The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (3 page)

Moreover, priests now had access to children on a weekly basis in the unsupervised intimacy of the confessional box. Many priests, because of the enclosed seminary education, lacked maturity as well as training in child psychology and pedagogy. In time, child victims of oppression would themselves become priests.

From the 1950s, and with gathering momentum during the period of the ‘sexual revolution’, a significant minority of priests was taking advantage of the intimacy of the confessional to groom young penitents for acts of sexual abuse. Current investigations reveal that priests were exploiting confession to test the vulnerability of children for sexual exploitation and to establish opportunities for abuse outside of the confessional. At the same time, the abusers would exploit confession to square their own offences with their pastoral lives. Priests who have served prison sentences for sexual crimes admit that they would seek out confessors to secure absolution while concealing the ages of their ‘sexual partners’ and their own priestly identities.
⁸
Lay Catholics have been
angered by the knowledge that prelates right up to the Vatican have harboured or turned a blind eye to sexual deviants.

By the strict standards of papal teaching on sexual morals, Catholics who practise contraception, or who are living together outside of marriage, or who are practising homosexuals, are in grave sin. John Paul II insisted that the use of condoms, even by those infected by HIV/AIDS, is a sin. He also declared that grave sins can only be forgiven in confession. Yet the majority of practising Catholics go to confession rarely, if at all. In Europe the statisticians of Catholic practice have ceased to make enquiries about the reception of confession in their questionnaires. In the United States, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) estimates that only 2 per cent of Catholics go to confession regularly. Anecdotal evidence for Ireland and the United Kingdom, as well as correspondents writing to me from Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, suggests a massive collapse.
⁹

The sense of sin taught to generations of Catholic children as an offence against God’s rules barely survives alongside a virtual denial of sin. A recent convert informant, typical of many who were brought into the Church by traditionalist priests, tells me that she has been taught that missing Mass is a serious sin—a mortal sin, in fact, requiring absolution before receiving the Eucharist. In contrast, a pastor in his seventies, ‘liberated’ by the Second Vatican Council, tells me that he never speaks of sin: ‘We have encouraged teenagers in our local Catholic school to see confession as an opportunity
to talk about their
experience
of life, and their
difficulties
.’ The occasional, and temporary, popularity of confession among groups of teenagers is clearly visible at World Youth Days when the young queue in the hundreds to be confessed. But there is no evidence that these teenagers continue to go to confession back at home, or that their sense of sin bears any relation to official Catholic teaching, especially on sexual matters.

U
NDERSTANDING HOW CONFESSION
has shaped Catholicism through the past century merits a rehearsal of confession’s historical development, which forms the first part of this book. Confession in private to a priest (auricular confession) of minor as well as major sins (venial and mortal) evolved only gradually, and late in the first millennium, in remote monastic communities that had survived the barbarian invasions and the breakdown of civil society. Individual confession as we know it today grew out of one-on-one spiritual direction in religious communities. It was not until the thirteenth century that Rome commanded all members of the faithful to confess to a priest at least once a year under pain of excommunication, eternal damnation, and loss of the right to be buried in consecrated ground. The obligation to confess, imposed by Pope Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, was as much a tactic in the war against heresy (an opportunity to question penitents on their orthodoxy) as a desire to call the faithful to greater holiness.

The practice of confession from the late medieval and early modern periods was to exert a potent influence on the development of Western ethics, law, and perceptions of the self. Confession gradually replaced trial by ordeal; and yet, in cases of suspected heresy, the Inquisition thought it legitimate to extort confessions (not the sacrament, but ‘criminal’ confessions) by torture. Catholic moral theology’s obsessive interest in what happens between the bed-sheets helped shape our modern understanding of the language of the body and sexual behaviour. Ideas about the examination of conscience, and preoccupation with sins of thought and imagination, encouraged a deepening sense of subjectivity and individual moral agency. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, believers died gruesome deaths—on both sides of the Reformation divide—for the right to practise confession or to refuse it.

The frequent confessions practised by my generation, and the generations of my parents and grandparents, nurtured an identifiable literary subgenre that extended from Paul Claudel and James Joyce through writers such as Georges Bernanos, Evelyn Waugh, Edna O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, and Colm Tóibín. Authors who were Catholic converts, such as Graham Greene, tended to exploit the drama of confession for the adult soul in peril. Others, including Frank O’Connor and Roddy Doyle, have expressed the comic potential of the confessional’s dark box. For the poet Carol Ann Duffy, however, who recollected the confessions of her childhood, the confessional box was a ‘dark cell’ with suggestions of live burial, where a child would ‘stammer’ in fear of ‘eternal
damnation’. Sins were ‘those maggoty things / that wriggle in the soul’. For another poet, the late Christopher Logue, the confessional booth was ‘a dark, smelly, wooden crate of a place’ where one retailed one’s ‘so-called sins to a hairy ear’. Logue complains: ‘Proscription rather than examination, the cultivation of guilt, the awarding of punishment and blame—was cruel, abusive, even—if you countenance the thought—sinful in itself.’
¹⁰

Logue declared that the universal practice of confession for young children was a form of psychological and emotional abuse. Moreover, the lowered age of confession from thirteen to seven would coincide with the age group of the young most affected by sexual abuse.
¹¹
Pius X’s initiative resulted in the frequent exposure of Catholic children to priests who had been removed from the normal, familial company of children for many years. It is significant that the rise in sexual attacks, from the late 1950s through the 1980s, coincided not only with the explosion of sexual permissiveness but also with the tendency for priests to hear confessions outside of the confessional box—in sacristies, parish rooms, and priests’ quarters. Informants have spoken of confessions held in priests’ bedrooms, on retreats, and in cars, and of being invited, at the age of seven or eight, to be confessed on a priest’s lap.

Understanding the current crises in the Catholic Church, and its fate and its future, involves an appreciation of the chequered history of the powerful instrument of confession and the absolution of sins as seen by the laity, rather than through the doctrinal lens of theologians, or the pastoral
perspective of priests, bishops, and popes. St. Augustine of Hippo believed that the authenticity of Christianity ultimately depended on the reception of its beliefs and practices by the faithful at large and the ‘echo’ it gave back to official doctrine. The Catholic faithful, en masse, have sent a definitive signal of dissent to the purveyors of ‘official’ doctrine on confession and the nature of sin.

PART ONE

A BRIEF HISTORY
of
CONFESSION

One

Early Penitents and Their Penances

Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!

—Psalm 51

O
N THE DAY KNOWN AS
A
SH
W
EDNESDAY, MANY
Christians the world over sport a dark smudge on their foreheads in the shape of a cross. They are marking the beginning of the penitential season of Lent with a public display that harks back to the remote origins of the sacrament of penance. That morning they have received on the brow in memory of the crucifixion a sign in ash made from burnt palm leaves and olive oil, to the accompaniment of the words ‘Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you will return!’
¹
But there is an earlier tradition of marking the head with
ashes that has its origins in Jewish and Christian rituals for the reconciliation of sinners.

The Hebrew prophets and poets dwelt on guilt, individually and collectively. ‘My sin’, wrote the Psalmist, ‘is always before me.’ And, ‘I eat ashes like bread, and mingle tears with my drink.’ Ritualistic contrition had antecedents in the Jewish Day of Atonement, involving a day and night of fasting. The tradition developed over many centuries and was originally a means of making reparation for mistakes and incorrect rituals in temple sacrifices. We read in Jonah how the Ninevites averted God’s anger by wearing sackcloth and ashes and engaging in fasting and prayer. In time, the Day of Atonement, practised widely in synagogues in the absence of the Temple (after 70 CE), encouraged reconciliation with those whom one had wronged as well as sorrow for offending God. In the Jewish tradition, while sins against God could only be forgiven by God, sins against one’s neighbour had to be forgiven both by that neighbour and by God. Repentance, according to the Sages, brought about acquittal and purity, allowing men and women to come close to God. The central meaning of atonement was this ‘at-one-ment’.
²

In the course of Jesus’s ministry, we find him expressing a purer Hebrew prophetic tradition which required a change of heart rather than an external ritual. He said of Mary Magdalene: ‘Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.’ Critics who question the Scriptural origins of the Catholic sacrament of penance cite several examples—the woman taken in adultery, the prodigal son, the penitent
thief, Peter’s forgiveness for his denial of Christ—demonstrating the absence of an external agent, a priest or confessor, serving as mediator. James and John spoke of the need for all Christians to tell each other their sins.
³

The principal rite of absolution of sins in the early Church was baptism, which was bestowed on adult converts. Baptism washed away the original sin of Adam and Eve. Atonement for sin had been achieved once and for all with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and was now completed for each individual in the waters of baptism. Nor was candidacy for baptism made easy. Catechumens—those preparing for Christian membership—were obliged to submit to long periods of prayer and austerity, and even to call on the services of official exorcists to cast out their demons.

Yet as the primitive Church grew and expanded, and members of the faithful fell by the wayside, rituals of reconciliation emerged as once-in-a-lifetime events. Christians often found themselves under threat and in a minority, fearful for their livelihoods and very lives. Those who committed serious crimes were a threat to the community. Christians were convinced, moreover, that Judgement Day would come sooner rather than later. Sinners stood in imminent danger of eternal damnation. In the early era of the Church, members of the faithful who had been excluded for grave sins were readmitted only after the completion of a series of painful public ceremonies.

The way back was harsh, melodramatic, and communal. Barefoot penitents—garbed in sackcloth, heads shaven,
faces and skulls besmirched with filth—were summoned to approach the altar and the assembly’s bishop at the beginning of Lent. After the congregation had chanted lengthy petitions to the saints, the penitents rose to confess their sins out loud: principally adultery, violence, and idolatry. In one ceremony the clergy and the laity cried out ‘
Indulgentia
’ (Mercy), ‘Release us from our misery!’ ‘Help all penitents!’ St. Jerome wrote, of a widowed Roman penitent accused of adultery, ‘The bishop, the priests, and the people wept with her. Her hair dishevelled, her face pale, her hands dirty, her head covered in ashes, she beat her naked breast and face with which she had seduced her second husband. She revealed to all her wounds, and Rome, in tears, contemplated the scars on her emaciated body.’
⁴
The readmission of penitents to the assembly, in many cases dependent on the communal decision of the congregation, traditionally took place on Maundy Thursday of Holy Week.