The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  The code constrained not only the clergy but also the laity through a series of decrees and regulations aimed at undermining intellectual freedom and curbing peer-group ecumenical discussion: ‘Catholics are to avoid disputations or conferences about matters of faith with non-Catholics, especially in public, unless the Holy See, or in case of emergency the [the bishop of the] place, has given permission.’ Judgements concerning theological orthodoxy were to be entrusted exclusively to the Holy Office. No priest could publish a book or edit or contribute to a newspaper, journal, magazine, or review without permission of the local bishop. Every diocese would have its own censors, who were obliged to make a special profession of faith. The names of the censors were not to be divulged until the bishop had endorsed the work.10

  Seven

  The Great Confessional Experiment

  At an early age—I was scarcely eight years old—I had to go to confession. . . . And the very next thing we were told was, ‘That is a sin, and now your guardian angel is crying because of you.’ I cannot forget the way we were threatened and terrified with the ‘evil spirit’, the devil and hell.

  —Anonymous, quoted in Mary Collins and David N. Power, eds., The Fate of Confession, citing Ludwig Fertig, Zeitgeist und Erziehungskunst

  PIUS X’S INITIATIVE TO FORTIFY THE FAITHFUL AGAINST THE evil forces of the world began with a decree on Holy Communion, published on 20 December 1905. The sacrament, he declared, ideally should be approached ‘daily’, since its chief purpose was to help communicants ‘derive strength to resist their sensual passions, cleanse themselves from the stains of daily faults, and avoid these graver sins to which human frailty is liable’. Hence its primary purpose was ‘not that the honour and reverence due to our Lord may be safeguarded, or that it may serve as a reward or recompense of virtue bestowed on the recipients.’ The Eucharist, the pope went on, was ‘the antidote whereby we may be freed from daily faults and be preserved from mortal sin.’ From the outset, then, the focus was as much on avoidance of sin as on spiritual flourishing and full participation at Mass.1

  As a result of failure to attend communion regularly, Pius X opined, ‘piety . . . grew cold’. Disputes had arisen, he declared, ‘concerning the dispositions with which one ought to receive frequent and daily communion; and writers vied with one another in demanding more and more stringent conditions as necessary to be fulfilled.’ The result was that people ‘were content to partake of it once a year, or once a month, or at most once a week.’

  The papal encouragement to partake frequently, even daily, in communion was to be broadcast with impressive results, through sermons, retreats, parish missions, and visitations. Special confraternities and sodalities of the Eucharist were formed; Eucharistic congresses were held in many countries, and a constant flood of articles on the Eucharist appeared in the Catholic media. Yet a major problem soon became apparent.2

  Throughout the Church it was customary for children to delay making their first communion until the age of thirteen or fourteen, or even later. If Pius X was to alter the entrenched practice of centuries, however, he also needed to dislodge an ancient view about the age at which children made their first confession. And to do this, he needed to alter an entrenched conviction about the ‘age of discretion’: the age at which children acquired the capacity to tell right from wrong.

  It took another five years for him to deliver, on 8 August 1910, the encyclical Quam Singulari, where he sets out his thinking and teaching in detail. He starts by claiming that the Eucharist had been administered in the early Church ‘even to nursing infants’. He acknowledges, however, that the practice had died out in the Latin Church, and goes on to cite the Fourth Lateran Council and the Council of Trent on the rule that the faithful should receive communion, in conjunction with confession, once a year after reaching the ‘years of discretion’. But what are the years of discretion? And here he acknowledges the widespread and historic actual practice throughout the Church: ‘On the age of reason or discretion’, he writes, ‘not a few errors and deplorable abuses have crept in during the course of time.’ The first deplorable error, he avers, is that there should be a different age for confession from that for Holy Communion. In consequence, ‘the age determined for the reception of First Communion was placed at ten years or twelve, and in places fourteen years or even more were required; and until that age children and youth were prohibited from Eucharistic Communion.’ The age of ‘discretion for confession’, he goes on, ‘is the time when one can distinguish between right and wrong, that is, when one arrives at a certain use of reason’. Aquinas, he claims, states that children who have ‘some use of reason’ should be allowed to go to communion. He then quotes Saint Antoninus as saying, ‘But when a child is capable of doing wrong, this is of committing a mortal sin, then he is bound by the precept of confession’, although, again, this ‘authority’ has nothing to say on the matter of age. Finally, he conflates a child’s understanding of the nature of the Eucharist with knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. Quoting the Roman Catechism of Trent, he asserts that a confessor will judge the age of discretion as the point at which children ‘have an understanding of this admirable Sacrament [Holy Communion] and if they have any desire for it.’ From all this it is clear, he goes on, ‘that the age of discretion for receiving Holy Communion is that at which the child knows the difference between the Eucharistic Bread and ordinary, material bread, and can therefore approach the altar with proper devotion.’ He concludes the encyclical with the following decree: ‘The custom of not admitting children to Confession or of not giving them absolution when they have already attained the use of reason must be entirely abandoned. The Ordinary [local bishop] shall see to it that this condition ceases absolutely, and he may, if necessary, use legal measures accordingly.’

  THE MESSAGE NOW WENT OUT TO the universal Church—bishops, congregations of religious, parish priests, missionaries, and schools. From 1910 onwards it became a matter of Catholic belief that discretion means the ability to tell the difference between right and wrong, and to tell the difference between bread and wine consecrated and unconsecrated. Yet, in arguing that the age of seven had always, in fact, been the Church’s understanding of the norm of discretion’s emergence, and therefore the norm for first confession, Pius X was flying in the face of historical fact. He was also ignoring the wisdom of the faithful, clergy and laity, who had recognised down the centuries that confession should not be foisted upon children too early, and that the age of discretion differs between individual children. It was well recognised, moreover, that the imposition of inappropriate guilt on young children had its psychological and moral dangers. As Henry Charles Lea, the principal nineteenth-century historian of the sacrament, wrote: ‘It seems a sacrilege to administer to children of tender years the awful sacrament of penitence, with its presumed requisites of contrition and charity and a conception of its significance as the means of averting the wrath of an offended God.’3

  As we have seen, there had been constant debates down the centuries over the age at which ‘discretion’ emerges. An early reference arose in a question put to Timothy of Alexandria at the end of the fourth century. Under discussion was the emergence of a sense of ‘responsibility’ in a child. Timothy commented that some believed that responsibility began at the age of ten; others argued much later. Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century noted that some believed that it was not possible to sin under the age of fourteen, yet surely, he objected, and with reason, it was possible for children to lie at that age. The obligation to confess under pain of excommunication did not arise, as we saw, until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215; nevertheless, the Council fathers did not settle on a specific age for first confession. Yet the heavy penalty attendant on failure to comply meant that the starting point of the obligation to confess became a topic of intense debate.4

  The Council of Narbonne in 1244 declared the age to be fourteen, as did various other councils, synods, and canon law rulings in the th
irteenth and fourteenth centuries. In 1408, at the provincial synod of Reims, the theologian Jean Charlier de Gerson concurred. In the quarrels that raged over the theology of the sacrament through the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, there were violent differences of opinion over the authenticity of the sacrament as well as the age and frequency at which the sacrament should be administered. Charles Borromeo was all for lowering first confession to the age of five or six, although he also advocated the view, as did other moral theologians, that a child should not be given absolution but merely a blessing. Others recommended conditional absolution.

  The overall history of the disputes, moreover, is a different matter from actual practice, which is harder to ascertain. By the eighteenth century there were striking differences of opinion, including the recommendation of ages significantly higher than fourteen, based on local tradition, customs, experience, and perhaps prejudice. In some cases, evidence of practice emerges from complaints. In 1703, for example, the Provincial Council of Albania denounced the practice of making first confession as late as the age of sixteen, eighteen, and even twenty. In 1747 the bishop of Padua, Cardinal Carlo Rezzonico, professed himself astounded that many young people still had not made their first confession by the age of eighteen. In terms of averages, many sources suggest that throughout the nineteenth century girls made their first confession in groups at the age of twelve or older at the same time that they made their first communion and confirmation; for boys, the age of first confession was typically thirteen or fourteen.

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF Pius X’s experiment on Catholic children, spanning the second decade of the twentieth century up to the early 1960s, emerge from the published writings, fiction and non-fiction, and personal correspondence and interviews occasioned by my research for this book.

  Catholic life was marked during those years by a religiosity that was both defensive and combative. The enemy—atheistic communism—loomed large and clear, presenting a serious threat to the Church’s very existence during the interwar and post-war years. Much was made during that era of the presence of Satan in the world. Each person, we were taught, had been assigned a guardian angel to ward off the whispered suggestions of our personal devil. Those who lived in predominantly Protestant countries or districts were often embattled with local non-Catholic antagonists. My mother, as a child in the East End of London, was taunted on her way to school by pupils from a militantly Protestant school; mutual insults, bricks, and fists flew. The tensions of Northern Ireland were being played out on the inner-city streets of England and Scotland.

  When I was in the infant class of my convent school towards the end of the Second World War, one of Hitler’s rockets demolished the local Anglican church, killing fifteen members of the congregation. Miss Doonan, our pious teacher, explained that God had punished those people because they were Protestants. We were taught that it was a grave sin to enter a Protestant church or attend ‘the rites of their false religion’. The contempt of some East End Catholics for Protestants was matched only by their hatred of Jews. I once heard an Irish Catholic uncle referring to my genial Jewish Grandma Cornwell as ‘that Yid their father’s mother’.

  The pope was the living symbol of Catholic unity and continuity. Loyalty to the papacy was fierce and unflinching. As the hymn went, ‘God bless our Pope, the Great the Good.’ Catholicism was confrontational, visible, and public. In the United States, Catholic evangelism, first by radio and then by television, achieved large audiences. By the 1950s the Rosary was being said daily to combat the Russian nuclear threat. The world over, Catholics went on processions in the streets outside their churches. Pilgrimages to Marian shrines were popular throughout Europe, especially Lourdes, Fatima, and Knock in Ireland. Devotional objects dominated the walls of Catholic homes, prosperous or poor: a crucifix in every room, a picture of the Sacred Heart in the living room, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the parental bedroom. Catholics wore the Miraculous Medal, celebrating the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, and scapulas—items of cloth, not much bigger than postage stamps, that would hang on one’s breast and back like a double-sided necklace, attached by silk strings. Scapulas had tiny pictures of Jesus or Mary on them, or perhaps a saint; some included a phrase from a prayer or a promise of spiritual protection for the wearer. It was believed that if one died wearing the scapula, one escaped Purgatory on the first Friday after one’s death. Possession of a Rosary was essential. The Catholic ambiance was festooned with ‘sacramentals’ and devotions: holy water, holy pictures, votive candles, incense, litanies, novenas.

  At the heart of Catholicism was the practice of frequent confession and communion. Preparation for these sacraments now began typically at the age of five or six, aided by vivid depictions of religious truths on roll-down oleographs—the Garden of Eden, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. Children were introduced to the notion of sin as the breaking of God’s rules. And the rules made by the Church were equivalent to God’s rules.

  The official catechism, taught from the age of five, was composed of questions and answers which we learnt by rote:

  QUESTION: What is sin?

  ANSWER: Sin is an offence against God, by any thought, word, deed, or omission against the law of God.5

  We were taught that there were two kinds of sin. First, there was original sin, which was ‘committed by Adam . . . when he ate the forbidden fruit’, the stain and guilt of which had been contracted by all mankind, ‘except the Blessed Virgin’. Then there were ‘actual sins . . . which we ourselves commit’, which in turn were of two kinds: ‘mortal sin and venial sin’, meaning serious sin and less serious sin. And here we came to the nub of the matter:

  QUESTION: Why is it called mortal sin?

  ANSWER: It is called mortal sin because it is so serious that it kills the soul and deserves hell.

  QUESTION: How does mortal sin kill the soul?

  ANSWER: Mortal sin kills the soul by depriving it of sanctifying grace, which is the supernatural life of the soul.

  QUESTION: Is it a great evil to fall into mortal sin?

  ANSWER: It is the greatest of all evils to fall into mortal sin.6

  There was little or no mention of sin as an action that harmed others, individually or communally. It was claimed, moreover, that harm to our souls was greater than any harm to our bodies—thus giving the impression that the harm one might inflict on the body of another was not so serious a matter. The catechism asked: ‘Why is the soul more important than the body?’ Answer: ‘Because it is a spirit and immortal.’

  Meanwhile, the focus on God as one who is prone to take offence depicted Him from the outset as essentially vengeful and wrathful. It was not that the Judeo-Christian story was fundamentally pernicious so much as inadequately imparted by our teachers and the catechism text. Serious, or mortal, sin, according to orthodox Christian theology, involves deliberate rejection of the unconditional love of an all-merciful God. Instead, children of that half-century were being taught that God’s love was conditional on our behaviour; that he could change his mind about us; that he withdrew his love and punished us in eternal fire if we died unconfessed. This notion was reinforced by the formal words of contrition we learned by heart and recited in confession. We begged pardon for our sins and said that we detested them ‘above all things’ because ‘they offend your infinite goodness’.

  The leading imagery of sin for Catholic children throughout much of the twentieth century suggested a trivial, petulant God obsessed with cleanliness. Sins were described as discrete dirty marks on the robe of the soul. For a child, this robe was literal, despite the soul being a spirit and immortal. You were handed a clean, white robe on the day of baptism. If you told a lie, or hit your sister, or were disobedient to your mother, black marks appeared. If you did something seriously wrong, it became entirely black and that person was destined for Hell.

  Goodness, or ‘holiness’, was not a practice of virtue in the whole of one’s daily life and relation
s with others, but rather, the feeling you experienced on leaving the confessional box with your robe nicely laundered.

  IN THE SECOND HALF of the twentieth century, many Catholic writers recalled the trauma of confession in childhood. The American journalist Christopher Buckley wrote about his own anxiety as a child at the prospect of going to confession. You were told, he said, to ‘go into a dark booth with a man dressed in black and tell [him] . . . things that you haven’t even told your mother.’ The experience was like bereavement of the worst kind for a child: ‘It’s really the most sobering thing I can imagine happening . . . short of losing your mother or father’.7

  In Frank O’Connor’s short story ‘First Confession’, the box’s dark geography exemplifies a subtext of acute anxiety. Jackie, the authorial voice, reminiscing on the experience from the vantage of adulthood, writes: ‘I was scared to death . . .’ He goes on: ‘It was pitch-dark, and I couldn’t see priest or anything else. Then I really began to be frightened.’ Jackie begins by making his confession to the panelled wall, before realising his mistake. Baffled by the arrangement of the pitch dark interior, he clambers onto the elbow rest of the penitent’s kneeler (he would not have been the first or the last to do so). When the priest slams back the hatch, he can see only the boy’s knees, level with the grille.8