Making My Way to Forgiveness--Part 2: Do We Need To Rethink the Rite?

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.…