The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (8 page)

In 1565 Borromeo commissioned the Jesuits in Milan to write a treatise, entitled ‘On the Examination of Confessors’, to explore the best way of ensuring the authentic administration of the sacrament and protecting the rite from future scepticism. Foremost in his mind was the issue that had driven the Donatist heresy of the fourth and fifth centuries: the belief that sacraments performed by a priest in a state of mortal sin were invalid. Theologians in the Middle Ages had insisted on the principle
ex opere operato
—that the state of a priest’s soul did not affect the efficacy of the sacraments he bestowed. Yet dissatisfaction with sinful confessors, leading to widespread anticlericalism, had been cited as a chief reason for neglect of confession and a consequent decline in Mass attendance, participation in the Eucharist, and other devotions throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As one parishioner in the diocese put
it bluntly: ‘I don’t want to confess to one who is more of a sinner than I am’.
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While conscious of the need to avoid the Donatist position, Borromeo concentrated on the education and formation of future priests. There would be careful recruitment of candidates for the priesthood, frequent examinations, and chastisement of those who erred. And there would be visitations of parishes and religious houses, regular reports on progress, and tribunals for complaints. Above all, Trent had called for episcopal control of confessors, whether they were parish priests or monks and friars. Supervision and transparency were to be the order of the day. In Milan, which promoted itself as a model for dioceses throughout the Catholic world, special examinations were established for confessors. Only those who passed could receive a written licence to administer the sacrament.

Crucial to Borromeo’s strategy was the publication of his
Avertenze
(Admonitions) to confessors in 1574.
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These instructions outlined the scope of the bishop’s authority—his right to set standards, impose conformity, reserve to the bishops the absolution of certain sins (especially those of priests), and withdraw licences, or ‘faculties’, to hear confessions. The instructions stressed the avoidance of familiar medieval abuses, such as sexual solicitation, sale of absolution, loose living, and ignorance of canon law. Borromeo was shaping a professional class of clergy which in time would be known as ‘Tridentine’ clericalism. His ultimate aim was to improve the spiritual lives of the faithful. Confession, for Borromeo,
provided a window onto individual consciences, a crucial means of improving the moral lives of the faithful, which in turn, he believed, would improve civil society.

Mindful of widespread sexual abuse in the practice of confession, Borromeo resorted to a practical scheme to prevent confessors and penitents from coming into contact in the course of administering the sacrament. Before Trent, as we have seen, the priest would sit on a chair with the penitent at his feet—thus making it easy for the confessor to touch the penitent, and for the penitent to lean on the lap of the confessor. At times the confessor would hold the penitents’ hands, or even encourage an embrace. Absolution, moreover, usually ended with the priest laying hands on the head of the penitent; eye contact was common, as evinced by warnings against its dangers in the medieval confessional manuals. The physical, potentially tactile, face-to-face proximity of the confessional relationship had offered ample opportunity for intimacy, and therefore ‘occasions of sin’. Cases against soliciting confessors had come before the inquisitors involving kissing, touching penitents’ breasts, and mutual masturbation during the very administration of the sacrament.
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We get an impression of the state of affairs in a report to the Roman Curia written in 1575 by Borromeo’s former assistant, Niccolò Ormaneto: ‘From all sides zealous people approach me to lament the great abomination of many impious men who violate the sacrament of penance by attempting to satiate their unbridled and bestial appetite with their spiritual daughters, during or outside the act of confession.’
Ormaneto faced the stark fact that it was not worldly pursuits alone—such as drinking, dancing, and immodest speech and dress—that acted as occasions of concupiscence, but the circumstance of the sacrament of confession itself.
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Against this unseemly background, Borromeo now commissioned an item of church furniture to set a physical barrier between confessor and penitent. In 1576, members of the faithful entering the Duomo in Milan were struck by the presence of several unfamiliar wooden booths. The confessional box had arrived. Borromeo’s text on their design is to be found in a set of special instructions (
Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae
). The confessional was composed of a chair for the confessor and a kneeler for the penitent. The confessor was enclosed by wooden panels on three sides, but there was a door (or doors) left open into the body of the church, so that he would be on view to the faithful. The panel that divided the confessor from the penitent had a grille and a curtain. The primary significance of the design was to show the confessor in his guise as judge, with the penitent kneeling before him in an attitude of contrition and humility. The grille and the curtain emphasised ‘custody of the eyes’. Although confessor and penitent communicated at close quarters, they were not meant to see each other (although an attentive confessor would have known who was entering the confessional next, or recognised the voice). The Borromeo confessional would be adopted throughout Western Europe, although it was to take a period of more than two centuries to become the norm; the expense of the items required for the
box was an obstacle in the poorer parishes. Meanwhile, the habit of hearing confessions in the privacy of sacristies, the quarters of priests, and the cells of monks continued—although it was discouraged by diocesan bishops.
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Historians of ideas have pondered the significance of the confessional box as a symptom, or perhaps even a cause, of a shift in notions of the mind and self-consciousness at the dawning of the modern period.
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According to this view, John Locke’s description of the self as an ‘empty cabinet’ found its physical counterpart in the penitent’s location in a cubicle. Isolation in the dark prompts a heightened sense of interiority. The confessional box thus encourages an image of the soul as essentially disembodied. In the dark box, penitents searched their consciences—those innermost thoughts known only to themselves and to God—sharing secrets with His representative, mediator, and judge on earth: the confessor. The advent of the dark box arguably prompted a shift of emphasis: from preoccupation with moral precepts and laws to an examination of subjective intentions; from the public or social nature of sin to the scrupulous examination of recollected motivation. Hence the confessional box had its part to play in a further shift within Catholicism from a consequentialist morality to interiorised, ‘casuistic’ soul-searching.

The box was meant to bring an end to the scandal of sexual solicitation, yet cases of sexual abuse of women brought against confessors appeared to be on the increase even as the Borromeo confessional became more widely used. This increase may well have been due to improved reporting of
such incidents, especially in Spain. By 1561 Pope Pius IV had given permission to the Spanish Inquisition to prosecute the ‘crime’, as opposed to the ‘abuse’, of seducing women sexually in the confessional—
sollicitatio ad turpia
. But there was independent and general evidence that such sexual attacks were occurring despite, and perhaps even because of, the emergence of the dark box.

At a time when priests were being called to strict discipline in matters of chastity, celibacy, and sins of impurity, the new confessional apparatus was to become—for many confessors, it appears—a provocation to unchastity. Borromeo’s
Avertenze
clearly acknowledged as much, warning that a confessor could find his ‘soul stained after hearing the filth of others.’ The advice is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s satirical evocation in
Tale of a Tub
of the confessional box as a ‘whispering office’ for the purpose of ‘evomition’. It was widely recognised that within the privacy of the confessional booth, the whispered sins, especially of married women—and especially the details of the bedchamber, recounted under cross-examination—could inflame the imagination of a confessor, leading to ‘occasions of sin’ on his part. Cardinal Thomas Cajetan, Luther’s great antagonist, had warned confessors of the danger of probing too deeply into a penitent’s sexual life. They should employ modest euphemisms: ‘If . . . a woman confesses to having been known outside the natural vessel, this suffices; it should not be asked in what part of the body.’ The Borromeo box, for all its physical barriers, still allowed for whispered pillow talk in the dark: the penitent’s
voice and breath up close to the confessor’s ear. Many married women, suffering from domestic and marital frustrations, became addicted to the atmosphere of crepuscular intimacy. Confessors, for their own reasons and circumstances, were equally vulnerable. As the provost of Santa Fedele, a new Jesuit church in Milan, noted (arguing that the penitent should not face the grille full on, but sideways to it), there were distinct dangers in the circumstance of a ‘woman’s mouth being close to the confessor’s ear’.
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I
N THE CENTURIES FOLLOWING
the Council of Trent, a variety of ecclesiastical and secular tribunals across Europe, including episcopal chancellories, the Holy Office in Rome, and the Spanish Inquisition, sought to enforce Trent’s conciliar decrees. From Spain to France, Germany, and Italy, the surviving documentation provides an overview of the emotional and psychological dimensions of confessional practice even as bishops attempted to make confession a focus of regular Catholic practice and constrained clerics to new standards of discipline. In Spain, the scholarly work achieved by Professor Stephen Haliczer in the Archivo Histórico Nacional, especially in the Sección de Inquisición, is instructive. Haliczer, who presented his findings in
Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned
, published in 1996, offers an insight into the broad scope of the problem of sexual solicitation. His research involved thousands of cases in this most Catholic of
countries. The friars, or mendicant preaching orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians), were the greatest offenders. This is not surprising, given their licence to wander far and wide, largely free of episcopal jurisdiction. The friars had extensive access to convents of nuns, whose numbers in Spain increased from 25,000 in 1591 to 33,000 in 1747. Nuns, being obliged to make their confessions monthly, now had more frequent contact with confessors. Given the economic and familial pressures that sent many women reluctantly into the cloister, and given, moreover, the harsher rules of enclosure and asceticism laid down by the Council of Trent, it is not surprising that problems arose within the confessor-penitent relationship in religious communities of women. The Council of Trent had not only imposed virtual imprisonment on religious orders of women, but had also deprived them of sensory and imaginative stimuli. Even as Baroque music and painting flourished outside their walls, many communities were forbidden even to sing the Divine Office, or to display pictures and sculpture. From a twentieth-century perspective, it is clear that the dependency associated with transference in psychotherapy was common. It was customary for confessors to speak of penitent nuns as their ‘spiritual daughters’, and in one Venetian convent there was talk of ‘marriages’ taking place between friars and nuns. One Don Apollinario of Ravenna, giving witness to a tribunal, remembered how a Don Gregorio ‘was given a nun as his spiritual friend, and apparently gave her a ring and they carried out certain ceremonies.’
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In a book for confessors published in 1644, Alonso de Andrade in Spain warned his readers that nuns became obsessed with their confessors, so much so ‘that they neither thought nor spoke of anything else.’ By the same token, a predatory confessor could carry out his attempted and successful seductions on vulnerable women unobserved. Mary Laven’s study of nuns in Venice, where there were more than fifty convents during the early modern period, reveals the extent of the depravity of some convent chaplains even during the first flush of the Counter-Reformation. A contemporary commentator, Ippolito Capilupi, declared that one confessor-seducer existed ‘alone, like a great Turk in his Seraglio’. Giovanni Pietro Lion (later beheaded for his crimes) had spiritual charge of a convent of four hundred nuns on the Giudecca. Capilupi wrote: ‘When he confessed one of the nuns whom he liked, he would in the very act of confession try to draw her to his will with some pre-prepared speech, and by placing his hands upon her in order to excite the carnal appetite in her more readily; and if he found her at all opposed to his advances he would praise her greatly for her strength and constancy, and would seek to have her understand that he was moved to try her as a test of her goodness.’
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