The tensions within the Catholic Church between inwardly preoccupied virtue, on the one hand, and liberation virtue, on the other, are well known. Borrowing from the history of science, some liberal theologians have described their distance from ‘traditionalist’ theology as being comparable to the so-called paradigm shift in the natural sciences. In other words, Catholic teaching is no longer seen as immutable, patriarchal, exclusive, defensive, and militant, but as open to historical, cultural, and social factors, willing to engage society and the non-Catholic world. This perspective has been given practical impetus by younger generations of lay Catholics who find in Christianity a duty to combat social, economic, and political injustice. Their moral concerns focus not on the exquisite state of their souls, but on the alleviation of poverty, homelessness, hunger, and disease; care for the environment; and peace building. They seek to combat the ‘sins’ of racism, sexism, child abuse, and the oppression of minorities.4
In the meantime, an ancient and enduring idea of sin, unfamiliar to the catechists of my childhood, but widely accepted today, declares that if there is a Hell it consists not in a physical place of torture but in a person’s deliberate abandonment of God’s love through the sin of self-idolatry. It is not God who rejects and punishes the ‘sinner’, but the self-adulator who turns away from God’s unconditional love.
The notion finds expression in the Book of Genesis. In Hebrew, the word yetzer is often employed to denote sin. It is related, however, to the word for ‘creation’, yetzirah, and to the word for ‘imagine’ (which is another form of creation—making something out of nothing). In Genesis the power of imagination is synonymous with the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Satan tempts our first parents to acquire ‘the Knowledge of Good and Evil’, which sets them on the path to rivalling God. ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil’, Satan tells Eve. But it is the power of imagination that makes a moral life possible. It makes possible the recollection of past actions, options taken or rejected. Imagination is the capacity to envision future choices and weigh their comparative consequences. The power of imagination thus becomes both the source of freedom and a potential curse. For at the heart of the Genesis myth is a powerful metaphor for the human capacity to supplant God in a life of self-love.5
Self-adulation has been explored down the centuries in works of religious and artistic imagination: from Narcissus in Greek mythology, to Sophocles’ Electra, to the sins of avarice, pride, and envy in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Two kinds of narcissism are portrayed in Shakespeare’s Othello—that of the Moor and the diabolical Iago. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus barters earthly self-aggrandisement for an eternity of punishment. John Milton’s Satan is the archetype of supreme pride and God-envy. And in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Gray’s vanity is matched by his selfishness in everyday life.
A powerful example of the predicament of grotesque self-centredness in mid-twentieth-century literature is to be found in William Golding’s novel Pincher Martin. Martin is shipwrecked in the Atlantic. The action of the novel takes place, one eventually understands, at the moment of Martin’s death. Martin cannot accept death, however, because he cannot surrender his voracious ego. We are given to believe that he is stranded on a rock. In fact, as he drowns, he is exploring a missing jagged tooth in his mouth, to which he clings as his final vestige of ownership, colonising it and subjecting it to his will. If there is a Hell, according to Golding, it is in the inability to accept one’s creatureliness, one’s finitude—one’s consciousness of a creator on the horizon of existence. In the course of the novel we are told of Martin’s legendary lifelong selfishness: ‘This painted bastard here takes anything he can lay his hands on. Not food . . . that’s far too simple. He takes the best part, the best seat, the most money, the best notice, the best woman. He was born with his mouth and his flies open and both hands out to grab. He’s a cosmic case of the bugger who gets his penny and someone else’s bun.’ In Martin’s life, self-idolatry manifests itself in acquisitiveness, possessing, and having.6
There are flashes of a mysterious black lightning, suggestive of divine influence, seeking to distract Martin from his inward egotistic insistence on being the very centre and meaning of life and the universe. The play of the lightning is reminiscent of the water snakes in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: it seeks to find a chink in the carapace of Martin’s egotism, even as he draws his self-protective claws in ever tighter: ‘There was nothing but the centre and the claws. They were huge and strong and inflamed to red. They closed on each other. They contracted.’7
We never know whether Martin finally yields his inexorable narcissism to the divinity of black lightning. Some commentators suggest that Martin finally submits, and that the novel is a portrait of Purgatory rather than Hell.8
THE POINT OF CHRISTIANITY, according to a constituency of theologians of the ‘new paradigm’, is to teach by example the virtues of spiritual community in contrast to the sin of self-adulation. Christianity is essentially, therefore, a community, a ‘school of prayer and friendship’, rather than a hierarchical reformatory of top-down dogma. The Catholic Church, however, has been a community in conflict with itself on this issue, with far-reaching implications for the sacrament of confession.9
During the recent celebrations for the half-century that has elapsed since the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, that momentous event for the world’s Catholics has been explained in several different ways. Whatever else its goals, the Council attempted to overturn much of the legalistic, centralising, Anti-Modernist tendencies of the Church of the Piuses (Pius X, XI, and XII). The Council was not entirely successful in achieving that aim, however, and where it succeeded there have been gradual, inexorable processes of retrenchment by recent popes. The society that invokes Pius X’s name—the Society of Pius X—demonstrates the discontent of those who regret the loss of that former, patriarchal, citadel Church of immutable truths, dictatorial rulings, and a punitive God.
The Second Vatican Council declared in two key documents that confession, or the sacrament of penance, was a reconciliation that took place not only between God and the individual soul, but between the fellowship of the people of God and each individual Christian as a member of the congregation and the community at large. The decision of Council Fathers to emphasise the long-neglected social nature of the sacrament, and the social nature of sin, had much to do with their determination to recover aspects of practice and doctrine that had been lost down the centuries. Exploring the communal rather than the purely private and devotional aspect of confession’s past traditions, the French theologian Henri de Lubac offered this insight: ‘The reconciliation of the sinner is in the first place a reconciliation with the Church, this latter constituting an efficacious sign of reconciliation with God.’ The Council, in turn, stressed the need for the Church to engage with society and with other Christians, other religions, and the world. Its final decree, which found much resistance from conservatives, proclaimed freedom of religion and conscience. The Council, finally, acknowledged that salvation is not a monopoly of Catholics, and that the moral life of religion is communitarian, rather than private and interior.10
It has been argued by Church historians that, in its conflict with the Protestant reformers John Wycliffe, John Hus, and Martin Luther, Catholicism came to emphasise its controlling, legal, and juridical structures over its communitarian fellowship. As the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner put it: ‘The individualism of modern times, the origin of which can already be found in the late Middle Ages’, meant that ‘grace became more and more something which is worked out between God and the individual alone and taken in isolation.’ The Second Vatican Council sought to rectify this emphasis by recovering the idea of communal reconciliation practised in the early Church.11
This background explains in part why the rite of congregational or general confession and absolution was so popular through the 197
0s, and why it brought so many people back to the faith who had been lapsed for years. It appeared to strike a chord in many Catholics, consistent with the spirit of renewal of the times. The majority of my respondents lamented the banning of this rite, and pastors had reasons to lament it, too.
The Second Vatican Council prompted a re-examination, moreover, of that essential Greek term metanoia—meaning transformation, or change of heart and mind—which had created such fierce divisions over the understanding of the sacrament of confession at the time of the Reformation. Metanoia is neither the doing of penance nor the judgement and sacramental operation of the minister, conciliar theologians concluded, but a person’s rejection of self-centredness, and an inclination of the heart towards God. Thus the Council sought to advocate both individual and communal virtues in the subordination of self to God and to the community. Does a ‘sinner’ require the absolution of a priest to return to God? The view of many theologians and lay Catholics today is that a penitent is reconciled with God before going to confession, not as a result of it. Were the Church officially and clearly to expound this teaching, many Catholics would be released from lingering guilt that keeps them from practice. It should also reduce the dangerous clerical assumption of unearthly power so aptly encapsulated in James Joyce’s portrayal of the temptation of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘He would hold his secret knowledge and secret power, being as sinless as the innocent . . .’ Stephen’s temptation to priestly supremacy involved, as well, the masculine power of the confessor over the submissive female penitent, and the unequal power relationship of a confessor over a child. Stephen fantasises that he would know the ‘sinful longings and sinful thoughts and sinful acts . . . murmured into his ears . . . by the lips of women and girls: but rendered immune mysteriously at his ordination by the imposition of hands his soul would pass again uncontaminated to the white peace of the altar.’12
The late Father Herbert McCabe, a Dominican theologian, gave a homily on confession not long before he died: ‘You are not forgiven because you confess your sin’, he said. ‘You confess your sin, recognise yourself for what you are, because you are forgiven.’ The theologian Karl Rahner, citing Augustine, made the same point, invoking the image of Lazarus rising from the tomb. When a Christian stands outside the confessional ready to tell his sins to a priest, ‘he has already been raised by the word of grace of Christ from the tomb of sin like a Lazarus[;] . . . he has already begun to live.’13
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THIS BOOK OWES ITS EXISTENCE TO the late Peter Carson, my publisher for forty years at Allen Lane, Viking-Penguin, and Profile Books. Peter midwifed the text of this book until his death in January 2013. He is sorely missed by colleagues and the rest of the publishing world. Being above all an ‘authors’ publisher’, he is especially missed by the many writers he discovered, nurtured, and inspired. My personal debt to him is incalculable.
My research has drawn on a wide circuit of recent scholarly work on the role of confession in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, especially in the archives of the Spanish Inquisition and canon law tribunals in Italy. Counter-Reformation studies continue to attract scholars, and their work provides new perspectives and overviews of a period and subject that, from a Catholic view, had become closer to apologetics than authentic history. A critical overview of modern manuals of moral and pastoral theology, from Alphonsus Liguori to Henry Davis, has enabled me to form an impression of a confessor’s formation in the seminaries through the first two-thirds of the past century. For the link between sexual abuse and confession in the second half of the twentieth century, official reports from the United States, Canada, Ireland, Germany, and Australia have been crucial. Information continues to come in piecemeal via the media and the courts.
I was part of a seminar at University College, Dublin, in the spring of 2012 run by Dr. Marie Keenan, whose interviews with offending priests (on leaving jail) have proved essential to my research. I am grateful to Dr. Keenan for permission to quote from interviews with priests who had served jail sentences as a result of convictions relating to clerical sexual abuse. Research on the local incidence of abuse conducted by Professor Gerry Kearns (who also participated in the seminar) of Maynooth University College, Dublin, has also proved invaluable. Understanding the psychological dimensions of confession, and stages of moral development, took me to the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and others as well as to the ideas of Michel Foucault. At the same time, I have derived considerable benefit from my conversations with the psychoanalyst and sociologist Professor Juliet Mitchell of the University of Cambridge and with the London psychoanalyst Josephine Klein.
In the summer of 2012 I was invited by the international Catholic weekly The Tablet to publish an article on the neglect of confession. In consequence I received more than three hundred responses from readers around the world. This correspondence, together with interviews with penitents and confessors, has provided ample source material for the views expressed by the lay and clerical Catholic faithful that I have discussed in Part Three. I am indebted to Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet, for publishing my article. In addition, I thank all the respondents for their contributions. Their views have been essential even if they are not cited in the text. Charles Lysaght; Professor Bryan Fanning of University College, Dublin; and the late Dr. Pádraic Conway of the Newman Centre, Dublin, also helped to expedite my research and discussions in Ireland.
I have also benefited from my correspondence with Father Desmond O’Donnell, OMI. Dr. David Bernard McLoughlin of Newman University College enlightened me on the topic of penitentials. The moral theologian Father Jim McManus advised me on questions relating to Alphonsus Liguori.
I would also like to thank Professor Nicholas Lash, Dr. Mary Laven, Nathan Brooker, and Roger Labrie for reading the book, or parts of it, in manuscript form, and for their valued comments; and I must thank Father Alban McCoy, Canon John Koenig, Janet Lash, John Wilkins, Professor John Mahoney, Dr. Christopher Burlinson and Dr. Michael McGhee for their insights on specific matters.
In addition, I thank my friend and agent Clare Alexander in London, Zoë Pagnamenta in New York, and my publishers Andrew Franklin, Lara Heimert, and Jens Dehning.
This book was written under the hospitable auspices of Jesus College, Cambridge, for which I thank its Master and Fellows. Finally, I am especially grateful to my friend and ‘reader’ Professor Stephen Heath of Jesus College, Cambridge, for his encouragement and advice, and for scrutinising the manuscript and proofs. Any remaining infelicities are my responsibility.
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