Kumpisal.ph

Begin again · Confession times in Metro Manila

The six parishes swipe →

All six at a glance

Illustration: a woman waits in a pew while a lamp glows above the confessional door.

Examination of conscience

Your list

This is what you have noted. Glance at it while you wait.

How to go

Someone else’s guide, not ours. Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play — or watch it on YouTube instead.

Act of Contrition

Say this when the priest asks for it, near the end.

Confession is one of the least understood things the Catholic Church does, including by Catholics. Here is what it actually is, what people most often ask, and what people most often get wrong.

Illustration: the lattice screen of a confessional, lit warmly from the priest's side.

Questions people ask

Things people get wrong

Illustration: a young man sits alone in the last pew of a quiet church, near the open door.

About Kumpisal.ph

Illustration: someone at a workbench fitting another arm onto a wooden signpost, with a framed photograph on the wall, and palms and a church belfry through the window. — The portrait on the wall is St Pier Giorgio Frassati, the patron of this project — *verso l’alto*, to the heights.

This is one person’s project — not a parish, not an organisation, and nothing official. A fellow sinner who has met real grace and mercy in this sacrament, and wanted it to be easier for other people to find their way to it as well.

What is here is only a start: six parishes in one city. The hope is to cover more of Makati, and then other cities and parishes across the Philippines. That depends almost entirely on having schedules that are right and keeping them that way — slow, ordinary work, and the reason this is still small.

Help build it

If you know a parish that should be here, or its confession times, that is the most useful thing anyone can send.

Add a photo of the schedule

A photo of the noticeboard or parish bulletin is the most useful thing of all — it means the times can be checked rather than taken on trust. It is resized on your device before it is sent, which also strips whatever location your camera recorded. Goes to the same place as a schedule correction; leave contact details only if you would not mind being asked a follow-up question.

Or send a message

A thought on the site, something that needs fixing, or an intention you would like prayed for.

Goes to the same private queue as a schedule correction, and one person reads it. Leave contact details only if you would like a reply. This is not confession — for that, the times are on the first tab.

Keeping it on your phone

Once you have opened Kumpisal, it stays on your phone. It will still answer in a basement car park, in a lift, or anywhere the signal gives out — it shows you the last times it saw, and says so plainly at the top when it is working from memory. Whenever there is a connection it fetches the current page first, so a corrected schedule reaches you on your next visit.

You can keep it on your home screen like an app. On iPhone, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen.

What this site keeps

Prepare is private, and not counted. What you write there stays in this browser’s own storage — never uploaded, and erased for good by the button at the end of it, which you can use without saying you have been to confession. Nothing on that tab is measured either: not what you tick, not even that you opened it.

The rest of the site keeps running totals only — which parishes get opened, when people look, whether anything was open when they arrived, roughly which city, and what kind of place sent you here: a messaging app, a search engine, or nothing at all. Never the address you came from, never what you searched for. No cookie, no identifier, no record of a visit as a visit, and no way to pick one person out of the numbers.

The only things that ever leave your device are the ones you send on purpose: a schedule correction, a suggested parish, or a message. The saved copy that lets the site work offline is just the page and its drawings, held by your browser; it carries nothing about you and is cleared with the rest of the site’s data.