The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  The incident prompts consideration of the role of the confessors who either knew or guessed what their priestly penitents were confessing to, and who then neglected to react appropriately. At one point in his interview, Father A admitted his surprise that he had not been severely reproached more often. (‘In all the times I confessed to abusing a minor I can only remember one occasion when I got a reprimand or advice not to do this thing.’) Yet he had already explained that on most occasions he had not admitted to the confessor the true nature of his sin, or reported his status.28

  What was in the minds of those confessors who failed to issue a reprimand? My attempts at eliciting the confessor’s perspective have not prospered. Out of the dozens of priests whom I approached, only one former confessor, now laicised, whose ministry ceased some thirty years ago, admitted that a priest had come to him on more than one occasion to confess child sexual abuse. ‘What did you say to him?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t say anything’, he replied. ‘I gave him three Hail Marys or something like that. . . . We didn’t think such things were all that terrible years ago.’

  Many of the priests I interviewed told me they would not necessarily have known for certain what was being confessed, and if they had suspected, they would not have wished to probe. A former Jesuit priest had this to say: ‘It was laid down in our moral and pastoral textbooks that we should not show too much curiosity. . . . Mostly you just wanted to get through the penitents as efficiently as you could. Possibly we suspected, but did not want to go there.’

  Another of my interviewees, who was a young priest in the early 1960s, but had been laicised for some fifty years, refused to answer the question. Despite the fact that we were discussing a ministry he left half a century ago, he had serious scruples about doing violence to the seal of confession. He wished the interview to be anonymous and withheld even basic circumstantial information, saying:

  Let me put it this way: you might know where I practised as a priest in those days. You might know of a priest in that area who was charged with child sexual abuse and eventually sent to prison. You could then put two and two together, and guess that this person came to me to confess that sin. I have to tell you that it would be wrong of me, in my opinion, to let you know either way—that I did, or that I didn’t have such a priest come to me. Because I wouldn’t want you to think, that if I did, I would tell you. All I will say is this: when people came to me confessing impurity or sexual intercourse with another, I would want to know the marital status of the person I was speaking to, although I was unlikely to ask whether he was a priest, and the status of the sexual partner, whether married or not; and whether the sex was consensual or not. I don’t think that I would automatically ask if it was a child, or non-consensual: that would have been up to the penitent to confess such a thing. Some priests would want to know whether contraception had been used; I tended not to want to know that, or to discuss contraception unless the penitent raised it.

  What was lacking among the priestly penitent abusers, and evidently among many of their confessors, too, was a mature sense of the nature of clerical abuse as having grievous consequences for another person. In attempting to describe why he thought his behaviour was wrong, Father A spoke initially of ‘guilt, shame, and fear that I would get caught’. His consciousness of what he had done was entirely self-centred. He regretted that he was ‘not taking steps to deal with the compulsion which was causing me to sin’. There were times, he went on, ‘when I was quite upset with myself and the way I was going.’ He dwelt on his ‘weaknesses’, yet took comfort that God ‘was the father of the Prodigal Son and I saw myself as fitting into the parable.’29

  He granted in his interview with Dr. Keenan that his ‘behaviour was not okay’. He knew that it was ‘contrary to the system of morality’ he had been taught. He had ‘breached the moral code’, yet ‘the intention to hurt was not in my mind’, he said. He expanded on his reference to a ‘moral code’ by saying, ‘I persuaded myself that while there was a moral breach, the harm to the young person was minimal. The fact that the other person did not object was a factor in my “justification” of the behaviour in that there was a sort of tacit assent to the “intrusion.”’ And yet, this was not entirely true, he conceded: ‘This was dishonest and distorted thinking because the fact is that I had already ensured submission by targeting only those whom I believed would be compliant. I knew in my heart that the fact that the person showed no enthusiasm whatever was sufficient sign of unwillingness. So there was much double-thinking going on.’

  One reads through the nine interviews provided by Dr. Keenan hoping for one small indication of awareness of the consequences of the abuse on the young victims on the part of these former priests, but to no avail. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that Dr. Keenan had suggested that there was a question of ‘justice’ to be considered. One interviewee responded: ‘I did not think about justice to the individual . . . it was about how far did you go with yourself in the process before committing a sin. The individual was not considered.’30

  The moral mindset is that of a person who habitually neglects to consider the otherness of people—a failure to consider consequences in the real world in which people live and have their being; a rule-bound ethic with no developed sense of individual, authentic conscience; a person trapped in a moral stage of infancy. At the same time the mindset is typical of a view of human nature that is essentially dualistic—recognising a split between body and soul—with the body being held of less value than the soul. The predicament is reminiscent of the unfeeling personality of the psychopath, although in the case of the priest, we are dealing with years of learnt behaviour in the institutionalised environment of the seminary.

  What we are witnessing is a distorted religious imagination that has been shaped by narratives and metaphors of confessional experience. And these narratives and metaphors were first inculcated in childhood and adolescence and further reinforced during years of seminary formation. It is to the imaginative force of confessional experience that we must now turn to understand the impact of confession on generations of the faithful starting in the first half of the twentieth century.

  Eleven

  Confession Imagined

  Eamon could not imagine trying to explain to him, even in the darkness of the confessional, what he and Anne had done together. . . . Until now, the state of mortal sin seemed unimaginable . . .

  —Colm Tóibín, The Heather Blazing

  THE DARK BOX IS STILL TO BE SEEN IN USE IN CATHEDRALS and large city churches, where penitents continue to wait their turn in the pews. These are Catholics who still find spiritual consolation whispering their sins into the ear of the shadowy priest beyond a screen of anonymity. As we have seen, in 2011 Pope Benedict XVI advocated a return to confession, as of old. Yet in countless lesser churches where the box has not been broken up for firewood, church janitors have found the hidden space useful as a storage closet for vacuum cleaners, brooms, and cleaning products. The dwindling numbers of priests could never bring back the ‘old days’, even if there was a renewed appetite on the part of Catholics to confess weekly. Yet the dark box continues to live in the memories of the generations born before the early 1970s.

  The box also lives on, as in its heyday, in literature and film, persisting in an enduring radioactive half-life of the popular imagination. These evocations of the confessional tell us something of the robust iconography of the sacrament as it was reinstituted following the counter-reforming Council of Trent. The literary exploitation of confession occurs in the work of many Catholic writers throughout the twentieth century—cradle, convert, practising, and lapsed. Edith Wharton’s short story ‘Confession’ portrays a jealous husband who masquerades as a confessor to catch out his adulterous wife. But he fails to discover her secrets, because she, albeit unconscious of her husband’s masquerade, lies in the confessional—denying any sexual sin. Georges Bernanos, in The Diary of a Country Priest, enters the consciousness of a curate tantalised by
the sexuality of a seven-year-old. Evelyn Waugh depicts the deathbed confession of an aristocrat, Lord Marchmain, while Graham Greene explores the ‘dangerous edge’ of the confessions of a whiskey priest and an ex-pat adulterer. The Italian writer Luigi Meneghello, in Deliver Us, explores childhood stratagems for confessing offences against ‘modesty’, and the heroine in Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons objects to making a confession to an Italian priest in case he fails to understand the true nature of her sins. Confessions and the dark box also make appearances in the fiction of, among many others, Heinrich Böll, Italo Svevo, Anthony Burgess, Umberto Eco, Muriel Spark, and John Banville.

  By the 1950s the theme was equally popular in cinema. Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess deals with the pressures of the seal of the confessional on a priest who has been accused of murder. The priest knows the true identity of the murderer, who has come to him in confession, but his lips are sealed. Jean-Pierre Melville’s Léon Morin, Prêtre, dramatizes a penitent sexual temptress. Federico Fellini reminisces about his childhood experiences with oppressive priests in 8½ and Amarcord, and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets explores the penitential theology of the young gangster-saint Charlie. Charlie prefers to make his penance on the sidewalks and bars of Brooklyn, all too conscious of eternal suffering: ‘And you don’t fuck with the infinite!’ he says. Confessors make cameo appearances in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Ulu Grosbard’s True Confessions, Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, and Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges—which opens with an assassin shooting a paedophile priest in an old-style confessional box. Echoing Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, in which money is seen as the root of evil (and three villains manage to kill each other), McDonagh’s film proposes that the root of all evil is sexual child abuse. As Robert Stone, author of A Flag for Sunrise, would note half a century on from Pius X’s decrees, there is ‘enough material within Catholicism to keep you performing for years and years and years.’1

  Two writers more than any others in the twentieth century have contributed to the imaginative and spiritual significance of confession as ritual and as a major theme in one’s spiritual life story. The confession of James Joyce’s hero Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man marks the beginning of Stephen’s spiritual and artistic journey, a journey culminating in Stephen’s rejection of a priestly vocation and the blossoming of his literary calling. A spiritual metanoia, a turning towards the religious life, parallels his bid for liberation into a life in literature. The narrative evokes the confession as spiritual life story; but the sacramental ritual lies at the heart of the book.

  In surely the most powerful description of a teenage confession ever written, Joyce depicts the trepidation of a young man entering the dark box, the disgust of sexual sin and fear of the terrors of hell familiar to generations of cradle Catholic youth. ‘He was next. He stood up in terror and walked blindly into the box. At last it had come. . . . The slide clicked back and his heart bounded in his breast.’ The sins trickled from his lips ‘in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy’. The imagery matches the ‘putrid’, ‘liquid’ rottenness of the soul in Hell, themes fresh on Stephen’s mind from the Jesuit priest’s homily that had brought him to confess in the first place.2

  As the priest says the words of absolution, Stephen experiences that moment of relief familiar to Catholics of every era: ‘The old and weary voice fell like sweet rain upon his quaking parching heart. How sweet and sad!’ And then he walks home, ‘conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs.’

  But the confessional experience leads not so much to liberation as to the urge to regulate and regiment his life in the pursuit of holiness. In the course of this ‘intricate piety and self restraint’, he is often in and out of that confessional box now, relating ‘doubts and scruples, some momentary inattention at prayer, a movement of trivial anger in his soul or a subtle wilfulness in speech or act’. His confession becomes ‘a channel for the escape of scrupulous and unrepented imperfections.’ His piety is noticed, leading to an encounter with the Jesuit director of the university, who broaches the possibility of Stephen’s vocation to the priesthood.3

  In presenting the advantages of the priesthood, the Jesuit invokes the power of the priest to absolve sin, with echoes of Satan’s temptation of Christ in the desert: ‘No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself has the power of a priest of God: the power of the keys, the power to bind and to loose from sin, the power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the creatures of God the evil spirits that have power over them’. And the Jesuit adds to this peroration: ‘What an awful power, Stephen!’4

  The priest’s temptation to the power of absolution of sins meets with fantasies Stephen has already entertained of being a confessor. The preferred penitents of his imagination are ‘women, and of girls’; the drama of the imagined encounters involves the secrecy of their sins and the contrast between the sins of women and his own priestly innocence: ‘His soul had loved to muse in secret on this desire. He had seen himself, a young and silent-mannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly. . . . He would know obscure things, hidden from others . . . the sinful longings and sinful thoughts and sinful acts, of others, hearing them murmured into his ears in the confessional under the shame of a darkened chapel by the lips of women and of girls . . . He would hold his secret knowledge and secret power, being as sinless as the innocent . . .’5

  The sustained fantasy that follows, as Stephen walks home, then walks out once more towards the strand and the sea, is an alternative examination of conscience, an alternative ‘confession’, in the sense originally employed by the early Christian fathers—confession as profession of faith, culminating in conversion of life: a vocation. ‘This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar.’ Encountering a girl on the strand, the vision of her standing bare-legged on the water’s edge, ‘passed into his soul for ever’. Her bosom was ‘slight and soft as the breast of some dark plumaged dove’, an alternative mystery to his earlier religiose vision of the soul that ‘seemed to answer with the same inaudible voice, surrendering herself: Inter ubera mea commorabitur [He shall lie between my breasts]’, and the ‘the unseen Paraclete, Whose symbols were a dove and a mighty wind, to sin against Whom was a sin beyond forgiveness’. A life of freedom and writing in Europe beckoned.6

  Contemporaneously with Joyce’s novel, a very different kind of literary confession and spiritual liberation was proving a mass best-seller throughout the Catholic world in hundreds of editions and translations. St. Thérèse of Lisieux was a Carmelite nun who had entered the convent at the unusually youthful age of fifteen. Born in 1873, she was dead by 1897, wracked with tuberculosis and exhausted by the rigours of the highly ascetical, enclosed Carmelite convent she had entered while still little more than a child.

  Losing her mother at the age of four, and her eldest sisters to the convent soon afterwards, Thérèse was prone to introversion, scrupulosity, psychosomatic illness, and an intense religiosity. The story of her short life, compiled and edited posthumously from three manuscripts, was published in English in 1912 as Sœur Thérèse of Lisieux: The Little Flower. It remains as popular to this day in the realm of Catholic piety as Joyce’s Portrait does in that of Modernist literary novels. The autobiography of Thérèse is precisely the fulfilment of the ‘pale life in service of the altar’ that Stephen rejects. The book’s internal commentary establishes that the narrative was composed out of a series of drafts written under obedience to her sister, her religious superior. This most Anti-Modernist of confessions, by the nun whom Pius X called the ‘greatest saint of the modern period’, is arguably the first post-Modernist ‘confession’ and hagiography, given the author’s apologetic, sel
f-conscious commentary on its construction. At the same time, its confessional impetus betrays an admission of profound scepticism more radical even than that of many confessed agnostics and atheists of the period. It is hard to think of a piece of Christian spiritual writing, including the Dark Night of the Soul of St. John of the Cross, in which a ‘saint’s’ trials of faith have been publicly confessed so unremittingly—to extremes of agonised despair. In the year before she died, Thérèse suffered for months ‘in the midst of the darkest storm’. She writes of an iron curtain that rises up to the heavens, blotting out the stars; of crawling through a tunnel, walking in thick mists, and plunging into a black hole where ‘everything has disappeared’. She hears the darkness speak to her mockingly, telling her that the heavenly country is all a dream, that she is destined for a night darker than ever, of mere non-existence.7

  What appealed to the clergy about Thérèse’s story, and especially to Pius X, who initiated the process for her beatification in 1914, was her religious acquiescence and obedience to her superiors in everything, whatever the temptations to independence of spirit, whatever the doubts and temptations to rebellion. She proved equally attractive to senior Catholic theologians and intellectuals. The Catholic historian Henri Daniel-Rops argued that she posed the ‘irrefutable answer’ to the ‘assertions of Nietzsche and Karl Marx’ as well as to ‘all forms of contemporary apostasy’. She overcame her profound doubt, he argued, with an act of love arising from sheer, intransigent will. In his book Holy Daring, John Udris noted a strange paradox: ‘Her strategy is “not to struggle against the chimeras of the night” but to surrender oneself in the certainty that we are being carried. She counsels a consent not to see; a consent which confounds the “empty” fear which she felt so unfitting for such a little child.’ Thérèse’s obedient confession of ‘serviam’ stands at the opposite extreme to Joyce’s confession of ‘non serviam’.8