|
When I received my first notice of For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America [2025] I knew I would like it. But I had no idea of how much I would be captivated by this objective analysis of why Catholics frequented the confessional box [or, more recently, the confessional room] for so many years and then, within a generation, discontinued the practice. The late priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley always maintained that the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reinforced the Church teaching that artificial birth control, notably “the pill,” was always mortally sinful, was the watershed moment when Catholics retreated from confession.
The author, James M. O’Toole, Ph.D., of Boston College, paints a broader landscape of the penitential tradition in the U.S. He acknowledges the stressful intersection of Catholic moral life with seismic social shifts after World War II, but his even-handed treatment of the sacrament gives us much better insight into the days when people waited for hours for their turn to confess. No matter how estranged a Catholic might become from either a devotional or moral life, or both, the confessional sacrament was there, lodged in the consciousness as a way of avoiding hell. Avoiding hell has always been a “big deal.” In concluding his masterful Medieval Christianity [2015, see my review] Kevin Madigan describes the attitudes of many Catholics in Europe on the eve [c. 1500] of the Reformation: “No matter how much one confessed, it was impossible to say if one was in a state of grace and justified in the eyes of God. Far from offering relief, the salvific instrumentalities of the late-medieval church could have encouraged hypersensitivity and doubt. In the end, what one group of Christians could feel as consolation, another could feel as anxiety-causing torment and, finally, un-Christian.” [Madigan, p. 435] When Catholics and their priests began settling en masse in the United States after 1800, they brought their fear of hell with them, though in a more resigned state of mind. O’Toole, in his opening chapters, makes a compelling argument that confession, unpleasant as it may be for many, then and today, brought certain spiritual satisfactions that carried an appeal to Catholic penitents. These are a few of the blessings experienced. For example, confession was an “affective experience of worship.” A Catholic might fall asleep during Mass, but in the confessional he or she, along with the confessor, was something of a concelebrant in the sense that the penitent’s faith, feelings, words, and history, were necessary for the completion of the sacrament. Take away the penitent, no sacrament. And, upon leaving the confessional, the penitent felt something. Often it might be simply relief, but at other times it might be a closeness to Jesus like receiving a worthy communion at Mass. In truth, both sacraments are encounters with Christ. [Incidentally, the penitential rite at Mass, with its absolution by the celebrant, forgives venial sins. In my adult life I have never heard that mentioned in a sermon or instruction. Mortal sin requires personal, verbal confession.] Another blessing: the confessional offered a meat-and-potatoes school of moral living in terms of understanding where the moral guardrails were. In the nineteenth century, when Catholic schools were rare and religious education hit or miss, moral teaching was conveyed by sermon or confession. Later, the churches in the United States offered aids such as pamphlets with examinations of conscience to be reviewed before entering the confessional, and eventually there were Catholic magazines such as Sign or Liguorian, the latter still publishing today, which offered moral instruction for examining the conscience before confession. It may come as a surprise that there were/are instructional publications for priests, too, notably Homiletic and Pastoral Review. [The preparation for and discussions of confessional practices by and for priests will be treated in a future post.] The best of confessors provide the most pointedly personal advice that a penitent with an open mind is likely to hear. One problem throughout the generations of confessions is time. Parishes today tend to schedule confessions in abbreviated time periods, such that several people are waiting in line as the penitent gets down to business in the box. In the 1800’s and into the twentieth a circuit-riding priest customarily heard confessions before the parish Sunday morning Mass. [Saturday evening Masses did not begin until the late 1960’s.] O’Toole relates a correspondence between an American priest and Roman officials in which he sought to move his 12 PM Mass to 1 PM because his lines for confession were so long; by Church Law the latest hour for a Sunday Mass was 12 PM. The author notes, correctly I am sure, that most priests simply did what they needed to do without asking. Confessional advice is probably ignored by some, but I have had experiences where, by the grace of God, I did respond with words that must have solved problems of longstanding. People would tell me years later, outside of confession. Of course, I struck out swinging more than once. To one penitent I suggested that a repeated sin might be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder—I hold a mental health degree—that might mitigate the extreme guilt. To my surprise the response was, “I don’t come in here for psycho b-------! I want absolution.” Pastorally speaking, the role of psychology in ministry has become part of the training of those in ministry since the 1950’s, though Catholicism lagged most other Christian churches. The author devotes a lengthy Chapter 6 to the relationship of psychology to church ministry, including the confessional on such matters as scrupulosity; he does make reference to the slow integration of psychological testing into seminary screening and its relevance to the revelations of child abuse, which had serious repercussions for the confessional ministry. I was fortunate to find an on-line copy of the approved Roman Rite of Penance, for those confessing one-on-one to a priest. Vatican II’s mandate to reform all seven sacraments took about a decade. This rite was promulgated in 1974, the same year I was ordained. When I read the new rite for the first time, I said to myself, “This is never going to play.” Take a minute and look at it yourselves, and ask yourself, “How long will confession take with this formula?” It is possible your parish may use the new rite of 1974 and has figured this out. I hope so, but I suspect we are still mostly using the “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned” format. That said, the new rite—the one we still don’t use regularly—was and is much closer to the other six sacraments in its proclamation of Scripture and its reinforcement of priests providing spiritual counsel toward conversion and growth in spiritual consciousness. We assumed--wrongly, perhaps—that people stopped going to confession because they were lazy, embarrassed, or quit believing in sin, or the devil, or the teaching authority of the Church. But forty years ago, my own father gave me a different window on the exodus. I took my parents up to Canada to fish one summer, and as all true fishermen, we sat up late and put a big dent into a bottle of Canadian Club. It was then that the conversation turned to church matters, and I simply remarked that “you don’t see as many people in the confessional these days.” Now my father practiced his faith to the hilt. Daily Mass, confession twice a month, and evening rosary; in fact, my parents offered the fifth decade of the rosary every night for Franklin Roosevelt, the father of Social Security. In response to my observation about confession, my father said, “You know, if your mother didn’t make me go, I don’t think I would.” “Really?” “I don’t get anything out of it.” A remarkable admission from a man who was later buried with the worn rosary “that got me through World War II.” I had to side with my dad’s reasoning on that one, privately, and here is why he was on target. From the time of the Reformation [1500’s] the Catholic Church has generally embraced an approach to moral theology in a highly systematic and methodized nature. Over the years sins in all their degrees and kinds were [and still are] categorized in a similar fashion to civil law. This approach is referred to as ‘casuist” [or case oriented] or manualist, after the legal books which sliced and diced morality with all the warmth of a tax code. Priests formed in this universe of morality would devote much attention to crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s regarding the kinds and numbers of confessed sins before administering absolution. Not for nothing was this movement referred to as “casuistry” [or case law], or the “Manualist Era.” Seminarians were expected to study the manuals [in Latin, I might add] until an English edition appeared in the 1960’s. But from about 1700 onward there was a reaction away from an overly strict pastoral practice of confession, led by St. Alphonsus of Ligouri, founder of the Redemptorist Order. Of Ligouri, Wikipedia says: Liguori's greatest contribution to the Catholic Church was in the area of moral theology. His masterpiece was The Moral Theology (1748), which was approved by the Pope himself and was born of Liguori's pastoral experience, his ability to respond to the practical questions posed by the faithful and his contact with their everyday problems. He opposed sterile legalism and strict rigorism. According to him, those were paths closed to the Gospel because "such rigour has never been taught nor practiced by the Church". His system of moral theology is noted for its prudence, avoiding both laxism and excessive rigour. Couple Ligouri’s pastoral outlook with the new devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and later the apparitions of Mary at Lourdes and elsewhere, and you have a Catholic population sorry for sin but hungry for sacramental input, the merciful outreach and spiritual counsel that went far beyond avoiding hell. As I have now reached my father’s age, I am coming to appreciate the wide range of crosses, griefs, losses, memories, etc. of seniors, and the spiritual help I need to craft a penitential yet hopeful spirituality as I approach my death. I don’t know if my dad found a confessor to personally support his spiritual quests as he deserved. I know he worried about all five of us kids regardless of age, as any good father would; he saw the worst of World War II as a front line medic from Africa to Germany; he worked much of his career with the high pressure that comes as a hospital administrator; he was one of fourteen children born and raised in the coal region of Appalachia. I hope somewhere along the line a confessor took the time to comfort him with words from the Bible itself, as the new rite encouraged, Come to Me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your soul.…
0 Comments
I completed a reading of this year’s [2025] release, For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America just a week ago, and at this juncture I would put it near the top of the books I have reviewed this year. To tell you the truth, with my concentration in grad school theology, twenty years as a priest confessor, and a quarter century as a psychotherapist, I still learned much from this work about the developments [plural] of the sacrament of Penance and the concerns of bishops and priests about confessional experience over the centuries. I need to add here that any Catholic reader of this book may feel naturally more inclined to reflect upon Jesus’ Resurrection appearance to the Apostles in John 20:23, Easter Sunday evening, in the light of this book. As the Gospel writer records,
[Jesus] said to them again “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” NABRE Translation.] Penance is a big deal. Jesus equated it with the reception of the Holy Spirit! Let’s talk about it. FROM THE BEGINNING James M. O’Toole’s For I Have Sinned provides an intense examination of the post-Reformation [roughly 1600-present day] theology and pastoral practice of the Sacrament of Penance. Much of the book covers confessional practice in our lifetimes, including the pre and post Vatican II rites of Confession. The author’s treatment of the radical decline in confessions is addressed in distressing detail. He does not lay out a “master plan” for filling those confessionals again, but he is for the most part on target with his critiques. The Church needs a top to bottom evaluation of how we celebrate [or, more appropriately, don’t celebrate] the rites of forgiveness, because there is a massive gulf between the Sacred Scriptures’ revelation of mercy and our current-day practice of confession. It makes sense, then, to go back to the roots of the Christian Era and see what our evangelists and the other leaders of the earliest days to celebrate redemption from sin with the glory of the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself was Jewish and never “converted” to anything else. Rather, as a descendent of Abraham, as St. Matthew’s Gospel records, Jesus saw himself as the son of the Father, come to fulfill the entire Hebrew Scripture of promise of the reign of God. As a devout Jew, Jesus would have embraced the ethical conduct of the Chosen People delivered to Moses as it was understood and enforced in Jesus’ day. Some precepts of the Law came to be perceived as too harsh; executing homosexuals or wayward daughters by their fathers were not enforced in Jesus’ time though they still appear in your home Bible [see Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.] Jesus certainly had difficulty with misuses of the Law, which led many who heard him to identify him with the classical prophets, such as Isaiah, Amos, Ezechiel, etc. For Jesus preached that contemporary law and worship were missing conversion of the heart, and by example he taught that the law of love superseded an inflexible and unreasonable interpretation of law. Jesus performed healings on the Sabbath, ate and drank with unclean sinners, and evangelized among Samaritans and Romans with the blessing of his Father. For our purposes here, it is Jesus’ extension of the Father’s saving mercy and forgiveness that underlies what time and tradition would evolve into the Catholic institutional/liturgical sacrament of mercy. Jesus was no antinomian; he publicly upheld the Ten Commandments, and in many of his cures and personal encounters he gave a serious but encouraging charge to “sin no more” or “avoid this sin.” His perfect love of his Father’s truth made him an evangelist of the heart. “Purity of heart” underwrote his mission upon earth. It is hard to understand Jesus without his passion for justice and “love thy neighbor as thyself.” It should be no surprise, then, that the first New Testament pen put to parchment, St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, would in large part address the lifestyle of new baptized Christian communities in terms of how they loved one another. The Gospels, for their part, were written later than the Epistles, roughly 70-100 A.D., but they, too, exalt a morality that calls for an imitation of the Father’s love between Christians, coupled with an apocalyptic expectation that when the kingdom of God reveals itself at the end of time, those who have lived an imitation of Christ’s love and fidelity to God’s law will find their place in a chosen seat of honor at the eternal banquet. By 100 A.D. we can safely say that the “forgiveness sacrament” was Baptism, received once in a lifetime. Given that there were no “second baptisms,” some potential converts elected to wait until their deathbeds to receive baptism and admission to the Kingdom, a risky choice then as today. Christians identified post-baptismal “grave sins” as adultery, apostacy, and murder. Over the years the early Christians appear to have followed a variety of rites or gestures to restore unity among themselves and make reparations for minor offenses, including fasting, giving alms, and prayer. THE LAST PLANK It became clear, as the Church expanded in numbers, that some kind of post-Baptismal moral/liturgical rite was necessary, i.e., a second chance for salvation for those baptized persons who had gravely sinned at some point in their lives after their baptism. Theologically speaking, this was a major step forward for the Christian Church: a new sacrament with the same saving effects as Baptism. In a real sense, the concept of repeatable forgiveness bestowed by an ordained minister dates to the second and third centuries, but only in rare cases cited above. It should be noted, though, that most baptized Christians never experienced this second rite of conversion, as most were not guilty of adultery, apostacy, or murder. The reason these three sins received so much attention then was their destructive influence upon a small community of believers centered around the Eucharist. The gravity of apostacy is particularly understandable in an age of periodic Roman persecutions. An apostate denied membership in a Christian community while his or her fellow Christians were tortured and martyred. There was no way an apostate was going to return to the local church without passing through a rite that literally began from the beginning. A serious sinner would seek the bishop, confess his sins, and then if the bishop judged him sincere, he could enter a lengthy period of penance—minimally a year, sometimes several years. What the local church was looking for was evidence that the sinner grieved his past and embraced a turn toward austerity and charity—sitting by public buildings collecting alms for the poor, etc. At an appropriate time, the bishop would receive the sinner back into full communion with the Church through the laying on of hands to forgive the sin[s], often on Holy Thursday so that the forgiven member could participate in the Easter Eucharist. The above-described rite of forgiveness could not be repeated. The unfortunate individual who sinned gravely after the above-described rite was consigned to the judgment of God, period. Not for nothing was this protracted rite of conversion and forgiveness nicknamed “the last plank.” THEY DID IT DIFFERENTLY ON THE EMERALD ISLE Anyone who took history in high school has at least some idea of the “barbarian invasions” and the “dark ages” as the Western Roman Empire collapsed during the first millennium. There was one site, however, where the thought and practice about sin and ritual forgiveness made enormous strides—and where “confession” as we know it today began to take form. If you have ever visited the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland, you may have noticed that its next-door neighbor is a pub called “The Confession Box. “Neither structure was standing in the fifth century when an intrepid missionary named Patrick set foot on the island of Ireland in the late 400’s A.D. In the early days of the Irish mission, the goal of Christian missionaries who followed Patrick was quite basic: baptize and preach peace to the warlike Celtic tribes. This mission must have been successful, for within a century or two there were enough baptized Christians to begin the establishment of numerous monasteries and thus an extraordinary period of devotion, charitable service, and the healing of sinful acts. Ireland had no cities; the monastery was the bulwark around which the development and the governance of society. It is in this milieu that the monks were inspired—incrementally—to make the single greatest theological and liturgical change in the history of what we know today as the Sacramental Penance. The change was not sudden; in fact, its gradual development reveals it to be a response to the penitential needs of all the baptized as the Irish Church intensified its evangelization. The beginnings of the change were utterly simple. It should not surprise anyone that, in a typical monk’s day, the community gathered for readings and psalms at least six times per day, exclusive of the Eucharist. The final prayer of the day, sung before retiring, is “Compline.” It seems that in the earliest days of monasteries St. Benedict in Italy included in his universal monastic rule a provision that the day’s prayer include an examination of conscience, a public confession of the day’s faults by each monk, and an acknowledgement/blessing from the abbot. But the Irish gradually expanded the scope of this chapter of faults/penance rite because of two insights. First, Irish society, being tribal, looked to the guidance of a wiseman, a brehon, as a personal and community source of wisdom and order. As Irish priest-monks expanded their pastoral work into the countryside, converts began to view the priest in a brehon-esque sort of way, as a guide to a more wholesome life. Beyond that, Irish Christian thinkers came to agree that sacramental Penance was not reserved for grave sins but belonged at the heart of every believer. This indeed was a radical step; Ireland went out on a limb by initiating repeated confession and absolution, a change we take for granted in 2025 although few take advantage of it today. To ensure that multiple confessions and absolutions helped the Irish Christian to grow in Christ, the penitent--monks, and then laypersons-- were instructed to confess all sins and failures since the last confession. Curiously, the Irish moralists did not depend upon the Ten Commandments as the root of moral principles, as we might expect, but rather, the seven deadly sins. Of course, no one had faced the challenge of establishing pastoral/moral guidelines for a full multitude of sins before, except the adultery-apostacy-murder triad on the continent. The more I think about that, there is considerable wisdom in the Irish approach to the examination of conscience in terms of the seven deadly sins: the seven deadly sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. [You knew that already, I’m sure.] Using these seven categories of sinfulness, a confessor was able to function something like a modern therapist in getting to the heart of the penitent’s moral challenges, using open-ended questions on each category of behavior. Also, there is the “brehon” element, the confessor on journey with each penitent toward a stronger faith and deeper holiness. Commentators on this era of Irish history note the balance in the penitential process. On the one hand, the penitent is called to do appropriate penance [acts] for confessed sins depending upon the nature of the acts and the attitude of the penitent. On the other hand, the penance is geared, depending upon the sin[s], toward the specific sinful opposite. The goal of the sacrament of forgiveness is precisely to turn sinful attitude into a saving grace in the following of Jesus Christ. [Can this be accomplished in our 2025 method of hearing confessions? A good question, which will be pursued in the next posts on the subject. Stay tuned.] The Irish Church took great pains to identify sin and the appropriate “penance” or follow-up, which led to a series of guides for priests to use in their encounters with penitents. Many of these “Irish Penitentiaries,” as the books came to be called, have survived to this day. A useful source if you are interested is The Irish Penitentials [1995] by Hugh Connelly. I reviewed this work twenty years ago and I admit, I didn’t get everything right back then. |
MORALITYArchives
December 2025
|
RSS Feed