The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  Attendance at confession, even annually, was subject to many adaptations and exceptions across Western Christendom, depending on local traditions, the prejudices and convictions of pastors and bishops, and the existence of religious houses. Complying with the new rule was hardest in rural parishes with a single pastor. The parish priest’s workload increased exponentially with the new decrees, especially during late Lent and Holy Week, since many parishioners left their sacramental duties to the last minute. Priests complained of having to hear as many as three hundred confessions in a single day, hardly an ideal circumstance for a good confession. The priest usually sat on a chair in the sanctuary, the penitent kneeling beside him or in front of him. There were unruly scenes when people refused to wait their turn, and there was a tendency among penitents to eavesdrop. Overwhelmed by the numbers attempting to avoid excommunication as Easter approached, some priests would simply give general absolution to the entire congregation without hearing their sins. The stipulation that the faithful should confess solely to their own parish priest proved problematic. The better-educated parishioners refused to be confessed by an ignorant local priest, preferring to go to a monastic confessor of good reputation. Many were reluctant to confess to a priest who was known to them within their tightknit community. In some villages parishioners refused to attend confession despite the levying of fines, the threat of imprisonment, and the risk of excommunication.5

  Confession as an instrument of enforced secular and spiritual regulation had by the early Middle Ages become a dominant feature of Western Christianity. In 1199, Innocent had established the tribunals of the Inquisition, which obliged those suspected of heresy to answer, under oath, every question put to them. Failure to take the oath indicated guilt. The period saw a decline, moreover, in trials by combat or ordeal in criminal cases, with greater faith placed in the efficacy of investigatory confessions (as opposed to sacramental ones) to reach a verdict of guilt or innocence. Under both secular and canon law (where heresy was involved), torture was allowed in order to extract confessions in quest of evidence.

  Within sacramental confession, confessors were being taught to quiz their penitents rather than simply listen. Confessional manuals reveal that priests in the medieval period were expected to cross-examine penitents in a forensic manner, especially where adultery, incest, and masturbation were suspected. Masturbation, the single greatest obsession of the confessional manuals, was judged a more serious sin than the abduction and rape of a virgin, or straightforward adultery with a married woman. The theory of its evils was based on the idea that sperm contained homunculi; to spill human seed was therefore tantamount to homicide. Male penitents who failed to admit to masturbating were to be relentlessly challenged.

  Jean Charlier de Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, writing in the early fifteenth century, counselled confessors to say to a penitent: ‘Friend, do you remember when you were young, about ten or twelve years old, your rod or virile member ever stood erect?’ And the confessor should pursue the matter, he advised, with further questions: ‘What did you do, therefore, so that it wouldn’t stand erect?’ Finally, the confessor might say: ‘Friend, didn’t you touch or rub your member the way boys usually do?’ It occurred, of course, to some insightful writers of the confessional summas that such officious questions might actually put ideas into the heads of penitents, leading them into sin. Yet the risks, according to other pastoral theologians, were worth taking to save all those who were hiding that vicious secret sin to their eternal damnation. One of the tricks of the trade, according to Gerson, was to affect a nonchalance when suggesting the dreaded sin of self-abuse, as if it were not sinful, in order to extract the confession, and only then to condemn that behaviour as abominable.6

  Handbooks for confessors proliferated, offering obsessional analysis on the hierarchies, divisions, and subdivisions of sins. Under the sin of lust, for example, the penitent was invited to ponder at which points on the rising scale of sinfulness they might have offended: from kissing and touching right through to the rape or abduction of a nun—a sin of fornication aggravated by sacrilege. The encouragement of this subtle inward scrutiny of faults prompted anxieties in penitents that they might make inadequate confessions, committing, in consequence, the dire sin of sacrilege. Epidemics of ‘scruples’ (obsessive anxiety over minor imperfections) broke out in some religious communities, particularly among younger religious. In his Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis has a tendency to both encourage and repudiate scrupulosity: ‘Often also a person is hindered by too great a solicitude for devotion, and by some anxiety or other about his confessions. . . . Do not abandon Holy Communion for every trifling perturbation[;] . . . spit out the poison quickly, and then make haste to take the antidote’. While many laypeople were finding it difficult to submit themselves to confession once a year, there were those in the religious life who, under the tyranny of scruples, a spiritual condition comparable to hypochondria in medicine, were resorting to the sacrament with morbid frequency. There were even moralists who declared that scrupulosity was a sin, thus leading the sensitive soul to a never-ending spiral of further scrupulosity.7

  Obedience and submission to authority were emphasised in the manuals of ascetical theology: ‘If one does not freely and gladly submit himself to his superior, it is a sign that his flesh is not yet perfectly under control; for it often rebels and murmurs’, wrote one. Or, again: ‘Never think you have made any progress, unless you esteem yourself inferior to all.’ The principle of the submission and obedience of the wife to the authority of her husband had parallels with obedience to superiors in the religious life. A husband was entitled, without sinning, to beat his wife in moderation, but she sinned if she attempted to correct or thwart him. A disobedient wife was guilty of mortal sin. Drawing parallels with the obedience owed by children towards their parents, submission to authority was obligatory in professional and public life even if one’s superiors were sinners. Hatred expressed towards a superior was deemed a mortal sin.8

  A CLERICAL CLASS OF SPECIALIST CONFESSORS, chaplains, and spiritual directors arose to care for communities of nuns and for every kind of guild, confraternity, and civic or military group. Chaucer’s Prioress, whom we can take as typical of her ecclesiastical type, travelled with three priests. Catherine of Siena in the fourteenth century was accompanied by a team of clerics, including the English Austin friar William Flete. Wealthy widows with pious tendencies would take on personal confessors whose authoritarian relationship was virtually equal to that of a husband. An example in the thirteenth century was Elizabeth Queen of Hungary and her confessor Conrad of Marburg, an enthusiastic inquisitor. Married at fourteen to Louis IV of Thuringia, Elizabeth bore three children, but her husband died of plague while away on crusade when she was twenty. Elizabeth devoted her life to building hospitals and caring for the poor. She was given to fasts, long prayer vigils, and bizarre self-mortifications, such as taking female lepers into her bed—believing them to be representatives of Jesus. Conrad, who confessed Elizabeth frequently, took control of her feats of asceticism, the length of her prayer marathons, the details of her abstinence, and the extent of her almsgiving. He dismissed her ladies-in-waiting and hired two severe women who would slap her face. He increased her natural tendency to engage in self-mortification, and even beat her himself on occasion. She seems to have emulated his example, as she once thrashed an old woman patient in her hospice for refusing to confess her sins. Elizabeth died at the age of twenty-four. Her corpse is said to have exuded an odour of sanctity, and a cult dedicated to her memory developed rapidly.9

  Preoccupation with the examination of conscience, with guilt, and with the need to confess was widespread in convents and monastic settings in the late Middle Ages, but the tendency also erupted into the streets and piazzas. The thirteenth century had seen the emergence of widespread associations of holy women, such as the Beguines of Germany and the Low Countries, who devoted their lives to prayer, almsgiving, and care of
the sick. Their spiritual lives centred on confession and dependence on their confessors. In time, many thousands of women would be identified with the movement. They were not members of religious orders, took no vows, and lived ‘in the world’. They reported supernatural visions and were said to have attained the higher realms of contemplative prayer. Many of their confessors became literary witnesses to their mystical states. James of Vitry’s Life of Mary of Oignies exemplifies the horror of their sense of even trivial sin, hence their desire to confess daily. ‘If it sometimes seemed to [Mary] that she had committed a little venial sin, she showed herself to the priest with such sorrow of heart, with such timidity and shame and with such contrition that she was often forced to shout like a woman giving birth from her intense anxiety of heart.’ Papal encouragement of the Beguine movement arguably aimed to create an antidote to heretical repudiation of the clergy and the efficacy of confession. Certainly the Beguines’ self-mortifications equalled anything performed by the Cathars. In a similar spirit, groups of flagellants would beat themselves while journeying across Europe, eventually in processions of thousands, preaching the need for acknowledgement of sin and repentance.10

  In the early fifteenth century, the so-called ‘Apostle of Italy’, Bernardino of Siena, travelled through the peninsula to call the faithful to confession, citing the sins of gambling, witchcraft, sodomy, and usury. Peripatetic confessors followed in his wake. Savonarola, the visionary preacher and prophet of doom, also called the faithful to confession. He wrote a manual for confessors, but was later found guilty of heresy. Eventually he was hanged and burnt at the stake in Florence.

  Yet by no means did all Catholics, or even all potential saints, conform to obligatory confession. An example was Catherine of Genoa in the late 1400s, who appears to have exerted unusual power over her confessor, Fra Marabotto. He was on hand for much of her life as a supporter and adviser, but he tells us that for a period of twenty-five years she did not confess her sins once. She thus blatantly broke the conciliar decree threatening excommunication for non-attendance. Marabotto was evidently anxious about this situation, but Catherine explained to him that she did not think that she had committed a sin during all that time and therefore saw no need to confess. Catherine’s story not only reveals the failure of the official church to control confession-going universally, but her capacity to make a distinction between canon law and personal conscience. She became famous for her tireless self-sacrifice, but her austerities and aptitude for self-harm were equally notorious. On one occasion, in a bid to show empathy for a patient in her hospital, and at the same time chastise herself for the sake of chastisement itself, she sucked the pus from a plague victim. Not surprisingly, she caught the plague herself, but she survived. Her treatise on Purgatory argued that it was not a terrible place, but one of longing for the face of God—consoled by the certainty that one would in time be united with Him.11

  The doctrine of Purgatory in the Latin tradition of Christianity was well established by the end of the twelfth century following a gradual genesis of half a millennium. Its basic tenets would continue through to the third millennium. The notion of Purgatory depended on belief in an intermediate afterlife occurring between death and resurrection on the Last Day. Those souls that could not attain immediate entrance into Heaven by virtue of a sinless life, yet did not deserve eternal punishment in Hell, were destined for a place where their ‘venial’, less grave sins were purged through suffering. The notion of ‘venial’ sins, and their contrast with ‘mortal’ sins, was confirmed and settled by the doctrine of Purgatory. During a person’s life on earth, according to the emerging doctrine, it was possible to mitigate due suffering in the afterlife through prayers, pilgrimage, indulgences, and financial payments. Meanwhile, the living could employ the same penitential means (as well as purchased Masses) to intercede for purgatorial reductions on behalf of the dead. Belief in Purgatory endowed the Church, and the papacy, in particular, not only with extra spiritual powers, but with significant additional revenues. Much of the money was pocketed by members of the mendicant preaching orders, who were enthusiastic proponents of the doctrine. Indulgences, sanctioned by Rome, were not equivalent to absolution, but with the appropriate payment they could relieve an absolved penitent of remaining time in Purgatory. The indulgences could also be assigned to the dead, although not to those in Hell. Many of the faithful were sceptical about the efficacy of indulgences, which were seen as a kind of spiritual protection racket.12

  THE LATE MIDDLE AGES saw the widespread spawning of criminal confessors. Chaucer, again, gives us an exemplar of the confessor-rascal. His Friar Huberd is a hypocrite who exploits his eloquence both to preach and to sexually seduce. Chaucer intimates that Huberd’s chief interests are making money and having sex. He has a lurid past, having married off a number of women he made pregnant. He sells his absolutions, persuading his victims that his ‘power of confession’ is greater than that of a parish priest. And the more money paid out, the more efficacious the forgiveness: ‘Instead of weeping and prayers, men should give silver to poor friars’, he says. He spends his money on trinkets, which he keeps in his cowl to give to ‘young wives’. Although a mendicant by vocation, he squanders money on fine vestments, rich food, and alcohol. The Friar has no time for the poor or the sick, preferring the company of traders and landowners. Chaucer makes it clear that he is not depicting all priests and confessors as corrupt. His Parson of a Town—‘First he wrought and then he taught’—reveals the Friar’s opposite. The Parson’s Tale is a homiletic ‘meditation’ on sin and the sacrament of confession, and significantly, it ends the telling of the tales.

  Criminality among confessors was widespread and entrenched by the fifteenth century, as the records of ecclesiastical courts abundantly testify. Take the case of confessor Alonso de Valdelomar, of Almodóvar del Campo in Spain, who was brought before the ecclesiastical tribunal of Alcalá de Henares for rape, consorting with prostitutes, and gambling. Like Chaucer’s friar, Fra Alonso had demanded money before hearing a confession, and he would withhold absolution if the sum fell below his expectations. He was also in the business of selling indulgences that ‘were no longer valid’. Here, in 1520, is Antonio de Pareja of Cienpozuelos, whose behaviour was typical of that cited by reformers during the rising tide of Protestantism. Father Pareja was in the habit of soliciting his women penitents for sex. He cohabited with one of them in his priest’s house, but threw her onto the street after she gave birth to his child. His accusers informed the tribunal that he had extorted money for celebrating Masses and had routinely broken the seal of confession. It emerged in witness statements that Pareja’s ‘evil and unscrupulous’ pastoral style had led to most of the parish neglecting not only confession but even Sunday Mass.13

  Take the case, in the same era, of the friars of San Bernardino at Chiari in the diocese of Brescia, Italy. The municipal leaders complained of the ‘improprieties’ the friars had committed while hearing the confessions of women in the privacy of their monastic cells. Then there was the priest of Gorgonzola who solicited sex from two female penitents at the same time. Or the charges against the parish priest of Limido, Father Geronimo Di Luciani: too lazy to hear confession, he would leave his parishioners unshriven even on their deathbeds. He was denounced to the local bishop for his gambling, cursing, and womanising.14

  A Jesuit priest, Father Giacomo Carvajal of Milan, who was commissioned to write a report on the state of confession in his diocese in the mid-sixteenth century, before the Counter-Reformation got under way, expostulated that the abuses and corruption in the practice of confession in previous eras were too many to enumerate. In some rural areas, confessions had been heard by clerics in minor orders, or even by laypeople. The form of the sacrament was frequently ignored. Priests gossiped about what they had been told in confession. Money changed hands, bad advice was given, and heretical teachings imparted.15

  At the dawn of the Reformation, however, there were other, more spiritual and theolo
gical objections to the sacrament arising from the spread of humanist thinking. Early in the reign of Henry VIII we learn, for example, of groups of earnest students who would meet at the White Horse tavern in Cambridge to argue about religion and discuss the ideas of Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch Christian humanist. Like many other students and scholars in Europe, especially in the Low Countries and in Germany, these Cambridge students were excited by the stirrings of dissent within the Church. They looked forward to the prospect of offering the Scriptures in the vernacular to the people, and they wanted to purge religion of the excesses of control, violence, and superstition, including relics, alleged miracles, chantry Masses (commissioned at a cost for the souls of specific individuals), idolatry, and the sale of indulgences. Their dissatisfaction with the doctrinal basis of confession was a central contention, in particular the insistence on the mediation of the priest. There were suggestions that confession was unscriptural, blasphemous even: that the priest was coming between the soul and God. Thomas Bilney, one of the Cambridge leading lights, declared that on reading Erasmus, he believed he had ‘met Jesus for the first time’.16

  Erasmus, who never abjured his Catholicism, had written in his Pietas Puerilis that confession was not an authentic sacrament but an artificial, legal construct of the Church. The form of the book is a conversation between two students, Gaspar and Erasmillus. Gaspar insists that there is no need for a priest, no need of absolution: sins are forgiven when the penitent makes a direct act of contrition to Jesus Christ. The text brings to life the dissident conversations of the time.17