Repentance

[or Penance]
is commanded in Scripture to all people, because without repentance there can be no forgiveness with God. For this purpose the church has established the confessional.
Confession in the Catholic Church is an auricular confession, and each confessor is required to reveal to the confessor all the sins of which he is aware, together with the circumstances that accompany them. The priest then absolves the confessor and imposes on him a penance, i.e., a punishment to atone for his sins, which penance consists in praying the rosary, hearing mass diligently, giving alms, fasting, and various mortifications. The priest's absolution is: "Our Lord Jesus Christ absolve you and I absolve you as far as I am able and as far as you need. The passion and death of our Lord JEsu Christ, the merits of the most blessed Virgin Mary, the merits of the saints, all the good thou hast ever done, all the sufferings thou hast patiently endured - may they be sufficient for thee for the remission of sins and the attainment of eternal life. Amen." — Traces of auricular confession are found as early as the third century. Pope Innocent III, in the thirteenth century, commanded confession to be believed as a divine endowment.
In the Lutheran Church, a double confession is used at the discretion of each individual. One is the private or individual confession. As the Catechism shows, this was the exclusive confession, and until the last century it was universally used as such. The Lutheran Church leaves it entirely to the confessor to reveal his heart to the confessor. After this has been done, the confessor comforts and admonishes the penitent and then gives him absolution. The Catechism gives the shortest form of this. Another old form is: "As you believe, so be it done to you. And I, as a called minister of the Christian Church, and instead of the same, do absolve thee from all thy sins, that they may be as abundantly and perfectly forgiven thee, as Christ hath done sufficient for all sins, and hath procured forgiveness thereof, — in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Go in peace. Amen."
Unfortunately, there are only a few congregations in which private confession is used in addition to general confession. This consists in the fact that after a short admonition, which either the confessor holds freely, or reads from the agendas, he speaks a confessional formula in the name of the kneeling confessors and then gives them general absolution.