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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/FapDonkey on 2024-11-05 21:55:15+00:00.

recently told this story in another thread, and was told it would do well here? Please feel free to delete if it doesn;t meet the sub rules/subject.

I was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family, who sent myself my siblings to Catholic-run schools from Kindergarten through high school. For this to make sense, some basic understanding of Catholic religious doctrine is needed (I’ll keep it brief). Catholics practice something called the sacrament of Holy Confession. The belief is that if you confess your sins to a priest, and truly repent for what you’ve done, the priest has the power to forgive your sins in the eyes of God. Most churches will have things called “confessionals” for this purpose, while some newer ones are small rooms with chairs, teh classic confessional is like a small closet, with the presit sitting in a closet next to you, separated by a privacy screen. Usually confession will be held after a morning daily mass service; one or more priests will set up in the conrfessional, congregants will go in one by one and say their confession, etc.

Now, the bond of the confessional is aboslutely sacrosanct within the church. Think of it like lawyer/client privilege. A priest is NEVER EVER supposed to share anything they learn int he confessional, nor act on any information they learn. Priests have been executed by their government for refusing to testify in a trial about something they hear in a confessional. If a priest is found to have broken this bond, he will be defrocked (basically kicked out of the priesthood), and could possibly even be excommunicated (kicked out of the entire church, shunned, rejected by any devout catholic etc). Its a BIG DEAL. So much so that the policy for priests is that even if they later learn something through “normal” means that they originally first learned in teh confessional, they are not allowed to act on that information (lest it even give the impression to the person who confessed that the priest was breaking the bond of the confessional). This last part is important.

Well sophomore year my Catholic high school had its administration taken over by the Salesians, a religious order (brothers/monks) who are dedicated to educating chidlren. Our new principal was a Salesian priest, and started holding daily mass in our campus chapel every morning ebfore classes. He really encouraged folks to go. Despite his efforts, never realy took off. Would just be the usual 1-2 super devout teachers, maybe a particularly religious student or so. Then one Monday morning, right after homeroom, we hear the not-uncommon announcement over the PA “Will the following students report to the principal’s office immediately…”. Most of the time this happened when those students were getting disciplined for some weekend shenanigans (at a private school, so we could be punsihed for that sort of thing). Someone threw a raging kegger, someone’s aprents found out, called the school, and now everyone involved was getting punished. This is when I had my epiphany.

Next Monday morning I was at morning mass, bright an early. Right at the front of the line to go into the confessional afterwards. Sat down with Father Jim, and confessed to him in GREAT detail all the toruble I and my friends had gotten up to over the weekend. Where we went, who did what, and to whom. EVERY THING. The first time I think he was kinda surprised, gave me some acts of contrition to perform, said the absolution, and sent me on my way. I think the first few times he was actually pleased with hismelf “I’m really starting to each these kids”. But I’m pretty sure that by midway through the semester he’d caught on to what I was doing. every now and then he’d make a sly reference or crack a smile. But he coudln;t stop me lol!

You see, by going and confessing EVERYTHING we did over the weekend to our principal first thing Monday, I was putting ALL that info into the bonds of the confessional. Anything I told him there, Father would never be able to act on, without risking serious consequences. If he got to his office, and his first message was from my friends’ mom explaining how she’d caught us all drunk as skunks smoking cigarettes in the alley behind her house. He could thank her for hte info. But he couldn’t punish us for it. Becuase I’d already told him 20 minutes earlier alllll about it in the confessional.

This tradition lasted all the way through senior year/graduation. Served me and my friends well. Some other folks must have figured things out as time went on, by the time i graduated the monday mass sessions were always well attended, and father had to start doing them earlier to save time for all the confessions he was hearing before classes.

I don’t know if it was me or Father that was guilty of the “malicious compliance” here. Did we play him, by going to confession like he insisted, but for our own selfish reasons? Or did he play us, doing some 4d-chess shit? I mean, after all, in jsut 2 years, he somehow managed to get dozens and dozens of high school students to start regularly attening mass before class, and going to confession weekly… Win win? lol