your local preist,

“It (the app) does not and can not take the place of confessing before a validly ordained Roman Catholic priest in a Confessional, in person, either face to face, or behind the screen. Why? Because the Congregation on Divine Worship and the Sacraments has long ruled that Confessions by electronic media are invalid and that ABSOLUTION BY THE PRIEST must be given in person because the Seal of the Confessional must be Protected and for the Sacrament to be valid there has to be both the matter and the form which means THE PRIEST.”

As you go throughout your day, you can keep a tab on how many sins you’re committed.

Each commandment has its own list of specific sins, and you can highlight your evil deeds like a checklist. If you get creative and can’t seem to find the appropriate sin to mark, you can add your own custom heinous offense.

The goal of all this sin tracking is to help you make a more succinct confession to your preist. If you sin frequently, it will be nice to have a handy-dandy list available when you’re in the confessional. Also, you may want to make sure your iPhone’s password is turned on.

You can buy the Confession app for $1.99 in the App Store. That money will of course go towards your indulgences. (Not really. The develepors have said that they are donating proceeds to various Catholic charities.)

[via Engadget]