The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  Joyce’s handling of the sacrament of penance, in the case of Stephen’s original conversion of life, exemplifies, as does Thérèse’s entire life story in the convent, the Catholic confessional dilemma. The conversion of life, the metanoia, involves a radical decision to seek the face of God. Yet there is a price to be paid in self-inflicted wounds and the stifling of human emotions and instincts. Stephen has noted the first temptation: the acquisition of a power greater than that of the angels—of binding and loosing in Heaven and Hell. Later he observes the mirthless face of the early morning priest: ‘eyeless and sour-favoured and devout, shot with pink tinges of suffocated anger.’ The combination of temptation to power and the realities of ultimate self-denial have inevitable consequences: as Richard Crashaw put it in a poem in honour of St. Teresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic and Thérèse’s spiritual model, ‘the wounded is the wounding heart.’9

  ON ANOTHER PLANE, in the mundane world of everyday Catholic realities, the dilemma proposed by the life of Thérèse was being played out in the sexual lives of countless Catholic couples throughout the twentieth century. With the availability of cheap and efficient condoms, followed in the 1960s by the birth control pill, Catholics were faced with a choice between following the Church’s teaching on contraception or lowering their spiritual ideals (risking the loss of Heaven) and opting for the benefits of a planned family. The Church’s awareness of this dilemma, which no devout, yet sexually active, Catholic was spared, was evinced by Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii (Of Chaste Marriage). The encyclical became the Ur-text for subsequent popes, from Pius XII (with his advocacy of the ‘rhythm method’) through John Paul II’s frequent animadversions on ‘sexology’. Pius XI’s insistence on the sinful nature of contraception, and the duty of priests to preach its evils, was uncompromising. Contraception, he declared, was ‘a horrible crime’ (adding, with evident approval, that in times past it was ‘punished with death’). Quoting St. Augustine, he went on: ‘Intercourse even with one’s legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of the offspring is prevented. Onan, the son of Juda, did this and the Lord killed him for it.’

  The encounter between a sinning married person and the priest was a time for firm instruction, reproof, and reconciliation. ‘We admonish, therefore, priests, . . . in virtue of Our supreme authority and in Our solicitude for the salvation of souls, not to allow the faithful entrusted to them to err regarding this most grave law of God’, wrote Pius XI. He went on: ‘Much more, that they keep themselves immune from such false opinions, in no way conniving in them.’ Any deviation from the Church’s teaching within the confessional, he warned, placed a heavy burden on the conscience of the confessor. ‘If any confessor or pastor of souls, which may God forbid, lead the faithful entrusted to him into these errors or should at least confirm them by approval or by guilty silence, let him be mindful of the fact that he must render a strict account to God, the Supreme Judge, for the betrayal of his sacred trust, and let him take to himself the words of Christ: “They are blind and leaders of the blind: and if the blind lead the blind, both fall into the pit.”’10

  AS THE LIBERATIONS OF THE 1960s swept through the many worlds of the Catholic faithful, the serviam of married Catholics—typical of my grandmother, who had eight children, one of whom died, and who herself died at the age of fifty—was giving way to non serviam, at least where sexual practice and confession were concerned. There was a simultaneous decline, particularly on the part of the laity, in obedience to papal authority, as well as a plunge in the number of Catholics practising confession. The trends were revealed in two studies, one in Germany and the other in the United States. The former was reported by the moral theologian Bernard Häring in 1979, the latter by Andrew Greeley, the Chicago-based priest, novelist and sociologist of religion, in 1993. Greeley claimed that only 32 per cent of Catholics thought it was ‘certainly true’ that the pope was infallible in matters of faith and morals. One proposed cause was a rejection of papal teaching on contraception; another was social and political awakening on the part of women. With the invention and mass distribution of the birth control pill, women were in control of their reproductive lives in an unprecedented way. The ‘liberation’ of the sex act from procreative liability created scope for effective family planning, creating tensions for devout Catholics, who were constantly exposed to the clerical warnings of ‘sinfulness’, accompanied by the advocacy of ‘abstinence’, or the calendar-watching option of the ‘safe period’. In the wider sexual revolution of the 1960s, moreover, the pill had made cohabitation of unmarried couples both feasible and acceptable. The link between responsible parenthood and economic security was becoming a norm. Sexually active Catholics were adopting these trends in developed countries, and their rates of divorce were beginning to equal those of non-Catholic couples.11

  As we saw earlier, following the Second Vatican Council the faithful, lay and clerical, had expected a relaxation of the papal condemnation of artificial contraception. It was widely believed that the Church would soon allow freedom of conscience on the question for married couples. It was not to be. In 1968, Pope Paul VI made the uncollegial decision to publish his encyclical Humanae Vitae, which stressed the principle that ‘each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.’ Not only did he stress that contraception was a mortal sin within marriage, but he also said that contraception compounded the sin of sex outside of marriage. Homosexuality was also condemned. The Church’s views on homosexuality would be spelled out in more detail in a declaration made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1975, which ruled that homosexual practices and all masturbation were ‘disordered’ and constituted mortal sins.12

  After Humanae Vitae, two crucial tendencies occurred with important implications for confession. Although actual figures are unknown, and probably unknowable, there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence of a massive decline of confessional practice, and of course the decline is quite obvious to anyone who has been a Catholic during these years. There were those Catholics who refused to believe, despite the Church’s teaching, that their sexual behaviour was wrong, particularly when it came to the use of contraception within marriage. Confession was nevertheless difficult for them, as they balked at making a ‘bad confession’ by not admitting their use of contraception. Catholics brought up from childhood in the faith knew only too well that absolution depended on a ‘firm purpose of amendment’. So, on their own consciences, they decided to go to communion at Mass while giving up on confession altogether. In contrast, there were those Catholics who simply abandoned their Catholicism in a process of self-exclusion, having decided that it was too difficult to live up to the Church’s sexual teachings.

  The position of confessors was invidious. Anthony Kenny, an Oxford philosopher, was a Catholic curate in Liverpool in the early 1960s. In his memoir A Path from Rome, a significant ‘confessional’ narrative of its time, he outlined the dilemma of confessors. ‘The wrongness of contraception had been taught as explicitly and definitively by the Church as any moral doctrine. Yet, like most of the Church’s critics, I could see little force in the natural law arguments against it.’ He found himself constantly repeating and enforcing the Church’s teaching even though he was conscious that, ‘If the other doctrines I doubted turned out false, then in general no one was a loser but myself; but in a case like this it was others who were paying the penalty if the advice was wrong.’ Kenny wrote that he had no alternative but to follow the Church’s doctrine. This was a confessional admission of his decision for ‘serviam’, despite the consequences for his penitents.13

  Many priests, however, were beginning to rebel within the confessional, taking matters on their own conscience and telling their female penitents to go ahead and take the pill. The situation served to increase the anxiety of many priests during this period and added impetus to the mass walkout of some 100,000 priests worldwide in the following decades.

  Conscious of the wide-sca
le collapse of confessional practice, in 1973 Pope Paul VI announced a revision of the ‘Sacrament of Reconciliation’, as confession was now to be known. He distinguished three legitimate rituals: First, the traditional, one-on-one, individual confession; second, a communal service of contrition with individual confession available for those who wished for it; and third, a communal service in which the congregation received ‘general absolution’ of their sins without recounting them individually to a confessor. It was laid down within the rubric for the third form that any grave sin should nevertheless be confessed at a subsequent individual confession. In the years that followed, many priests began to use the rite of general absolution routinely, especially in the run-up to Easter, and it proved to be popular among congregations. Priests reported that the general absolution rite was bringing many lapsed Catholics back to church.14

  In Rome, however, the new pope, John Paul II, elected in 1978, and his new doctrinal enforcer, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, appointed in 1982, were unhappy. The time had come for yet another overhaul of the theology and practice of the sacrament, this time in the form of a retrenchment. In 1983 John Paul convened a synod of bishops in Rome to discuss ‘Reconciliation and Penance’. On the face of it, the meeting was in continuity with the Second Vatican Council, being an attempt to resolve the evident crises collegially by consulting with the bishops. The synod had been preceded by a theological commission that had called for recognition of the social dimension of sin, and hence of such matters as a communal conscience and offences against the common good—including economic crime and pollution of the environment. The commission also advocated recognition of the variety of forms of the sacrament in pastoral practice, thereby noting the benefits of the rite of general absolution in bringing lapsed Catholics back into the fold.15

  In the verbal and written submissions made by the bishops from all over the world, the issue of general absolution was raised repeatedly. Bishops from missionary countries, especially in Africa and Latin America, spoke of the advantage of the rite as a way of administering the sacrament to large numbers of people, many of whom may have travelled for days to hear one Mass in their region. The issue was again raised by the cardinal archbishop of Milan, Carlo Mario Martini, who was charged with collating the more than two hundred verbal and written views expressed on the matter by the bishops. But in delivering his own summary, the new head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger, insisted that absolution must be administered individually and not to a group, except in situations of grave emergency, and even then, with the penitent intending to make a one-on-one individual confession later.

  A year after the synod, John Paul II issued an ‘apostolic exhortation’ ignoring the concerns raised by many of the bishops at the synod. As with Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, it was the pontiff taking upon himself the ultimate teaching role and ignoring the collegial authority of his bishops. Citing the Council of Trent, four hundred years back, rather than the recent Second Vatican Council, he spoke in his apostolic exhortation of confession as having a ‘juridical’ and a ‘medicinal’ character. In its final section, individual, as opposed to general, absolution was advocated as the only means of healing the soul in mortal sin. In a ruling that many priests saw as a bid to exert clerical control over individual souls and consciences, the ritual of general absolution was banned.16

  John Paul II, as a priest in his youth, had been in the habit of spending an entire hour delivering spiritual direction to each individual penitent who came to him. He saw confession as a ‘drama’, an act of intense religious imagination in which a person’s ideal self and real self were contrasted and compared in the presence of the confessor. This approach (he spoke elsewhere of typically taking more than an hour over each confession when he was a parish priest) hardly helped to solve the predicament of priests serving thousands of souls across vast terrains of the third world. Nor did it address the clear evidence that there were fewer priests every year in the developed world. Nor was he listening to the lay faithful any more than he had heeded his bishops at the synod.17

  John Paul II acknowledged the notion of ‘social sin’ that had been put forward by the Latin American bishops, but he remained wedded to that imaginative ‘drama’ of the individual soul in its ‘vertical’ relationship with his or her better self, and with God, in the presence of the confessor, who acted as a kind of theatrical director.

  The question of the age for first confession was not addressed, but the exhortation confirmed that, without exception, first communion must be preceded by first confession. Yet concerns about the inappropriateness of confession from the age of seven had been voiced by parents who retained memories of oppression in the confessional. In 1973, responding to parental anxieties, the German bishops had allowed that the rule of first confession before first communion might be waived, allowing parents to make the decision on the ideal age for their children to receive the sacrament. By 1977, under pressure from Rome, the proviso was withdrawn. Lay Catholics and pastors nevertheless continued to be anxious about children being forced to make their confessions at a tender age, when the majority of the faithful had ceased going to confession at all.18

  The moral theologian Professor John Mahoney, SJ, writing to me about the problem of early confession, argued:

  What I find hard to accept is not the passing of regular confession, like many other devotions, but the way in which the passing is officially deplored, and we are still apparently trying to drill into children making their ‘first confession’ and the need to make their confession weekly, in spite of the fact that their teachers and parents (and priests) have given up this regular practice. It smacks of inconsistency and even intellectual dishonesty, which is particularly reprehensible with regard to young children. The Church needs courageously in this, as in so many other practices, to review its approach and teaching.

  MEANWHILE, THERE WAS an impression throughout the 1980s that the split between teaching and practice on sexual matters was widening. Was there any hope of a resolution to problems that were driving Catholics from the Church in ever growing numbers? In 1993 I interviewed Cardinal Carlo Mario Martini, who was considered until his death in 2012 to be a leading progressive voice in the Church and even a likely candidate someday to be pope. As it turned out, he would be the chief rival to Joseph Ratzinger in the 2005 conclave following the death of John Paul II. In our conversation, which took place in the cardinal’s palace in Milan, he revealed himself to be remote from the simplistic liberal image promoted by many of his supporters and detractors. On contraception, however, the ‘sin’ that had driven so many sexually active Catholics from confession, and indeed the Church, he made a bold statement: ‘Contraception is something special, to do with special points of moral teaching. There is a contrast in attitude between northern countries and Latin countries on moral questions. In Italy we believe the ideal is set high so as to attain something. In other countries they think that they must actually achieve the ideal, and they are anxious if they fail.’ The perspective admitted a measure of relativism, and the language was interesting: the Church’s teaching on contraception was a ‘special point’ rather than an infallible doctrine. He elaborated:

  I don’t know what the development will be as regards contraception. But I believe that the Church’s teaching has not been expressed so well. The fact is that the problem of contraception is relatively new; it was only really possible with new techniques in the past forty or so years. The Church, on the other hand, thinks very slowly, so I’m confident we will find some formula to state things better, so that the problem is better understood and more adapted to reality. I admit that there is a gap and that bothers me, but I am confident it can be overcome.

  Cardinal Martini went on to give an example of how a similar problem was resolved in the past: ‘Usury’, he said, ‘was an almost insurmountable impediment in the fourteenth century, but little by little we began to see the problem in a different light, although it took cen
turies to resolve it.’

  Talking of the antagonisms and divisions within the Church, he said: ‘We are not all contemporaries in a biographical sense. We are in the 1990s, but some Catholics are still mentally in the 1960s and some in the 1940s, and some even in the last century; it’s inevitable that there will be clashes of mentalities.’19

  Twelve

  Varieties of Confessional Experience

  Nothing could be more impossible than that God should be wrath. For wrath and friendship are two contraries. He that layeth and destroyeth our wrath, and maketh us meek and mild—we must believe that he is ever, in the same love, meek and mild; which is contrary to wrath.

  —Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

  THE GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CATHOLICS are amply illustrated in the correspondence generated in the course of my research.1 In addition to the many people responding to my article in The Tablet who still carried memories of torment and abuse, I heard from some who had never found confession to be a negative experience personally, yet still voiced positive criticisms. The correspondence as a whole presented a variety of perspectives based on respondents’ personal experiences and the contrasts between quotations I heard from the young and the old, married people and single people, cradle Catholics and converts, laypeople, priests, and one bishop. All in all, the material provides a wide-ranging overview of current attitudes and practices, suggesting that the sacrament continues to evolve.