WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR THE SACRAMENT OF PENANCE?

OLD THERAPISTS DON'T DIE...THEY ANALYZE RELIGIOUS LIFE
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Sometime this year I must decide whether to renew my mental health counseling license with the Florida Department of Health, or to change my status from active to retired. If I choose to continue holding an active license till the spring of 2029, when I will be 81, I will need to take 30 to 36 classroom hours in recent developments in the field of psychotherapy. Some of you may remember my posting last January [2025] about attending the state counselors’ convention. [If you are curious about the offerings at such a convention, here is the 2026 curriculum that I am not attending this year.]
 
I was disappointed in last year’s mental health event. Most of the presentations focused on a narrow range of clinical concerns, mostly post-trauma stress, and it was clear that the evolution of the insurance companies toward reimbursing only short-term treatment was impeding the work of most of the practitioners I met. [I went to the 2025 convention in part to learn how my practicing colleagues were treating transgender issues. There was no discussion about that.] When I closed my practice in 2014, United Health Care was requesting that I have my patients undergo a paper-and-pencil symptoms exam every six sessions to receive third-party reimbursement. When treating mood disorders like depression, my clinical concentration, I found that often a patient was feeling quite poorly around the sixth session, acknowledging for the first time plausible causes for their pain and recalling their roots. Also, many clinical antidepressants do not produce symptom reduction for four to six weeks. If Rome can’t be built in a day, it certainly can’t be rebuilt in a day, either. The same is true with human beings who [often courageously] bring a lifetime of pain into a counselor’s office. Or, for that matter, into the confessional.
 
CONFESSION AND COUNSELING
 
Reading James O’Toole’s For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America, and Irwin Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients, has prompted me to think of how much the confessor and the therapist can help each other, must help each other, in healing the pain, loss, and confusion that every one of us experiences when we have the courage to step out of the world for a time and taste the reality of God’s existence. Without this profound awakening within ourselves, evangelization will never get off the ground. In fact, it would be a dishonest venture.
 
O’Toole’s book on Confession concludes [p. 276] with his observation that “the older form no longer speaks to the great majority of Catholic laypeople; a new form is needed…church leaders and theologians neglect their duties if they do not begin the long work of articulating [a new form].” I agree, and there are several things we can do immediately to stop the hemorrhaging.
 
There are significant similarities between the challenges faced by confessors and mental health professionals. Some might argue that the sacrament heals the soul and the counselor heals the body and mind. But in truth how can one make that distinction? Medical research over the past century has isolated a variety of neurotransmitters in the brain that impact thought and behavior. Ironically, Church language itself depends heavily upon what we might call psychological strategies. For example, in confession we are instructed to put forth our sins with information about the number of offenses, our intentions in the act, and our contriteness. A competent confessor can gather an initial sense of the penitent’s spiritual status from the manner the information is offered up, although it must be remembered that the typical confessional encounter is extremely brief. In a perfect world, a confessor with the same penitent over time would gain better insights into the penitent’s life—and thus obtain information that would enable better spiritual counsel and appropriate penances. We will come back to that point.
 
Counselors and priests have different challenges, too. If a prospective mental health patient has health insurance with a major provider, he or she can go into the company portal on-line and shop for any or all mental health therapists in the region and, in a sense, create their “ideal counselor” by their instincts. United provided us providers with 24 areas of expertise to claim on our personal sites. Some therapists claimed all 24! I listed three: Mood Disorder, Couples Counseling, and Christian Counseling. A funny thing: several couples told me they came to my office because I was a Christian marriage counselor. “We figured that as a Christian; you’d try to keep us together.”
 
Counselors, using their clinical training, can ask many more in-depth questions than priests in the confessional. One obvious reason is time: a therapy session, historically, covers fifty minutes of encounter. Priests are often constrained by assigned times and/or waiting lines unless a penitent makes a special request to meet the priest outside of assigned confessional hours. As James O’Toole notes in For I Have Sinned, for over a century, probably back to the days of St. Alphonsus Liguori and St. John Vianney, Catholic moralists have debated how far a confessor can probe about personal conduct, most famously when birth control pills, considered mortally sinful artificial contraception, became available for general use in the 1960’s. There was considerable argument among priests whether to inquire of a married person whether the couple was using the pill. In my family’s parish years ago, it was general knowledge which priest asked, and which one[s] didn’t. Those priests who did ask feared that the penitent’s withholding the fact of artificial contraception usage rendered the sacrament invalid and would thus send the penitent to hell.
 
On the other hand, priests and penitents have the benefit of the seal of confession, which despite the efforts of some state legislatures [see Arizona], remains absolute in the Sacrament of Penance. Counselors, on the other hand, are bound to break confidentiality in several circumstances, varying from state to state, generally in cases of imminent or past harm to vulnerable persons. As a counselor I received periodic subpoena duces tecum summons, which means “show up in court with all your patient’s records.”   
 
REFORM OF THE PENITENTIAL SACRAMENT BEGINS HERE.
 
In the process of blogging, I receive and review all sorts of Church publications—diocesan websites, parish bulletins and fliers, religious order updates, and every kind of Catholic publication—from Substack to Vatican City.  I notice in my reading that there are many segments of Roman Catholicism talking about renewal and refilling the pews. The thing that troubles me is a subtle implication that the pews emptied because of the weakness or arrogance of those who left, that they were seduced by the culture, so to speak. Sort of a “come back and we’ll forgive you.”
 
Research does not support that. I wrote in an earlier post how my dad, then in his 70’s, who prayed the rosary daily and went to daily Mass, told me “I don’t get anything out of confession anymore. I only go because your mother makes me go.” He might have gone more enthusiastically if he knew in advance that he would receive Christ’s love and guidance through the piety and wisdom of a confessor who knew something of geriatric life and the particular crosses of my dad—watching children process through adult struggles, coping with physical pain and infirmities, carrying the trauma of a front-line medic for four years of World War II. 
 
Research indicates that the “nones,” those who have left membership in churches of all denominations, do not renounce spirituality, overall. The quote “I am religious, but I can’t deal with organized religion” comes up a lot. Many of my close friends from seminary days express such sentiments, and with good reason—there was little or no emphasis upon developing an internal spiritual life, strange as that may seem, in our seminary years. [Another post for another day.]
 
If Penance is to take its place as an integral rubric of Catholic life, its connection to Baptism—to what Baptism itself ultimately means—must be restored. In the present day, Penance is still held captive to the moral manuals—a juridical release from divine punishment—isolated from the broader experience of collective Church faith, the liturgical calendar, and most important of all, the tangible experience of God’s love. In psychological terms, confession is the admission of deeds without full context of the acts or the larger narrative of an individual’s personal faith and life.
 
By coincidence, next Sunday [January 10-11] is the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus. It is one of the episodes of Jesus’ life reported in detail by all four evangelists. Matthew’s Sunday Gospel text includes this:
 
After Jesus was baptized,
he came up from the water and behold,
the heavens were opened for him,
and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove
and coming upon him.
And a voice came from the heavens, saying,
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
 
Did Jesus need to be baptized, we asked our elementary school teachers seventy years ago. Matthew himself, in the same Sunday text, reports a debate between John the Baptist and Jesus about the propriety of John’s baptizing Jesus. Jesus replies,
 
“Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us
to fulfill all righteousness.”
 
Fitting for us. By John the Baptist’s ritual, the heavens were opened for Jesus, he beheld the Spirit of God and was acknowledged to be God’s pleasing Son. Was this baptism a prototype for all Christians? Given that the Apostles baptized 3000 on Pentecost, the “Birthday of the Church,” we are reminded of something so casually forgotten: the lives of each of us, and the collective life of all the baptized, pivots around baptism, when God affiliated each of us and all of us with an unimaginable love.
 
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR PENANCE?
 
I can only guess. I do have hopes along these lines, though.
 
Penance, in its present form, looks disjointed from the rest of church life. Think of the traditional confessional, which symbolizes the religious and psychological detachment of this sacrament from the liturgical stream of saving waters. Would it not make sense for each penitent to walk with the confessor to the baptismal font, where the penitent professes the Faith and is sprinkled with the baptismal waters of life as a fitting conclusion to the sacrament of forgiveness?
 
In theologizing about the Sacrament of Penance, the Church needs the input of psychology for multiple reasons. Psychology does not have the answers to all questions; it is not a substitute for religion. But if the goal of Penance is to bring people to their full baptismal identity, psychology has much to offer. Take the topic of human development. For example, most theories recognize a period of young adulthood wherein a human sorts out major decisions about purpose of life, such as career path, relationship bonding, coping with the unknown, and perhaps gender identity. Morally speaking, are we stuck in the Manualist Era of acts and punishments where one size fits all? Would a confessor do better to ask broader questions about the penitent’s present-day lifestyle vis-à-vis his or her identity with Jesus Christ through Baptism? Open ended questions, the therapist’s best friend, can lead to deeper and realistic discussions which in turn may awaken a greater hunger for God, or at least add grace to the search for identity.
 
It will be a half-century before the numbers of newly ordained clergy replace what we have lost in my lifetime, and we have no guarantee that such an ambitious hope is even possible. I know that bishops are worried about finances and staffing, but it is time now for a “plan B.” The Ritual of Penance contains a format for “general absolution.” That is, a biblical service whereby the celebrant extends absolution to a congregation without personal confession. The United States bishops have essentially buried this rite on the grounds that it is only to be used in an emergency. Personally, I think the bishops fear a “cheap grace” misuse of the rite to avoid the embarrassment of confessing directly to a priest. When did shame become an essential part of the rite of Penance?
 
All the same, the General Absolution rite does not provide for the personal direction every baptized person deserves, which leads me to comment on the practice of spiritual direction. In the last several decades I have observed a growth in training programs for spiritual directors, servicing mostly a lay student body of future directors. A few months ago, while on retreat, I requested a conference with a lay spiritual director on the staff. I spent at least 90 minutes with her as she sliced and diced my personal spiritual condition at that moment. Later I thought to myself that if every lay spiritual director were as competent as she, we would have a new energy with which to celebrate our common faith and serve the world. Is it possible?
 
I discovered that my neighbor to the north, the Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida, has a particularly useful site describing spiritual direction, a list of available directors, and an inventory of diocesan approved sites for training. This is indeed hopeful. The website states that spiritual direction is not psychological counseling. It would be my hope, however, that basic counseling principles from works such as Yalom’s cited above would be included in the curriculum. Teaching faith and sharing a faith walk require different shoes.
 
This concludes formal posts around the book For I Have Sinned. And I think I have sinned by neglecting other streams on the Café post. Come back soon! For my penance, I will now proof-read all 2308 words above.