The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  The current generation of young Catholics, aged fourteen to twenty-four in my sample, are now largely free of the oppressive confessional practices of the past that prompted unwarranted guilt and fear. First confession is still part of the celebration of first communion for young children. However, pastors and parents are now complicit in imparting to them the idea that confession is a brief and insignificant threshold to the more important celebration of the Eucharist. Pastors, catechists, and parents do their best to make light of the ritual. Confessor and child-penitent sit side by side, or facing each other, in full sight of the congregation. There is a tendency to eliminate sin language and to emphasise a God who loves and forgives.2

  A fourteen-year-old correspondent wrote that on the occasion of her first confession when she was eight, the priest greeted her with a smile, and she talked to him ‘about things I had done wrong.’ She remembers ‘we spoke freely and I relaxed. . . . I told him about not cleaning my bedroom, or not obeying my mother, all of which made him chuckle jovially.’ Since her first confession this correspondent has attended the sacrament on only one other occasion, this time in preparation for her confirmation four years later. Her account is typical of today’s experience. Like others in her age group, she receives the Eucharist whenever she goes to Mass.

  Young Catholics attending Catholic schools are encouraged, perhaps before Easter, to attend a single communal ritual of contrition, followed by the opportunity to make individual confession to one of several attending priests. I was told of experiments whereby schoolchildren will confess in small groups: admitting, for example, that they have been guilty of belonging to a bullying clique.

  Not every priest is a chuckling jovial pastor, but young people appear to be decisive in rejecting traditionalist, hardline approaches. One young single Catholic, twenty-three and recently graduated from college, noted the contrast between two priests she had known. ‘When I made my first holy communion I was used to the loving, creative, forgiving God which both my parents educated me in and our local priest’, she wrote. When the family moved, she came up against a new priest who expressed a Christianity that was ‘cruel and unforgiving’. This priest, she said, ‘quite changed my ideas about my faith.’ She remembers sitting in the pews on Sundays, covering her ears as the priest described ‘the shocking lengths women will go to for an abortion’, and how her ‘ever forgiving God would never forgive their sin.’ She had never suffered oppression or abuse in confession, but feels no compulsion to confess, and believes that censorious priests turn away more and more Catholics ‘who struggle in the modern world to find a happy balance between their lives and their faith.’

  A recent convert to Catholicism in her sixties acknowledged that she approaches confession without the hang-ups of cradle Catholics of her generation. She had never been instructed on how to make her confession. She, too, spoke of ‘wrongs she has done to God, to society, to friends and neighbours, to my family, to myself’, rather than of ‘sins’. It is more challenging, she believes, ‘saying these wrongs out loud to the priest than simply acknowledging them to myself. . . . And I must be prepared to make amends for my wrongdoings.’ She wrote that she does not come out of confession feeling forgiven. ‘After all, what is “being forgiven”? I don’t feel that the priest saying the absolution is the same as being truly forgiven.’

  Some correspondents wrote of valuing the anonymity of old-style confession. An eighty-three-year-old nun who had entered the religious life in the 1950s wrote that she goes to confession at Westminster Cathedral so that she cannot be recognised by the confessor: ‘I go to confession about five times a year. I have to wait a long time in a long queue which gives me time to prepare. I find the priests ready to spend time in discussing the issues which I confess and which I could not describe as sins but rather as imperfections which can hinder the spiritual life.’

  Many more, however, wrote of preferring to confess to a sympathetic priest that they knew. For them, the ritual of the sacrament was less important than the relationship. Some of these correspondents stressed that spiritual direction was more important than feeling forgiven. Indeed, many seeking spiritual direction preferred a woman counsellor to a priest. One correspondent wrote, ‘I have a spiritual director, a lovely Carmelite sister who gives me direction in my prayer life.’ She added, ‘The deepening of my relationship with God occurs most strongly through contemplative prayer, through which I receive his grace. In this fast moving and noisy world, the return to the old Christian practices of quiet prayer times and praying the Scriptures would seem a most healthy way forward to gain reconciliation with God. In the words of the little catechism “Why did God make me? To know him, to love him and to serve him . . .” We do need to get to know him—the other two follow on.’

  A Franciscan priest wrote, in a similar mode, that ‘confession as a regular practice can now feel infantile and misdirected. Catholic life is no longer compliance with a catalogue of precepts governing every detail of behaviour.’ The life of the spirit grows more, he said, ‘by aspiring to ideals than [by] avoiding failures. What we need is a practice to take us deeper in understanding God’s action in us, our motivation, and growing self-knowledge, in that order.’ For this reason he questions the ‘focus on absolution’, which can be ‘misleading’. He advocated the function of ‘the Celtic Soul Friend’, a figure that other correspondents also invoked. ‘He or she . . . is someone sympathetic, wise and spiritual acting as a catalyst on our personal journey’, he wrote.3

  Many of the correspondents attempted to tell a story of their developing relationships with confession over a lifetime. One woman who had been brought up outside the Church converted to Catholicism following her university years. She began to confess weekly, but saw it merely as a chore, a discipline. After several years she decided to confess only once a year, during Lent, and always to a strange confessor. This practice came to an end in 1983, when a priest gave her, as she put it, ‘inappropriate’ advice. She gave up confession on principle. ‘The Church’s emphasis on one-on-one confession now seems to me misguided, with the potential to encourage a power complex in the clergy and infantilism in the laity. It does not allow for communal sin (e.g., my totally unwilling but unavoidable involvement in the Iraq war because I contributed to its cost through taxation).’ As with so many correspondents, she found the services of general absolution uplifting. ‘If the Church wants more people to go to confession, bring back general absolution.’

  Divorce and remarriage without an annulment has separated many Catholics not only from confession but from the Church. Yet some nevertheless find their way back with an understanding priest. An American woman who has been three times married and twice divorced wrote that she gave up confession when she went on the birth control pill. ‘My Catholic upbringing couldn’t balance this with me being true to my faith, so I left the Church—angry at God’, she wrote. It was the experience of being at her mother’s deathbed that brought her back to the Church: ‘It was difficult, I was divorced, married, divorced, married. Approaching my local church, the parish priest was very supportive, a 70-year-old worldly priest. He helped me prepare an application for an annulment for my first marriage, the other two were only register type.’ She wrote, “I am full of the joys of my faith.’

  Some correspondents raised the phenomenon of counselling and psychotherapy, which continue to flourish while confession declines. A ‘consultant analyst’ speculated that the need to unburden has shifted from the confessional to the therapist’s couch. ‘Counselling and psychotherapy’, he wrote, ‘have become more widespread because they not only make sense to many people but are also ways of effecting change.’ He argued that ‘talk’ therapies have been characterised as spiritual technologies—ways of helping people to change and find healing for their brokenness. He believes that loss and pain are central themes in most therapies, and that adjustment to change in human beings takes time. ‘For me, psychotherapy means “soul healing.” I wonder if part of the current p
roblem is the language of sin rather than that of change and growth. The former is currently deeply unpopular while the latter is understandable to more people.’

  A woman in her late forties wrote that she had enjoyed spiritual direction since her twenties and finds that this, along with daily quiet time, keeping a journal, and the like, is usually enough to allow her to ‘reflect on my journey and see what is going astray, where I am drawn and where I feel driven.’ About once or twice a year she seeks something ‘more formal’, although not necessarily in a Catholic church. ‘I last went to a reconciliation service in Holy Week in an Anglican setting’, she said. She values going on retreats, where she gets ‘a great sense of clearing out and a new start.’ This woman was not alone in declaring her belief that ‘forgiveness is there always. The sacrament is more about my recognition that I’ve been forgiven, my acceptance of that forgiveness.’

  There were many correspondents who were critical of Catholic confessional practice even though they had not personally been victims of abuse. Their experiences in youth, however, measured the distance between the pre–Vatican II Church and the Church today. An ex-priest wrote that there is great satisfaction to be gained from confession, since it is only natural to offload the burdens on one’s mind. He takes this to be ‘a fundamental human experience and need.’ Yet, now in his sixties, he recalls the unnecessary, negative impact on children. ‘Our models for purity in adolescence were Dominic Savio an Italian youth of the mid-nineteenth century who died of pleurisy at the age of fifteen. As a child he put stones in his bed to be uncomfortable and wore a hair shirt. Then there was Maria Goretti, murdered during a rape attack by the family’s lodger . . . We fought impure thoughts as energetically and wearily as our father fought the Germans.’ Only today, half a century on, can he see the funny side of it. ‘I can chuckle at our local curate who used to ask us as children—“Are you married or single?”—when we confessed in unbroken voices to having dirty thoughts.’

  A former seminarian, now a professed Buddhist, commented on his years in junior seminary. He never experienced abuse, yet his story reveals the constructive potential of one former Catholic’s negative experiences. ‘For an adolescent with a little imagination, the idea that sexual transgressions killed the soul was horrifying’, he wrote. ‘You had to see yourself as having deliberately cut yourself off from God’s grace, the most important thing in life, and it made the need for the confessional even stronger: one had to get absolution if one was to restore life to one’s own soul, a restoration that depended absolutely upon the power of the church.’ But, even worse, he wrote, ‘was the hatred of the body that this ideology of mortal sin brought about, a hatred of a body whose impulses led to this constant death of the soul, and a self-loathing at the weakness that led to the succumbing to these evil impulses.’ It was not until he was in his early thirties, he went on, that he overcame the negative feelings this training generated. He wondered whether the process of seminary formation did not lead to a kind of erosion of a future priest’s moral integrity. ‘One either repressed the horror of mortal sin and separation from God and acted almost as an automaton; or one was cynical about the whole story of mortal sin and sexual transgression and got on with it under the cover of priestly prestige.’ He concluded by saying, ‘Thank God I never became a priest.’

  Only one bishop wrote in response to my invitation in The Tablet. Like Anthony Kenny, author of The Path from Rome (discussed in Chapter 11), the bishop turned the tables by writing about the burdens of a confessor. ‘We ask about the effect on the penitent of the “shopping list” confession, but what about its effect on the priest? I found that the daily round of almost entirely predictable minor infringements of what was perceived of as “Church rules” quite frustrating and dispiriting. Only once did I experience a satisfactory encounter when one individual actually said that he was not ready for absolution at the end of the meeting, and was not ready for some time after that.’ The bishop believes that the ‘shopping list’ confessions were an attempt to engage with the guilt that many felt and still feel as Catholics. ‘On the one hand’, he said, ‘I think this is a pity that Catholics were made to feel guilty by an over-emphasis on sin and the threat of hell, but on the other hand it is a recognition that none of us is responding sufficiently to the call of the gospel.’ The laundry list and the brief penance gave people temporary relief, he went on, but ‘often (in my own experience) more akin to coming out of the dentist, glad the experience is over and pleased to have been strong enough to do it.’ He asserted that:

  the people in our churches are not good or less good because they come to confession or not. They are going to be ‘better Catholics’ (whatever that might mean) if they are trying to deepen their understanding of what faith might mean to them. Deus Caritas Est [God Is Love] reminds us that faith is an encounter with a person, and that the basic message of the gospel is that ‘God loved the world so much . . .’ If the Sacrament of Reconciliation can help us to be more loveable, then all the better; if it reinforces my belief that I am not loveable, then so much the worse.

  Epilogue

  It is very odd that the view of God as seen from the Church should ever be simply the view of God as seen from Hell. For damnation must be just being fixed in this illusion, stuck forever with the God of the Law, stuck forever with the God provided by our sin.

  —Herbert McCabe, OP, The Tablet, 5 March 2011

  PSYCHOANALYST AND PHILOSOPHER JULIA KRISTEVA has written of the residents of ‘steel city’—her metaphor for the collective maladies of the psyche that blight much of Western life. Its denizens, she declares, have nothing to do except ‘buy and sell goods and images, which amounts to the same thing, since they both are dull, shallow symbols . . . while in the next street, heaps of filth abound and drugs accompany the sleep or the fury of the social outcasts.’ There are those who attempt to ‘create a space for an “inner zone”—a secret garden, an intimate quarter, or more simply and ambitiously, a psychic life.’ For the most part, however, the majority remain just ‘as anxious, depressed, neurotic, and psychotic as the Freudian unconscious would wish them to be.’ In view of this state of affairs, she says, psychoanalysis has much work to do, since ‘Freud’s doctrine seeks precisely to free us from this suppressed space of psychological ill-being.’ The problem, though, is that the benefits of psychoanalysis have been thwarted by pharmacological fixes, superficial talk therapy, and ‘plain ignorance’. What chance is there in these circumstances, she asks, for psychoanalysis to ease our dislocations and perplexities?1

  In the same way, it could be argued that the scope and benefits of the sacrament of penance to ease the ills of the soul have been relativized and obscured, not only by the myriad ‘fess-up’, ‘guilt-trip’ alternatives of the late twentieth century, but by the long-term trivialisation of the sacrament itself. The routine, frequent, ‘devotional’ guilt-fix confessions imposed on my generation—and those of my parents and grandparents—were a travesty of the true potential of the sacrament, as many of my correspondents, lay and clerical, men and women, have argued from personal experience. In the case of children, the practice was inappropriate, harmful, and in many cases lastingly so.

  Just as psychoanalysis offers narrative depth, a willingness to explore backwards and forwards, and a drive to know oneself and to transform oneself and grow, so sacramental confession has the potential capacity to administer knowledge of the whole of one’s spiritual life, past, present, and future, in relation to one’s faith community and in relation to God.

  Connected with the recent decline of confession, moreover, are significant shifts in Christian perceptions of sin. The word for ‘sin’ in many languages derives from the idea of ‘missing the mark’—in Greek, hamartia. For Catholics under traditionalist disciplines and catechesis of confession, this ‘missing the mark’ traditionally meant a failure to live up to God’s laws. Catholic children growing up in the first half of the twentieth century were taught that their sins were offens
es against God’s infinite goodness. God was the all-powerful, big ‘I AM’ who stood in readiness to be offended, and even to punish for all eternity.

  The capital sins worthy of God’s anger and punishment were the Ten Commandments of the Bible, or the Seven Deadly Sins of the Desert Fathers. But from the Middle Ages on, moralists increasingly encouraged preoccupation with those subtle sins of interiority and the fine gradations of motives and intentions. The least ‘impure thought’ was a mortal sin, an offence against God and one’s soul. Human failings were categorised into checklists of imperfections disconnected from circumstances and relationships.

  The era of the Enlightenment tended to revive and reinforce the separation of the conscious inward soul from the world. Moral and ascetical theology emphasised those ‘virtues’ proper to a medieval cloister—as advocated, for example, by Thomas à Kempis’s early fifteenth-century The Imitation of Christ. Here is a typical passage from Imitation illustrating this intense preoccupation with self:

  Rest from inordinate desire of knowledge, for therein is found much distraction and deceit. Those who have knowledge desire to appear learned, and to be called wise. Many things there are to know which profiteth little or nothing to the soul. And foolish out of measure is he who attendeth upon other things rather than those which serve to his soul’s health. Many words satisfy not the soul, but a good life refresheth the mind, and a pure conscience giveth great confidence towards God.2

  The highest virtue consisted in the individual soul’s union with God, involving aspirations to perfect recollection, detachment, poverty of spirit, purity of heart, humility, and obedience to spiritual authority.

  The idea of virtue as the pursuit of the common good, however, had also been active in Christianity. Its intellectual origins date back to ancient Greece and the ethics of Aristotle. Humans, according to his philosophy, are communal animals. Virtue, wholeness, is the nurturing of one’s true purpose or goal in everyday life, whether in trade, husbandry, manual skills, education, or medicine—that is, to be of service to one’s community. Aristotle’s ethics, adopted and adapted by the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, have been a feature, albeit subterranean, of Catholic moral philosophy to this day. Its revival in recent decades has been a central dynamic for groups that seek to express Catholicism’s social dimension. The philosophical foundations for this restoration have been provided by moral philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, the Aristotelian and Thomist scholar. In parallel, the idea of sin as ‘social’ rather than interior finds expression alongside the liberation theologies developed and practised in the third world—for example, by Leonardo Boff in Latin America.3