The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (2 page)

In this book I argue that the rejection of confession is a crucial symptom of a wider crisis within the Catholic Church. A gulf has opened up between official teaching and practice. An alteration across a broad front, described by some theologians as a ‘paradigm shift’ (in emulation of great sea changes in ‘normal’ science), has affected the way many Catholics understand sin, virtue, and the nature of God. This shift, in turn, has created new insights into the meaning of God’s love and forgiveness.
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Over the past four decades, Rome has attempted to make confession more attractive. Today Catholics refer to the sacrament as ‘reconciliation’ (a term used in the early Church), and confessors tend to hear the sins of their penitents in the pews or the sanctuary, or on comfortable chairs in a parish room set aside for the purpose. Yet the more user-friendly circumstances of the sacrament have not brought back the penitents. From the mid-1970s, during the papacy of Paul VI, penitents were offered the option of group absolution—known as ‘general’ absolution; the initiative was quashed by John Paul II in 1983. Mortal, or grave, sins, he insisted, must be absolved in privacy after they have been told to a priest. (Mortal sins, according to orthodox doctrine, include not only the major sins, such as murder, grand larceny, physical
violence, and adultery, but also all sexual sins: using condoms, having sex outside of marriage, having homosexual sex, divorcing and remarrying without an annulment, masturbation, and indulging in ‘impure thoughts’.)

Confessions have been so poorly attended in recent years that in many parishes the sacrament is only available by appointment. Some priests will tell you that nobody has sought the sacrament for months. If you go to a cathedral church, you may still find queues of penitents waiting to be confessed in the traditional confessional box; but this is an isolated phenomenon. Many of these old-style confessants, who are nevertheless as likely to be in their twenties as their eighties, cling to a version of Catholicism that most Catholics have abandoned. Many have come from parishes where their confessions cannot be heard, or because they prefer to be confessed by a priest who does not recognise them.

One practice that continues to be upheld throughout the Church, however, despite the widespread decline of confession or reconciliation as a sacrament among adult Catholics, is that of children making their first confession at age seven in preparation for their first communion. A crucial theme of this book is the phenomenon of obligatory confession in early childhood. The story of its universal commencement in the early twentieth century, the widespread oppression it occasioned, and, scandalously, the opportunity it afforded a minority of priests to abuse children sexually reveals the dark face of confession’s recent history.

In the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, there is a handsome illuminated document, penned in black and red gothic script, entitled
Memoriale Presbiterorum
—an
aide memoire
for priests. Written in Latin and dating from the early fourteenth century, it has 218 chapters offering guidance to confessors on every aspect of confessional practice. The manual is typical of the many guides for confessors appearing throughout Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.
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One chapter, headed ‘Concerning Children’ (
Circa pueros
), offers this advice: ‘You ought to know, confessor, that if a child be capable of wrongdoing, near to puberty, he is obliged to confess all his sins at least once a year.’ By the time the
Memoriale
came to be written, a hundred years had passed since a great council in Rome decreed that all Christians in the Latin tradition must confess their sins at least once a year on reaching the ‘age of discretion’—which, as this manual and many others implied, was around the time of puberty. The age for first confession in the Latin Christian tradition was therefore generally held to be between twelve and fourteen, a view that persisted down the centuries, with local and periodic variations, until the first decade of the twentieth century, when Rome issued a dramatic proclamation on the subject.
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Against the background of the eventful, and at times troubled, evolution of the practice of confession, this book culminates with the story of a historic experiment imposed universally on Catholic children. In 1910, the pope of the day, Pius X, decreed that first confession should be made not at puberty but at the age of seven—which meant that
instruction on sin, and the different categories of sins, and the punishments due for sins in Purgatory and Hell, would begin at five or six. The decree also advocated weekly confession for Catholics of every age, instead of annual confession, the former norm for lay members of the faithful. Among the many unintended consequences of that experiment was the inculcation in young children of an oppressive sense of guilt and shame, especially for their bodies, and, for a significant minority, exposure to clerical sexual predators.

These charges are in stark contrast to the undeniable benefits—spiritual and psychological—that result from a mature individual’s admission of remorse for having caused injury to others, and the subsequent forgiveness of the injured party, across a wide spectrum of religious practices and cultural contexts. One of the most beautiful arias in opera concludes Mozart’s
Nozze di Figaro
—when marital discord, deceit and betrayal end with the husband begging for pardon, and the wife offering unconditional forgiveness. The poignant aria ‘
Contessa Perdono
’—‘Countess, forgive me’—envelops the cast and the entire audience in a sublime ambiance of harmony and reconciliation. A similar poignant moment occurs in Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice
when Portia extols the power and beneficence of mercy as a type of divine grace:

       
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,

       
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

       
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;

       
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
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Poets of every era testify that the act of unburdening in a form of words and in public brings healing, or, as William Wordsworth put it—‘timely utterance’ gives ‘thought relief’.
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Yet the widely assumed instinctual universality and healing quality of the tendency to confess—or as young people might say today, ‘fess up’—is a matter of debate. (How many marriages have been wrecked by a spouse’s admission of having strayed?) Nor does Catholic confession—involving the patriarchal judgement of a priest over women and children—accord with voluntary exchanges of remorse and forgiveness within relationships where the parties have equal power.

For many centuries confession to a priest in the Catholic Church was obligatory—under pain of further sin. For centuries the Catholic sacrament of confession involved patriarchal authority, secrecy, and itemized lists of discrete ‘sins’ couched in formalised language. The ‘telling’ of sins, moreover, was normally divorced from the narratives and relationships of a penitent’s life story. The role of the confessor was not that of a representative of an injured party, but of judge, healer, dispenser of penance, and representative of the divine.

The desire to be chastised for wrongdoing in a non-religious context can be traced through the works of many writers from Plato to Sigmund Freud, although Freud maintained that our conscious triggers for guilt hide deeper reasons, buried in the subconscious.
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Penances imposed by Catholic confessors today are mild—a few prayers. These ‘penances’, however, are remnants of harsh self-mortification that once included fasts, pilgrimage, exile, and self-flagellation.

Yet the point of Catholic confession goes beyond absolution for wrongdoing. For many centuries confession has been deemed crucial for achieving holiness and Heaven. Of all Christian denominations, the Catholic Church has advocated the importance of confession as a means of salvation. Great saints, such as Teresa of Avila, have extolled confession’s benefits as a means of achieving mystical union with God.

Spiritual writers within the sphere of the monotheistic religions emphasize the importance of the sinner making a decision for God: embarking on a conversion of life. The visible ritual of confession in the presence of a minister, however, makes such a conversion ‘sacramental’—an outward sign of inward grace, sanctioned by the Church. Despite the unhappiness of the Protestant reformers with the medieval conduct of the sacrament of penance, confession would nevertheless be practised in a restricted form by the Lutheran, Anglican, and Episcopalian churches (as well as the Eastern Churches). These denominations mostly administer the ritual in cases where a penitent seeks reconciliation, or spiritual consolation, in crisis, such as in illness or in the face of death. Unlike the Catholic Church, they do not oblige a member of their faithful to confess in the event of having committed a ‘serious’ sin, nor do they maintain rules of annual obligation to confess.

Confession has merged with spiritual counselling across different Christian denominations, especially for people dedicated to a life in religion. In the Catholic tradition, moreover, the power of the priest to bestow absolution extends in cases of emergency to groups of believers, especially when the
priest can offer spiritual consolation in time of peril. One of the heroes of the
Titanic
disaster was Father Thomas Beales, who had twice refused the opportunity to go into a lifeboat. He preferred to stay on the vessel, where he continued to lead prayers and absolve sins even as the ship went down. During the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, Father Mychal Judge was the first dead rescuer to be carried out. He was killed by falling masonry while hearing the confessions of the injured and dying. In time of war, moreover, Catholic chaplains have won praise for their courage in administering, at risk of their lives, absolution and last rites to the wounded and dying on the battlefields and at sea. There are countless instances of priests for whom confession is an occasion of compassion and inclusion. It has been revealed that Pope Francis, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, would go to the city’s red-light district at night to give spiritual comfort to prostitutes, sitting on a roadside bench.
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And yet the Catholic history of confession is punctuated with evidence of a darker side. Confessors down the centuries, in the act of administering the sacrament, have been guilty of hypocrisy, avarice, sexual debauchery, and other forms of abuse. Theological disagreements over confession, as well as confessors’ sexual and mercenary abuses, were prime reasons for Protestant indignation at the Reformation. The confessional box, separating confessor and penitent physically and visually, was invented in the Catholic Counter-Reformation to prevent the seduction of women. Sexual abuses nevertheless persisted. The whispering of secrets, invariably involving the
marriage bed, would lead to new forms of confessional seduction. By the eighteenth century, anticlericalism, owing in part to antagonism between husbands and their wives’ confessors, led to widespread neglect of the sacrament.

Pius X, later canonised an official saint of the Church, extended universal and frequent confessional practice to young children, believing confession and Holy Communion to be means of bestowing spiritual sustenance and protection on them in the face of secularism, materialism, and a form of heresy he termed ‘Modernism’. The faithful responded: long lines of penitents, including young children now, were a feature of weekly confession-times in Catholic churches the world over. This was the Church familiar to Catholics from the First World War to the early 1970s, often referred to in nostalgic retrospect as a golden age of Catholicism. Catholic public and domestic religious practices increased—processions, pilgrimages, praying the Rosary, grace before and after meals, the Angelus, increased veneration of the pope. There was a surge in vocations to the priesthood—many candidates making their commitment, as I did, in boyhood.

In preparation for first confession, children barely out of infancy were taught the doctrine of ‘mortal sin’, which killed the soul and resulted in eternal punishment. Every sin of thought, word, and deed against chastity, or ‘modesty’, was mortal. Religious instruction at an early stage of moral development laid foundations of beliefs that were more akin to superstition than to faith, closer to fear than to love of
God. Adult disciplines such as fasting (from midnight on the day before receiving Holy Communion) were also imposed, often resulting in a child breaking the fast unintentionally. Children caught in this dilemma would go nevertheless to communion under social and familial pressures and suffer consequent guilt. They had been taught that receiving communion after breaking the fast was both a mortal sin and a sacrilege—compounded by a further sacrilege if the sin was not admitted in a subsequent confession.