The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  What we were drawing from this approach to ‘moral theology’ was the importance of discovering, and being conversant with, myriad distinctions and hair-splitting rules in preparation for our lives as confessors in the dark box, until common sense, individual moral agency, and exercise of conscience became redundant.

  Nine

  Seminary Sexology

  Immodest acts, however slight they may be, that are done from the motive of exciting lust, even though it do not ensue [sic], are grievous sins.

  —H. Davis, SJ, Moral and Pastoral Theology

  SEXUAL SIN WAS THE DOMINANT TOPIC OF THE MORAL textbooks we were obliged to study in preparation for future ministry. The sections on ‘Chastity and Modesty’ directly invoked the sixth and ninth commandments (in the Catholic Decalogue numerology) as the ultimate source of authority: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ and ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife.’ According to our moralists, the sixth commandment not only forbade adultery, ‘but all actions which are intended to lead or which naturally lead to it, and all actions contrary to the orderly propagation of the race.’ Meanwhile, the ninth commandment forbade ‘all lustful thoughts and desires’. Hence it was a mortal sin to derive the slightest wilful pleasure not only from words, thoughts, or deeds involving the illicit exercise of the sexual act, but also from wilful words, thoughts, or deeds that might lead to such ‘pleasures’.1

  The point of the sixth and ninth commandments, then, was to inculcate in all members of the faithful the virtues of chastity and modesty, which virtues ‘exclude in the unmarried all voluntary expression of the sensitive appetite for venereal pleasure.’ This ‘pleasure is normally associated as well with the full exercise of the generative function as with the movement of the generative organs as they are preparing to function.’ All were called upon to be chaste, according to our moralists—both married and unmarried: ‘the rational motive of the virtue of chastity is the reasonableness of controlling sexual appetite in the married and of excluding it in the unmarried.’ At the same time, life-long virginity bestows ‘a special aureole’. Marriage was instituted by God for the ‘allaying of concupiscence as for the procreation of children’, but ‘the state of virginity is the higher and nobler state and absolutely more pleasing to God.’ Then, again: ‘All sexual pleasure, outside wedlock, that is directly voluntary is grievously sinful.’2

  Homosexuality merited a mere six lines in our four-volume treatise by H. Davis, less than necrophilia. And yet the moralists established their abhorrence of homosexuality by placing it sixth in a catalogue of ‘perversions of the sexual appetites, beyond the order of nature’, right after sadism, masochism, fetishism, voyeurism, and exhibitionism (which, writes Davis, is often a perversion found in old men!: ‘Invenitur haec perversionem in senibus’). Homosexuality, which he termed ‘contrary sexuality’ (‘contraria sexualitas’), could be between men and men or between women and women. He adds what he calls the vice of the Greeks, namely ‘paederastia’, meaning the love of boys.

  Catholic priests could look forward to responsible roles in the running of parish schools soon after ordination. Most parish priests would be ex officio chairmen of the school management boards. Yet what we were taught about moral and emotional development in childhood was outlandishly misguided. ‘Moral education’ for children, according to Davis, should involve ‘the curbing of curiosity’; ‘the immediate expulsion of impure phantasies’; ‘avoidance of what are called soft and sentimental friendships with those of the opposite sex at a comparatively early age, since such friendships induce precocious sexuality’; ‘disapproval of mixed dances between small boys and girls, and much more, the co-education of the sexes close to the age of puberty if not earlier’; and prohibition of ‘promiscuous and general friendships between the sexes.’ Matched with these environmental considerations were peculiar notions of sexual physiology and psychology. ‘The so called sexual necessity of young people is often produced artificially through the nervous system under constant stimulation of an erotic nature.’ The principal strategy to attain chastity in children, therefore, is to inculcate control of the senses: ‘Modesty in act is expressed . . . by reasonable concealment of those parts of the body whose exposure might be an occasion of lustful desire, as by abstaining from all unnecessary touching of those parts and the parts adjoining them.’ Modesty of the eyes requires abstaining from ‘all prurient and dangerous curiosity.’ Modesty of speech involves avoidance of ‘suggestive expressions’. Modesty of ‘gait in man’ is the avoidance of ‘effeminate behaviour’, and in women of ‘attitudes that are bold and daring’.3

  Impurity, too, has its distinctions. First comes ‘complete venereal pleasure’ that is directly voluntary outside legitimate sexual intercourse, the purpose of the latter being ‘the propagation of the race, whether or not the effect ensue.’ Then ‘incomplete venereal pleasure’, even in the ‘smallest degree’, is grievously sinful, since it ‘has reference by its very nature to legitimate sexual intercourse’. It follows that ‘it is a perversion of nature that man or woman should procure even this incomplete pleasure for their solitary gratification.’

  The moralists inveighed against an array of occasions of sins of impurity, including kissing, dancing, unbridled music, and gazing on pictures (‘protracted gazing [on nudes] without any just reason will usually be a grievous sin’). Sun-bathing can be an occasion of sin, also gymnastic exercise, ‘even where uniforms are worn’. Special care is to be taken ‘of Christian modesty in young women and girls, which is so gravely impaired by any such kind of exhibition’, writes Davis, quoting the encyclical letter of Pope Pius XI on ‘The Christian Education of Youth’. It was Pius XI, moreover, who in 1936 wrote an encyclical on films which was cited by Davis: ‘Everyone knows what damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures.’ Pius XI might well have had a point, even in his day. But equally significant are the closed attitudes and mindset absorbed by generations of ordinands at a time when Western culture was increasingly sexually explicit and permissive.4

  The moralists taught that even small children harboured sexual desires. Father Davis explains: ‘Even the youngest children have a tendency to venereal excitation, and it would be both disgraceful and a grievous sin against chastity and justice to provoke them to it. . . . It is a delusion to suppose that a child below the age of puberty is a sexless being.’ Children, ‘even tiny children’, must not be herded together without close supervision, since ‘their animal instincts lead them into indecent play. . . . In the case of most prostitutes, the mischief is really done before the age of twelve.’5

  For these reasons, Davis continues, Pius X had advocated frequent Holy Communion ‘from their tender years’, and ‘daily if possible’, so that ‘they might thence derive strength to resist their sensual passions, to cleanse themselves from the stains of daily faults, and to avoid those graver sins to which human frailty is liable’.

  Linked to frequent communion, as we have seen, was the importance of frequent confession for small children, which within a decade or so revealed problems, of which Noldin and Schmitt, as well as Davis, appear well aware. Davis advocates ‘conditional absolution’ in confessions when priests come across ‘a child that does not appear to have come to the use of reason’. He notes that ‘many children are apt to be perfunctory’ in confessing, especially young boys. Even in childhood, confession has become ‘routine’. ‘The haste with which boys confess is a fault that must be corrected.’ He is aware, moreover, of the danger of scrupulosity in the young, although he appears to advocate the source of the problem while drawing attention to its consequences: ‘Children should be particularly exhorted to tell every sin they remember, not to conceal any sin at all, even if a venial sin, for the habit of concealing sins may grow on them, and some children suffer mental anguish of a real sort intermittently for years owing to an imagined sacrilegious confession.’6 As my informants in earlier chapters demonstrate, the exhortation to ‘tell every sin’ had been the cause of the
‘mental anguish’ and not the cure.

  MASTURBATION IS DEALT WITH at length in the moral manuals, and here, again, the ‘mental anguish’ of penitents is all too evident. The topic, dealt with in Latin under the heading ‘Pollutio’, is prefaced by a preliminary introduction in English by Davis in a remarkable display of casuistry. Under the subheading ‘The duty of resisting sexual pleasure’, Davis writes of ‘sexual movements’, by which he means involuntary erection in the case of men. But this must be resisted ‘with vigorous disregard and displeasure’. What he means here, and the topic is expanded in a section written in Latin, is the importance of resisting even a sense of enjoyment while experiencing ‘wet dreams’, or nocturnal emissions (already, as we have seen, a topic of intense anxiety for the authors of confessional manuals in the early Middle Ages).

  In a section headed ‘Morbid Sexuality’, Davis offers a recipe for dealing with the anguish of nocturnal emissions while in the same breath advocating tactics designed to provoke such anguish in the first place. In subsequent sections he goes on to claim that nocturnal emissions could arise as a result of actions that, performed in the cold light of day, are not in themselves sinful, but might, through experience, be seen to be the cause of the emissions at night—a recipe for agonising scruples over every kind of innocent activity. Again, some fashionable ideas on neurophysiology are invoked: ‘As soon as sex ideas, and preoccupation with sex, find their way into consciousness, certain nerve centres are excited, and more blood finds its way to the sex centres of the spinal cord, thus highly sensitizing them. These produce physical effects on the external sex apparatus.’7

  It is noteworthy that the masturbation section in Davis runs to five whole pages, whereas rape gets barely a third of a page. Cruelty to children and sexual molestation of minors merit no coverage whatsoever in the entire corpus of four volumes. Yet it is clear from a later section on ‘solicitation’ in the confessional that abuse of the young was widely known at the time of publication.

  In cases of rape, Davis declares that it is a sin against chastity and justice. From foregoing discussions on chastity, it is clear that the offence is principally against God and against the soul of the perpetrator. As for justice, the nature of the injustice is not explained, it is simply posited as an abstract principle; although the moralists declare that in the case of a virgin the injustice is chiefly against the father—because his daughter’s marriage prospects have been affected. On reparation, Davis asserts that a rapist should agree to marry his victim in order to put right his sin. Davis also expends space in the meagre section on rape to warn that a woman should resist the attack with all her might. (In 1950 Pius XII would canonize a girl called Maria Goretti who had died rather than surrender her virginity—a vivid example of the point made in the moral manuals.) If, however, the victim of rape enjoys the experience, she colludes in the sin. Davis does not consider that the victim might be an underage boy, or that the rape might have nothing to do with hymens and virgins.

  OVER 60 PER CENT of the more than three hundred lay male respondents who wrote to me in the course of my research for this book spoke of mental anguish prompted in childhood and youth because of the Church’s moral teaching on masturbation, and their anxieties—even into their eighties—because of the catechetical and confessional insistence that it is a mortal sin. Priests who wrote or spoke were reticent about their own personal behaviour, moral attitudes, and mental anguish on the subject. Yet one spiritual director, a clinical psychologist who is also a priest, told me bluntly: ‘Look, the diocesan priests all get by on what I call the three excesses: excessive whisky, excessive golf, and excessive masturbation.’ In other conversations and interviews with priests, I was informed that the practice was widespread among clerics, and that there were even reports of priests either masturbating or achieving ‘involuntary’ orgasm in the confessional box.

  Of all the sins associated with the sixth commandment, and what the moralists termed ‘morbid sexuality’, masturbation is the subject of the most keen, obsessive, and extensive discussion and analysis in the manuals. The point is stressed and reiterated that enjoyment of orgasm in both men women—whether the orgasm was voluntary or not, alone or aided by another, by the married or the unmarried—is deemed to be ‘against Nature’, in that the pleasure of the sex act being procured is detached from its true purpose—legitimate procreation. The coverage in the manuals spans an extraordinary variety of combinations and possibilities, as if a penitent might present in confession any of the following: orgasms achieved by eunuchs; males who reach orgasm but without ejaculation; coitus interruptus; orgasm while horse riding or on a bicycle; orgasm while dancing; spontaneous orgasm while viewing erotic pictures. All such actions, and many more, performed in the knowledge that orgasm might occur, are condemned as mortal sins even if the action does not result in orgasm. There is not even allowance for men who need to give specimens of their sperm for medical reasons, such as for sperm count. Davis writes: ‘If for a just cause, for example, to test for sterility of disease, the doctor wishes to examine the sperm of a married man (it would not be possible for the obvious reasons, in view of what follows, to test that of an unmarried man), it is suggested to pour into a test-tube the remains of sperm which remain in the urethra after sexual intercourse.’8

  At the same time, the manuals declare a catch-all definition: that the sin of masturbation ‘consists in the use of any sexual act for the wrong purpose’:

  Therefore masturbation is possible for women as well as men; in young men and in old men . . . despite the fact that the ejaculations of the latter might be slight; in men who have had vasectomies, even if they eventually cannot produce semen, and adult castrati if they are capable of erections and reaching orgasm; in prepubescent children, even though they cannot produce semen, so long as they can achieve an erection and reach orgasm; yet not infants who are incapable of producing a full erection, or orgasm, even though they are capable of emitting a prostatic liquid from the urethra.9

  The obsession with masturbation and other forms of auto-eroticism in the moral and pastoral manuals reflects the acute anxiety that it evidently occasioned for many seminarians and priests, including moral theologians, canon lawyers, and prelates right up to the pope, through much of the twentieth century. No wonder if, as claimed by the psychotherapist and former priest A. W. Richard Sipe, who conducted an investigation in the 1990s, ‘80 percent of the clergy masturbate’. Richard Sipe’s estimate may well have been conservative, both for today and in the past. In 1969, when Dr. William Masters of the archdiocese of St. Paul conducted a survey of 200 celibate Catholic clerics, 198 reported having masturbated that year. The remaining two, according to Masters, did not understand the question. Richard Sipe also drew attention to those clerical non-masturbators who suffer from hypogonadism, known as Kallmann syndrome—the virtual absence of sexual libido—who typically have penises no larger than three centimetres, and small testicles to match.10

  If Alfred Kinsey’s figures on masturbation are modest for the twentieth century, it seems fair to assume that the rate of practice was also similar among celibate seminarians and priests in the nineteenth century. The difference was that harsh prohibitions in the ecclesial sphere in the nineteenth century were matched by equally harsh prohibitions for psychological and medical reasons in the secular sphere.

  PIUS X WAS ELECTED POPE IN 1903, the same year as the publication in Germany of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which strongly influenced Freud on the topic of masturbation. In 1905, the year that Pius X advocated frequent communion, and at least by inference confession, for children aged seven and up, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In his memoir of mental illness Schreber first employed the term ‘soul murder’, cited earlier, commenting that it was invoked because of an ‘idea widespread in folk-lore and poetry of all peoples that it is somehow possible to take possession of another person’s soul’. ‘Soul murder’, within Catholic theology,
is a precise description of mortal sin—a sin that ‘kills’ the soul.

  Schreber suffered from phases of schizophrenia, featuring delusional states that were often God-centred, religiose, and sexual. He thought that God was attempting to emasculate him. The value of his memoir is the insight it gives into the effect of a morally tyrannical father who is obsessed with combatting, above all, the destructive evil of masturbation in his children. Daniel Paul Schreber’s father was Dr. Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber, a famous German physician and pedagogue who published a number of best-selling books on child development, discipline, and child-rearing in the mid-nineteenth century, with a profound and widespread effect on parenting, and hence, it is widely believed, on generations of German children. Son Daniel Paul ended his life in a mental asylum, and another son committed suicide.11