"For I Have Sinned" [2025] by James M. O'Toole, Ph.D.

This is a satisfying work: timely researched [2025] and unbiased reporting on the rise and fall of the practice of sacramental Penance in the United States. “For I Have Sinned” is a straightforward narrative of confessional practice in America dating from the founding of this nation. By setting clear boundaries on time and place, the author can credibly focus on the specifics of American confessional practice, the variety of pastoral approaches of priests in the confessional, and the motivations of penitents for confessing. The author, James M. O’Toole, Ph.D., provides a brief summary of penitential practice through the ages, a subtle way of suggesting that if confession isn’t “working” for many Catholics, the rite and its underlying spirituality is not beyond redemption, though the author puts forth no specific blueprint for such renewal, given that the Church as a whole has not addressed the confessional exodus except to blame it on modernism.
 
Catholics did not come to American shores in significant numbers until the nineteenth century, some to growing cities but many to the wide expanse of the Midwest. To be sure, they brought the fear of hell and European existential angsts of damnation with them—thanks in no little part to the Jansenist heresy—but having settled in ethnic pockets from the Alleghanies to the Rockies, frequent confession was rarely available, if at all. In truth, Mass itself was infrequent in most locales, and the arriving priest on Sunday would begin hearing confessions virtually after dawn, giving everyone assembled a chance to confess individually before the noon Mass and receive Holy Communion.
 
Chapter Two examines the grassroots American understanding of sin fostered by sermons, Catholic magazines for faithful laity, and journals for priests, such as Homiletic and Pastoral Review, which continues to publish to this day. With the establishment of Catholic seminaries beginning in 1791, Catholic moral thinking was steered to a large degree toward the form and content of personal confession; what, precisely, were God’s laws as defined by the Church, and how did a priest determine the seriousness of the penitent’s testimony of remorse. Confessors labored to do justice to the dictates of the Baltimore Catechism of the 1880’s, where each penitent was expected to render, to the best of one’s memory, every mortal sin in number and species; popular prudence strongly recommended confessing venial sins as well.
 
Prior to the twentieth century the emphasis upon exactitude of confession and absolution fit the times in a very practical sense; priests were hearing many more confessions, particularly in the larger cities. The author found significant documentation in the notes and memoirs of priests around the turn of the twentieth century who tallied their confessions [some bishops asked]. It was not unheard of that a parish priest might hear more than one-hundred confessions in a day, particularly around the feasts of Christmas and the Triduum. Clearly there was little time for elongated advice regarding a particular vice or spiritual direction. In complicated moral cases, priests referred to the volumes of canons which catalogued and interpreted sin. The time between the Reformation and the Council Vatican II [1962-1965] is popularly referred to as “The Manualist Era” in treatments on morality.
 
One of the most valuable chapters of this work is the sixth, “Psychology.” Catholicism, for the most part, initially took a dim view of Sigmund Freud; Bishop Fulton Sheen railed against the early psychoanalytic movement. But as the “talking cure” evolved through the twentieth century, there were pioneer Catholic priests—notably, Father Thomas Verner Moore [1887-1969]—who began exploration of a condition that attracted the attention of many parish priests on the front line—scrupulosity, or a compulsive fear of forgetting a sin or how often it was committed. O’Toole records the growing trend toward elementary clinical awareness in seminaries beginning in the mid to late 1960’s, and soon it was generally expected that priests bring at least a rudimentary healing approach to the Sacrament of Penance. There is also a captivating treatment of the use of psychological testing of seminarians themselves prior to admission to Holy Orders.
 
Chapter Seven, “Collapse,” is an overview of the Vatican II era [1965--] and efforts—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to hurriedly implement Biblical and ritual reform of the seven sacraments. Those of us who lived through that era will find in the author’s even-handed assessment a probable taste of how future historians will assess those times, which continue to this day. The decline—better described as a crash—in the numbers of confessions has never been critically treated, that I am aware of, aside from the search for a “smoking gun.” O’Toole states for the record that he does not believe the papal teaching, “Humanae Vitae” ]1968] which prohibited artificial birth control, single handedly brought down the confessional. But he does see a shift toward more autonomous moral thinking [p. 226ff] and the end of the Manualist Era. He adds a practical piece of the confessional puzzle; when most U.S. Bishops gave permission for Saturday vigil Masses, they inadvertently put an end, for all practical purposes, to the long-standing parish practice of Saturday afternoon and evening confessions.
 
Concurrent with the previous chapter, Chapter Eight, “Revelations,” explores the Sacrament of Penance vis-à-vis the recent awareness of clerical sexual abuse. In one sense this chapter is a continuation of Chapter 8, affirming that Catholics were right to turn to their own consciences for moral judgment before God without a clerical intermediary. The author clearly regrets that face-to-face confession and “confessional rooms” made grooming and sexual advances easier for predatory priests.
 
O’Toole does not project into the future, but he is clear about where we are today. His Chapter 6, “Psychology,” suggests that as a Church we may wish to examine the possibilities of integrating human insight with Biblical/spiritual insight and a rite of both affirmation and challenge. The contemporary rise in the number of Catholics seeking spiritual small groups and directors cannot be overlooked in gazing into the penitential/sacramental future.