“ CONFESSOR, in the Christian Church, a word used in the two senses of (1) a person the holy character of whose life and death entitle him or her, in the judgment of the Church, to a peculiar reputation for sanctity, (2) a priest empowered to hear confessions.
(1) In the first sense the word confessor was in the early Church sometimes applied loosely to all martyrs, but more properly to those who, having suffered persecution and torture for the faith, were afterwards allowed to die in peace. ”