This App Connects Guilty Catholics to Nearby Priests
Absolve sins with the help of your iPhone.
A new Spanish app has arrived in time for the holidays to assuage at least some of thatinfamous Catholic guilt.
Confessor Go,which launched Thursday, connects Spanish residents to nearby priests or clerics who are available for the sacrament of confession, Agence-France Pressereported.
Local priest Ricardo Latorreinvented the app, and more than 100 priests in Spain have signed on. South American countries have also expressed interest in the app, and Latorre said he hopes to expand the apps global reach.
"It has generated a great deal of interest and there are many priests from these countries that ask to join. What happens is things take time and it is impossible to do it faster,hetold Catholic news website Verdad en Libertad, according to the same report byAFP.
Confessor Go isn't the first app of its kind that aims to bring Catholic traditions into the technological age. An app called My Confessor, launched in Wisconsin that lets residents know when the local priest is available for confession in real time.
There are apps for finding daily bible verses or competing against friends in bible trivia. One recent app even translates bible verses into emoji, for the hip Christian millennial.
All of these apps have come at a time when church attendance in the U.S. and Europe has declined, according to many statistical accounts.
A recent Gallup poll reported that 10 percent of French and Germans attended religious services weekly, while 10-15 percent attended in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the U.K. Around 21 percent of Spaniards attended weekly services, according to the same poll.
While some reports estimate nearly half of the U.S. population attends church regularly, those numbers have been cast into doubt by researchers. One examination by the Public Religion Research Institute discovered that many people surveyed about their church attendance were likely to lie to appear more pious, particularly in phone interviews.
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