The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (14 page)

But the long-term impact of Pius X’s reign of moral terror went further—into the very minds and hearts of the clergy. In an act of extraordinary coercion, Pius X decreed
that all clergy, from diaconate upwards, should take an oath denouncing Modernism and supporting the encyclicals
Lamentabili
and
Pascendi
. The oath, which further shaped the new clerical ethos, is sworn to this day in modified form by all Catholic ordinands and all priests; it is also repeated by those accepting theological teaching posts in Catholic institutions. The oath commits the individual to mental acquiescence in Rome’s teaching, including the sense in which Rome might interpret such teaching at any time. Pius was manoeuvring the clergy to a point where there was no room for individual conscience and judgement, no wriggle-room for special cases or context. The oath constrained the cleric to self-excommunication should he break it, even within his innermost secret thoughts.
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The Anti-Modernist oath imprisoned the minds of Catholic priests for the twentieth century, creating for many a virtual schizophrenia between the individual voice of conscience and the mental assent of the oath-taker. Habits of secrecy, hypocrisy, and strategies for squaring the circles of emotional, moral, and intellectual life would become endemic among the clergy, as later testimonies will reveal. The predicament was reminiscent of George Orwell’s ‘doublethink’ in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, which he described as ‘to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it’. The moral
schizophrenia involved helps to explain, in part at least, the states of mind discovered in priestly child sex offenders, who would attack children one day, and say Mass the next.
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M
EANWHILE, IN 1904
, and in strictest secrecy, Pius X had launched a project that was to transform the legal structures of the Catholic Church. The scheme would take thirteen years and involve some 2,000 scholars. It would not be completed until three years after Pius X’s death.

Canon law, the ecclesiastical laws of the Church, had been gathering over many centuries in a vast array of rules, regulations, and statutes as well as case law covering everything from marriage annulments to the consecration of churches, concordats, and treaties. Organised by date rather than by theme, canon law was a legal jungle. From the outset of his pontificate, Pius X issued a directive to his canon-law subordinates to create a ‘Code of Canon Law’. Ironically, for the pope of Anti-Modernism, he was calling for nothing less than a manual of ecclesiastical law based on the modern formula of the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which had played such an effective role in the modernizing of France. The code was to be applied throughout the Church, each priest possessing an identical copy.
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It was, in essence, a handbook setting out the lines of responsibility, authority, rules, and penalties for members of the clergy. It was to transform Catholic allegiance to papal authority.

According to Ulrich Stutz, a distinguished Protestant canon lawyer of the period, ‘Now that infallibility in the areas of faith and morals has been attributed to the papacy, it has completed the work in the legal sphere and given the Church a comprehensive law book that exhaustively regulates conditions within the Church, a
unicus et authenticus fons
[a unique and authentic source] for administration, jurisdiction, and legal instruction—unlike anything the Church has previously possessed in its two-thousand-year existence.’
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Among the Code’s provisions, there was a blurring between the ordinary and solemn teaching authority of the pope, a confusion that the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870 had tried to avoid. Henceforth, papal encyclicals would be regarded with virtually the same authority as infallible dogma. Heresy and error were now conflated: ‘It is not enough to avoid heresies, but one must also carefully shun all errors that more or less approach it’, stated the text. ‘Hence all must observe the constitutions and decrees by which the Holy See has proscribed and forbidden opinions of that sort.’ All teaching of the Holy See, even though it is not strictly ‘infallible’, must be received with ‘internal and intellectual consent and loyal obedience’. Thus the Anti-Modernist oath was absorbed into the Code of Canon Law.
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The code constrained not only the clergy but also the laity through a series of decrees and regulations aimed at undermining intellectual freedom and curbing peer-group ecumenical discussion: ‘Catholics are to avoid disputations or conferences about matters of faith with non-Catholics,
especially in public, unless the Holy See, or in case of emergency the [the bishop of the] place, has given permission.’ Judgements concerning theological orthodoxy were to be entrusted exclusively to the Holy Office. No priest could publish a book or edit or contribute to a newspaper, journal, magazine, or review without permission of the local bishop. Every diocese would have its own censors, who were obliged to make a special profession of faith. The names of the censors were not to be divulged until the bishop had endorsed the work.
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Seven

The Great Confessional Experiment

At an early age—I was scarcely eight years old—I had to go to confession. . . . And the very next thing we were told was, ‘That is a sin, and now your guardian angel is crying because of you.’ I cannot forget the way we were threatened and terrified with the ‘evil spirit’, the devil and hell.

—Anonymous, quoted in Mary Collins and David N. Power, eds.,
The Fate of Confession
, citing Ludwig Fertig,
Zeitgeist und Erziehungskunst

P
IUS
X’
S
INITIATIVE TO FORTIFY THE FAITHFUL AGAINST THE
evil forces of the world began with a decree on Holy Communion, published on 20 December 1905. The sacrament, he declared, ideally should be approached ‘daily’, since its chief purpose was to help communicants ‘derive strength
to resist their sensual passions, cleanse themselves from the stains of daily faults, and avoid these graver sins to which human frailty is liable’. Hence its primary purpose was ‘not that the honour and reverence due to our Lord may be safeguarded, or that it may serve as a reward or recompense of virtue bestowed on the recipients.’ The Eucharist, the pope went on, was ‘the antidote whereby we may be freed from daily faults and be preserved from mortal sin.’ From the outset, then, the focus was as much on avoidance of sin as on spiritual flourishing and full participation at Mass.
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As a result of failure to attend communion regularly, Pius X opined, ‘piety . . . grew cold’. Disputes had arisen, he declared, ‘concerning the dispositions with which one ought to receive frequent and daily communion; and writers vied with one another in demanding more and more stringent conditions as necessary to be fulfilled.’ The result was that people ‘were content to partake of it once a year, or once a month, or at most once a week.’

The papal encouragement to partake frequently, even daily, in communion was to be broadcast with impressive results, through sermons, retreats, parish missions, and visitations. Special confraternities and sodalities of the Eucharist were formed; Eucharistic congresses were held in many countries, and a constant flood of articles on the Eucharist appeared in the Catholic media. Yet a major problem soon became apparent.
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Throughout the Church it was customary for children to delay making their first communion until the age of thirteen
or fourteen, or even later. If Pius X was to alter the entrenched practice of centuries, however, he also needed to dislodge an ancient view about the age at which children made their first confession. And to do this, he needed to alter an entrenched conviction about the ‘age of discretion’: the age at which children acquired the capacity to tell right from wrong.

It took another five years for him to deliver, on 8 August 1910, the encyclical
Quam Singulari
, where he sets out his thinking and teaching in detail. He starts by claiming that the Eucharist had been administered in the early Church ‘even to nursing infants’. He acknowledges, however, that the practice had died out in the Latin Church, and goes on to cite the Fourth Lateran Council and the Council of Trent on the rule that the faithful should receive communion, in conjunction with confession, once a year after reaching the ‘years of discretion’. But what are the years of discretion? And here he acknowledges the widespread and historic actual practice throughout the Church: ‘On the age of reason or discretion’, he writes, ‘not a few errors and deplorable abuses have crept in during the course of time.’ The first deplorable error, he avers, is that there should be a different age for confession from that for Holy Communion. In consequence, ‘the age determined for the reception of First Communion was placed at ten years or twelve, and in places fourteen years or even more were required; and until that age children and youth were prohibited from Eucharistic Communion.’ The age of ‘discretion for confession’, he goes on, ‘is the time when one
can distinguish between right and wrong, that is, when one arrives at a certain use of reason’. Aquinas, he claims, states that children who have ‘some use of reason’ should be allowed to go to communion. He then quotes Saint Antoninus as saying, ‘But when a child is capable of doing wrong, this is of committing a mortal sin, then he is bound by the precept of confession’, although, again, this ‘authority’ has nothing to say on the matter of age. Finally, he conflates a child’s understanding of the nature of the Eucharist with knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. Quoting the Roman Catechism of Trent, he asserts that a confessor will judge the age of discretion as the point at which children ‘have an understanding of this admirable Sacrament [Holy Communion] and if they have any desire for it.’ From all this it is clear, he goes on, ‘that the age of discretion for receiving Holy Communion is that at which the child knows the difference between the Eucharistic Bread and ordinary, material bread, and can therefore approach the altar with proper devotion.’ He concludes the encyclical with the following decree: ‘The custom of not admitting children to Confession or of not giving them absolution when they have already attained the use of reason must be entirely abandoned. The Ordinary [local bishop] shall see to it that this condition ceases absolutely, and he may, if necessary, use legal measures accordingly.’

T
HE MESSAGE NOW WENT OUT TO
the universal Church—bishops, congregations of religious, parish priests, missionaries, and schools. From 1910 onwards it became a matter of Catholic belief that discretion means the ability to tell the difference between right and wrong, and to tell the difference between bread and wine consecrated and unconsecrated. Yet, in arguing that the age of seven had always, in fact, been the Church’s understanding of the norm of discretion’s emergence, and therefore the norm for first confession, Pius X was flying in the face of historical fact. He was also ignoring the wisdom of the faithful, clergy and laity, who had recognised down the centuries that confession should not be foisted upon children too early, and that the age of discretion differs between individual children. It was well recognised, moreover, that the imposition of inappropriate guilt on young children had its psychological and moral dangers. As Henry Charles Lea, the principal nineteenth-century historian of the sacrament, wrote: ‘It seems a sacrilege to administer to children of tender years the awful sacrament of penitence, with its presumed requisites of contrition and charity and a conception of its significance as the means of averting the wrath of an offended God.’
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