The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  Yet the point of Catholic confession goes beyond absolution for wrongdoing. For many centuries confession has been deemed crucial for achieving holiness and Heaven. Of all Christian denominations, the Catholic Church has advocated the importance of confession as a means of salvation. Great saints, such as Teresa of Avila, have extolled confession’s benefits as a means of achieving mystical union with God.

  Spiritual writers within the sphere of the monotheistic religions emphasize the importance of the sinner making a decision for God: embarking on a conversion of life. The visible ritual of confession in the presence of a minister, however, makes such a conversion ‘sacramental’—an outward sign of inward grace, sanctioned by the Church. Despite the unhappiness of the Protestant reformers with the medieval conduct of the sacrament of penance, confession would nevertheless be practised in a restricted form by the Lutheran, Anglican, and Episcopalian churches (as well as the Eastern Churches). These denominations mostly administer the ritual in cases where a penitent seeks reconciliation, or spiritual consolation, in crisis, such as in illness or in the face of death. Unlike the Catholic Church, they do not oblige a member of their faithful to confess in the event of having committed a ‘serious’ sin, nor do they maintain rules of annual obligation to confess.

  Confession has merged with spiritual counselling across different Christian denominations, especially for people dedicated to a life in religion. In the Catholic tradition, moreover, the power of the priest to bestow absolution extends in cases of emergency to groups of believers, especially when the priest can offer spiritual consolation in time of peril. One of the heroes of the Titanic disaster was Father Thomas Beales, who had twice refused the opportunity to go into a lifeboat. He preferred to stay on the vessel, where he continued to lead prayers and absolve sins even as the ship went down. During the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, Father Mychal Judge was the first dead rescuer to be carried out. He was killed by falling masonry while hearing the confessions of the injured and dying. In time of war, moreover, Catholic chaplains have won praise for their courage in administering, at risk of their lives, absolution and last rites to the wounded and dying on the battlefields and at sea. There are countless instances of priests for whom confession is an occasion of compassion and inclusion. It has been revealed that Pope Francis, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, would go to the city’s red-light district at night to give spiritual comfort to prostitutes, sitting on a roadside bench.7

  And yet the Catholic history of confession is punctuated with evidence of a darker side. Confessors down the centuries, in the act of administering the sacrament, have been guilty of hypocrisy, avarice, sexual debauchery, and other forms of abuse. Theological disagreements over confession, as well as confessors’ sexual and mercenary abuses, were prime reasons for Protestant indignation at the Reformation. The confessional box, separating confessor and penitent physically and visually, was invented in the Catholic Counter-Reformation to prevent the seduction of women. Sexual abuses nevertheless persisted. The whispering of secrets, invariably involving the marriage bed, would lead to new forms of confessional seduction. By the eighteenth century, anticlericalism, owing in part to antagonism between husbands and their wives’ confessors, led to widespread neglect of the sacrament.

  Pius X, later canonised an official saint of the Church, extended universal and frequent confessional practice to young children, believing confession and Holy Communion to be means of bestowing spiritual sustenance and protection on them in the face of secularism, materialism, and a form of heresy he termed ‘Modernism’. The faithful responded: long lines of penitents, including young children now, were a feature of weekly confession-times in Catholic churches the world over. This was the Church familiar to Catholics from the First World War to the early 1970s, often referred to in nostalgic retrospect as a golden age of Catholicism. Catholic public and domestic religious practices increased—processions, pilgrimages, praying the Rosary, grace before and after meals, the Angelus, increased veneration of the pope. There was a surge in vocations to the priesthood—many candidates making their commitment, as I did, in boyhood.

  In preparation for first confession, children barely out of infancy were taught the doctrine of ‘mortal sin’, which killed the soul and resulted in eternal punishment. Every sin of thought, word, and deed against chastity, or ‘modesty’, was mortal. Religious instruction at an early stage of moral development laid foundations of beliefs that were more akin to superstition than to faith, closer to fear than to love of God. Adult disciplines such as fasting (from midnight on the day before receiving Holy Communion) were also imposed, often resulting in a child breaking the fast unintentionally. Children caught in this dilemma would go nevertheless to communion under social and familial pressures and suffer consequent guilt. They had been taught that receiving communion after breaking the fast was both a mortal sin and a sacrilege—compounded by a further sacrilege if the sin was not admitted in a subsequent confession.

  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.

  UNDERSTANDING 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

  ON THE DAY KNOWN AS ASH WEDNESDAY, 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 bes
mirched 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.

  The evolution of ritual was not without problems. There were early rigorist groups who insisted that lapsed Christians should never be allowed re-entry. Casuistic arguments arose, especially over the circumstances of sexual sin—a focus of obsessive anxiety among early Christians. The influential second-century writer Tertullian, a lawyer by profession and a keen disciplinarian by temperament, was convinced that sex even between married couples polluted both body and soul. Women, moreover, constituted a permanent provocation to chastity. He saw them as indeterminate human beings. They were, as he expressed it in his De Cultu Feminarum, the ‘Devil’s Gateway’, a breach in the citadel of the Church through which the secular world would enter to poison the chaste assemblies of male saints. Perpetual virginity in a woman was the highest virtue, in his view; even second marriage after widowhood was for him a kind of adultery. The delight of orgasm, he insisted, was shameful. ‘In that final release of pleasure, do we not sense a loss of our very souls?’ Tertullian argued that the principal sins—apostasy, idolatry, adultery, and homicide—were unforgivable, setting the scene not only for increasing exclusions from reconciliation, despite contrition, but debates about the extent and limits of adultery. So we find Bishop Cyprian of Carthage in 259 asking whether a consecrated virgin (a woman who had taken a vow of lifetime celibacy), guilty of a sin against chastity, was truly an adulteress, since she was not married. He concluded after much debate that she should suffer the same penalties as an authentic adulterer, as she had committed the sin against her spiritual spouse, Jesus Christ.5