The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (15 page)

As we have seen, there had been constant debates down the centuries over the age at which ‘discretion’ emerges. An early reference arose in a question put to Timothy of Alexandria at the end of the fourth century. Under discussion was the emergence of a sense of ‘responsibility’ in a child. Timothy commented that some believed that responsibility began
at the age of ten; others argued much later. Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century noted that some believed that it was not possible to sin under the age of fourteen, yet surely, he objected, and with reason, it was possible for children to lie at that age. The
obligation
to confess under pain of excommunication did not arise, as we saw, until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215; nevertheless, the Council fathers did not settle on a specific age for first confession. Yet the heavy penalty attendant on failure to comply meant that the starting point of the obligation to confess became a topic of intense debate.
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The Council of Narbonne in 1244 declared the age to be fourteen, as did various other councils, synods, and canon law rulings in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In 1408, at the provincial synod of Reims, the theologian Jean Charlier de Gerson concurred. In the quarrels that raged over the theology of the sacrament through the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, there were violent differences of opinion over the authenticity of the sacrament as well as the age and frequency at which the sacrament should be administered. Charles Borromeo was all for lowering first confession to the age of five or six, although he also advocated the view, as did other moral theologians, that a child should not be given absolution but merely a blessing. Others recommended conditional absolution.

The overall history of the disputes, moreover, is a different matter from actual practice, which is harder to ascertain. By the eighteenth century there were striking differences of
opinion, including the recommendation of ages significantly higher than fourteen, based on local tradition, customs, experience, and perhaps prejudice. In some cases, evidence of practice emerges from complaints. In 1703, for example, the Provincial Council of Albania denounced the practice of making first confession as late as the age of sixteen, eighteen, and even twenty. In 1747 the bishop of Padua, Cardinal Carlo Rezzonico, professed himself astounded that many young people still had not made their first confession by the age of eighteen. In terms of averages, many sources suggest that throughout the nineteenth century girls made their first confession in groups at the age of twelve or older at the same time that they made their first communion and confirmation; for boys, the age of first confession was typically thirteen or fourteen.

T
HE CONSEQUENCES OF
Pius X’s experiment on Catholic children, spanning the second decade of the twentieth century up to the early 1960s, emerge from the published writings, fiction and non-fiction, and personal correspondence and interviews occasioned by my research for this book.

Catholic life was marked during those years by a religiosity that was both defensive and combative. The enemy—atheistic communism—loomed large and clear, presenting a serious threat to the Church’s very existence during the interwar and post-war years. Much was made during that era
of the presence of Satan in the world. Each person, we were taught, had been assigned a guardian angel to ward off the whispered suggestions of our personal devil. Those who lived in predominantly Protestant countries or districts were often embattled with local non-Catholic antagonists. My mother, as a child in the East End of London, was taunted on her way to school by pupils from a militantly Protestant school; mutual insults, bricks, and fists flew. The tensions of Northern Ireland were being played out on the inner-city streets of England and Scotland.

When I was in the infant class of my convent school towards the end of the Second World War, one of Hitler’s rockets demolished the local Anglican church, killing fifteen members of the congregation. Miss Doonan, our pious teacher, explained that God had punished those people because they were Protestants. We were taught that it was a grave sin to enter a Protestant church or attend ‘the rites of their false religion’. The contempt of some East End Catholics for Protestants was matched only by their hatred of Jews. I once heard an Irish Catholic uncle referring to my genial Jewish Grandma Cornwell as ‘that Yid their father’s mother’.

The pope was the living symbol of Catholic unity and continuity. Loyalty to the papacy was fierce and unflinching. As the hymn went, ‘God bless our Pope, the Great the Good.’ Catholicism was confrontational, visible, and public. In the United States, Catholic evangelism, first by radio and then by television, achieved large audiences. By the 1950s the Rosary was being said daily to combat the Russian nuclear threat. The world over, Catholics went on processions in the streets
outside their churches. Pilgrimages to Marian shrines were popular throughout Europe, especially Lourdes, Fatima, and Knock in Ireland. Devotional objects dominated the walls of Catholic homes, prosperous or poor: a crucifix in every room, a picture of the Sacred Heart in the living room, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the parental bedroom. Catholics wore the Miraculous Medal, celebrating the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, and scapulas—items of cloth, not much bigger than postage stamps, that would hang on one’s breast and back like a double-sided necklace, attached by silk strings. Scapulas had tiny pictures of Jesus or Mary on them, or perhaps a saint; some included a phrase from a prayer or a promise of spiritual protection for the wearer. It was believed that if one died wearing the scapula, one escaped Purgatory on the first Friday after one’s death. Possession of a Rosary was essential. The Catholic ambiance was festooned with ‘sacramentals’ and devotions: holy water, holy pictures, votive candles, incense, litanies, novenas.

At the heart of Catholicism was the practice of frequent confession and communion. Preparation for these sacraments now began typically at the age of five or six, aided by vivid depictions of religious truths on roll-down oleographs—the Garden of Eden, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. Children were introduced to the notion of sin as the breaking of God’s rules. And the rules made by the Church were equivalent to God’s rules.

The official catechism, taught from the age of five, was composed of questions and answers which we learnt by rote:

       
QUESTION:
What is sin?

       
ANSWER:
Sin is an offence against God, by any thought, word, deed, or omission against the law of God.
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We were taught that there were two kinds of sin. First, there was original sin, which was ‘committed by Adam . . . when he ate the forbidden fruit’, the stain and guilt of which had been contracted by all mankind, ‘except the Blessed Virgin’. Then there were ‘actual sins . . . which we ourselves commit’, which in turn were of two kinds: ‘mortal sin and venial sin’, meaning serious sin and less serious sin. And here we came to the nub of the matter:

       
QUESTION:
Why is it called mortal sin?

       
ANSWER:
It is called mortal sin because it is so serious that it kills the soul and deserves hell.

       
QUESTION:
How does mortal sin kill the soul?

       
ANSWER:
Mortal sin kills the soul by depriving it of sanctifying grace, which is the supernatural life of the soul.

       
QUESTION:
Is it a great evil to fall into mortal sin?

       
ANSWER:
It is the greatest of all evils to fall into mortal sin.
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There was little or no mention of sin as an action that harmed others, individually or communally. It was claimed, moreover, that harm to our souls was greater than any harm to our bodies—thus giving the impression that the harm one might inflict on the body of another was not so serious a matter. The catechism asked: ‘Why is the soul more important than the body?’ Answer: ‘Because it is a spirit and immortal.’

Meanwhile, the focus on God as one who is prone to take offence depicted Him from the outset as essentially vengeful and wrathful. It was not that the Judeo-Christian story was fundamentally pernicious so much as inadequately imparted by our teachers and the catechism text. Serious, or mortal, sin, according to orthodox Christian theology, involves deliberate rejection of the unconditional love of an all-merciful God. Instead, children of that half-century were being taught that God’s love was conditional on our behaviour; that he could change his mind about us; that he withdrew his love and punished us in eternal fire if we died unconfessed. This notion was reinforced by the formal words of contrition we learned by heart and recited in confession. We begged pardon for our sins and said that we detested them ‘above all things’ because ‘they offend your infinite goodness’.

The leading imagery of sin for Catholic children throughout much of the twentieth century suggested a trivial, petulant God obsessed with cleanliness. Sins were described as discrete dirty marks on the robe of the soul. For a child, this robe was literal, despite the soul being a spirit and immortal. You were handed a clean, white robe on the day of baptism. If you told a lie, or hit your sister, or were disobedient to your mother, black marks appeared. If you did something seriously wrong, it became entirely black and that person was destined for Hell.

Goodness, or ‘holiness’, was not a practice of virtue in the whole of one’s daily life and relations with others, but rather, the feeling you experienced on leaving the confessional box with your robe nicely laundered.

I
N THE SECOND HALF
of the twentieth century, many Catholic writers recalled the trauma of confession in childhood. The American journalist Christopher Buckley wrote about his own anxiety as a child at the prospect of going to confession. You were told, he said, to ‘go into a dark booth with a man dressed in black and tell [him] . . . things that you haven’t even told your mother.’ The experience was like bereavement of the worst kind for a child: ‘It’s really the most sobering thing I can imagine happening . . . short of losing your mother or father’.
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In Frank O’Connor’s short story ‘First Confession’, the box’s dark geography exemplifies a subtext of acute anxiety. Jackie, the authorial voice, reminiscing on the experience from the vantage of adulthood, writes: ‘I was scared to death . . .’ He goes on: ‘It was pitch-dark, and I couldn’t see priest or anything else. Then I really began to be frightened.’ Jackie begins by making his confession to the panelled wall, before realising his mistake. Baffled by the arrangement of the pitch dark interior, he clambers onto the elbow rest of the penitent’s kneeler (he would not have been the first or the last to do so). When the priest slams back the hatch, he can see only the boy’s knees, level with the grille.
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First confession and communion, which had acquired the status of an infant rite of Catholic initiation, were surrounded by rules and regulations, which, to break deliberately, meant
falling into mortal sin. Children, like adults, for example, were obliged to fast from midnight the night before receiving communion. In
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
, the author Mary McCarthy reveals that on the very day of her first communion, she believed that she had committed a sacrilege. ‘I took a drink of water. Unthinkingly, of course, for had it not been drilled into me that the Host must be received fasting, on penalty of mortal sin?’ With the expensive dress, the veil, and the prayer book, she had not the courage to drop out. She received communion. It had only been a sip of water, she acknowledges, ‘but it made no difference’. She remembers that she felt ‘despair’ that summer morning, adding, with pitiful understatement, ‘It is quite common for children making their first communion to have just such a mishap as mine’.
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