The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (27 page)

Conscious of the wide-scale collapse of confessional practice, in 1973 Pope Paul VI announced a revision of the ‘Sacrament of Reconciliation’, as confession was now to be known. He distinguished three legitimate rituals: First, the traditional, one-on-one, individual confession; second, a communal service of contrition with individual confession available for those who wished for it; and third, a communal service in which the congregation received ‘general absolution’ of their sins without recounting them individually to a confessor. It was laid down within the rubric for the third form that any grave sin should nevertheless be confessed at a subsequent individual confession. In the years that followed, many priests began to use the rite of general absolution routinely, especially in the run-up to Easter, and it proved to be popular among congregations. Priests reported that the general absolution rite was bringing many lapsed Catholics back to church.
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In Rome, however, the new pope, John Paul II, elected in 1978, and his new doctrinal enforcer, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, appointed in 1982, were unhappy. The time had come for yet another overhaul of the theology and practice of the sacrament, this time in the form of a retrenchment. In 1983 John Paul convened a synod of bishops in Rome to discuss ‘Reconciliation and Penance’. On the face of it, the meeting was in continuity with the Second Vatican Council, being an attempt to resolve the evident crises collegially by consulting with the bishops. The synod had been preceded by a theological commission that had called for recognition of the social dimension of sin, and hence of such matters as a communal conscience and offences against the common good—including economic crime and pollution of the environment. The commission also advocated recognition of the variety of forms of the sacrament in pastoral practice, thereby noting the benefits of the rite of general absolution in bringing lapsed Catholics back into the fold.
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In the verbal and written submissions made by the bishops from all over the world, the issue of general absolution was raised repeatedly. Bishops from missionary countries, especially in Africa and Latin America, spoke of the advantage of the rite as a way of administering the sacrament to large numbers of people, many of whom may have travelled for days to hear one Mass in their region. The issue was again raised by the cardinal archbishop of Milan, Carlo Mario Martini, who was charged with collating the more than two hundred verbal and written views expressed on the matter by the bishops. But in delivering his own summary, the new
head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger, insisted that absolution must be administered individually and not to a group, except in situations of grave emergency, and even then, with the penitent intending to make a one-on-one individual confession later.

A year after the synod, John Paul II issued an ‘apostolic exhortation’ ignoring the concerns raised by many of the bishops at the synod. As with Paul VI’s encyclical
Humanae Vitae
, it was the pontiff taking upon himself the ultimate teaching role and ignoring the collegial authority of his bishops. Citing the Council of Trent, four hundred years back, rather than the recent Second Vatican Council, he spoke in his apostolic exhortation of confession as having a ‘juridical’ and a ‘medicinal’ character. In its final section, individual, as opposed to general, absolution was advocated as the only means of healing the soul in mortal sin. In a ruling that many priests saw as a bid to exert clerical control over individual souls and consciences, the ritual of general absolution was banned.
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John Paul II, as a priest in his youth, had been in the habit of spending an entire hour delivering spiritual direction to each individual penitent who came to him. He saw confession as a ‘drama’, an act of intense religious imagination in which a person’s ideal self and real self were contrasted and compared in the presence of the confessor. This approach (he spoke elsewhere of typically taking more than an hour over each confession when he was a parish priest) hardly helped to solve the predicament of priests
serving thousands of souls across vast terrains of the third world. Nor did it address the clear evidence that there were fewer priests every year in the developed world. Nor was he listening to the lay faithful any more than he had heeded his bishops at the synod.
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John Paul II acknowledged the notion of ‘social sin’ that had been put forward by the Latin American bishops, but he remained wedded to that imaginative ‘drama’ of the individual soul in its ‘vertical’ relationship with his or her better self, and with God, in the presence of the confessor, who acted as a kind of theatrical director.

The question of the age for first confession was not addressed, but the exhortation confirmed that, without exception, first communion must be preceded by first confession. Yet concerns about the inappropriateness of confession from the age of seven had been voiced by parents who retained memories of oppression in the confessional. In 1973, responding to parental anxieties, the German bishops had allowed that the rule of first confession before first communion might be waived, allowing parents to make the decision on the ideal age for their children to receive the sacrament. By 1977, under pressure from Rome, the proviso was withdrawn. Lay Catholics and pastors nevertheless continued to be anxious about children being forced to make their confessions at a tender age, when the majority of the faithful had ceased going to confession at all.
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The moral theologian Professor John Mahoney, SJ, writing to me about the problem of early confession, argued:

What I find hard to accept is not the passing of regular confession, like many other devotions, but the way in which the passing is officially deplored, and we are still apparently trying to drill into children making their ‘first confession’ and the need to make their confession weekly, in spite of the fact that their teachers and parents (and priests) have given up this regular practice. It smacks of inconsistency and even intellectual dishonesty, which is particularly reprehensible with regard to young children. The Church needs courageously in this, as in so many other practices, to review its approach and teaching.

M
EANWHILE, THERE WAS
an impression throughout the 1980s that the split between teaching and practice on sexual matters was widening. Was there any hope of a resolution to problems that were driving Catholics from the Church in ever growing numbers? In 1993 I interviewed Cardinal Carlo Mario Martini, who was considered until his death in 2012 to be a leading progressive voice in the Church and even a likely candidate someday to be pope. As it turned out, he would be the chief rival to Joseph Ratzinger in the 2005 conclave following the death of John Paul II. In our conversation, which took place in the cardinal’s palace in Milan, he revealed himself to be remote from the simplistic liberal image promoted by
many of his supporters and detractors. On contraception, however, the ‘sin’ that had driven so many sexually active Catholics from confession, and indeed the Church, he made a bold statement: ‘Contraception is something special, to do with special points of moral teaching. There is a contrast in attitude between northern countries and Latin countries on moral questions. In Italy we believe the ideal is set high so as to attain something. In other countries they think that they must actually achieve the ideal, and they are anxious if they fail.’ The perspective admitted a measure of relativism, and the language was interesting: the Church’s teaching on contraception was a ‘special point’ rather than an infallible doctrine. He elaborated:

I don’t know what the development will be as regards contraception. But I believe that the Church’s teaching has not been expressed so well. The fact is that the problem of contraception is relatively new; it was only really possible with new techniques in the past forty or so years. The Church, on the other hand, thinks very slowly, so I’m confident we will find some formula to state things better, so that the problem is better understood and more adapted to reality. I admit that there is a gap and that bothers me, but I am confident it can be overcome.

Cardinal Martini went on to give an example of how a similar problem was resolved in the past: ‘Usury’, he said, ‘was an almost insurmountable impediment in the fourteenth
century, but little by little we began to see the problem in a different light, although it took centuries to resolve it.’

Talking of the antagonisms and divisions within the Church, he said: ‘We are not all contemporaries in a biographical sense. We are in the 1990s, but some Catholics are still mentally in the 1960s and some in the 1940s, and some even in the last century; it’s inevitable that there will be clashes of mentalities.’
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Twelve

Varieties of Confessional Experience

Nothing could be more impossible than that God should be wrath. For wrath and friendship are two contraries. He that layeth and destroyeth our wrath, and maketh us meek and mild—we must believe that he is ever, in the same love, meek and mild; which is contrary to wrath.

—Julian of Norwich,
Revelations of Divine Love

T
HE GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN
C
ATHOLICS
are amply illustrated in the correspondence generated in the course of my research.
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In addition to the many people responding to my article in
The Tablet
who still carried memories of torment and abuse, I heard from some who had never found confession to be a negative experience personally, yet
still voiced positive criticisms. The correspondence as a whole presented a variety of perspectives based on respondents’ personal experiences and the contrasts between quotations I heard from the young and the old, married people and single people, cradle Catholics and converts, laypeople, priests, and one bishop. All in all, the material provides a wide-ranging overview of current attitudes and practices, suggesting that the sacrament continues to evolve.

The current generation of young Catholics, aged fourteen to twenty-four in my sample, are now largely free of the oppressive confessional practices of the past that prompted unwarranted guilt and fear. First confession is still part of the celebration of first communion for young children. However, pastors and parents are now complicit in imparting to them the idea that confession is a brief and insignificant threshold to the more important celebration of the Eucharist. Pastors, catechists, and parents do their best to make light of the ritual. Confessor and child-penitent sit side by side, or facing each other, in full sight of the congregation. There is a tendency to eliminate sin language and to emphasise a God who loves and forgives.
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A fourteen-year-old correspondent wrote that on the occasion of her first confession when she was eight, the priest greeted her with a smile, and she talked to him ‘about things I had done wrong.’ She remembers ‘we spoke freely and I relaxed. . . . I told him about not cleaning my bedroom, or not obeying my mother, all of which made him chuckle jovially.’ Since her first confession this correspondent has
attended the sacrament on only one other occasion, this time in preparation for her confirmation four years later. Her account is typical of today’s experience. Like others in her age group, she receives the Eucharist whenever she goes to Mass.

Young Catholics attending Catholic schools are encouraged, perhaps before Easter, to attend a single communal ritual of contrition, followed by the opportunity to make individual confession to one of several attending priests. I was told of experiments whereby schoolchildren will confess in small groups: admitting, for example, that they have been guilty of belonging to a bullying clique.

Not every priest is a chuckling jovial pastor, but young people appear to be decisive in rejecting traditionalist, hardline approaches. One young single Catholic, twenty-three and recently graduated from college, noted the contrast between two priests she had known. ‘When I made my first holy communion I was used to the loving, creative, forgiving God which both my parents educated me in and our local priest’, she wrote. When the family moved, she came up against a new priest who expressed a Christianity that was ‘cruel and unforgiving’. This priest, she said, ‘quite changed my ideas about my faith.’ She remembers sitting in the pews on Sundays, covering her ears as the priest described ‘the shocking lengths women will go to for an abortion’, and how her ‘ever forgiving God would never forgive their sin.’ She had never suffered oppression or abuse in confession, but feels no compulsion to confess, and believes that censorious priests turn away more and more Catholics ‘who struggle in
the modern world to find a happy balance between their lives and their faith.’