THE DARK BOX
ALSO BY
JOHN CORNWELL
Nonfiction:
Coleridge: Poet and Revolutionary
A Free and Balanced Flow (with Colin Legum)
Earth to Earth
A Thief in the Night
The Hiding Places of God (Powers of Darkness, Powers of Light)
Nature’s Imagination (ed.)
The Power to Harm
Consciousness and Human Identity (ed.)
Hitler’s Pope
Breaking Faith
Explanations (ed.)
Hitler’s Scientists
The Pontiff in Winter
Seminary Boy
Darwin’s Angel
Philosophers and God (ed. with Michael McGhee)
Newman’s Unquiet Grave
Meditations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (ed.)
Fiction:
The Spoiled Priest
Seven Other Demons
Strange Gods
Copyright © 2014 by John Cornwell
Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocrypha / Deuterocanonical Books: An Ecumenical Edition. New York: Collins, 1973.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cornwell, John, 1940–
The dark box : a secret history of confession / John Cornwell.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-08049-6 (e-book) 1.Confession—History. I.Title.
BV845.C67 2014
264'.0208609—dc23
2013042961
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of
Peter Carson
1938–2013
Editor, Publisher, Friend
I was so full of joy, submitting and humbling myself before the confessor, a simple, timid priest, and exposing all the filth of my soul;
I was so full of joy at my thoughts merging with the aspirations of the fathers who wrote the ritual prayers;
I was so full of joy to be one with all believers, past and present . . .
—Leo Tolstoy, Confession, translated from the Russian by Peter Carson, 2013
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Prologue
PART ONE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONFESSION
One: Early Penitents and Their Penances
Two: Confession into Its Own
Three: Confession and the Counter-Reformers
Four: Fact, Fiction, and Anticlericalism
PART TWO: THE CHILD PENITENTS
Five: The Pope Who ‘Restored’ Catholicism
Six: Pius X’s Spy-Net
Seven: The Great Confessional Experiment
Eight: The Making of a Confessor
Nine: Seminary Sexology
PART THREE: ‘SOUL MURDER’
Ten: Sexual Abuse in the Confessional
Eleven: Confession Imagined
Twelve: Varieties of Confessional Experience
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Notes
Index
AUTHOR’S NOTE
WHEN I BEGAN RESEARCH FOR THIS BOOK, I ASKED CATHOLIC friends: ‘How long since your last confession?’ I heard ‘twenty years’, ‘thirty years’, and an occasional ‘two months’. Sometimes I was told ‘Mind your own business’. It seems only right to state my own circumstance from the outset.
Brought up after the Second World War in London’s East End by a devout mother of Irish extraction, I was instructed in the Catholic faith by nuns from the age of five. I made my first confession at age seven, the day before my first communion. On Saturday afternoons or evenings, all the family, including four siblings, joined the lengthy queues at our local church to confess our sins—all except my father, that is, who only became a Catholic to marry my mother.
In confession, as we were taught, you started by telling the priest how many weeks or months had elapsed since your last confession. You listed the sins committed since that last confession, then said a prayer of contrition. The priest would ask some questions to clarify the nature of the sins you had told him. He might also offer spiritual advice. You were obliged to feel genuinely sorry for having offended God, and to declare that you would try not to commit those sins again. If it was possible to make reparation to the people you had wronged, it was important to do so. The priest then imposed a penance—usually a few prayers—and said the words of absolution. We were told that absolution relieved us of the guilt for the sins we had confessed. We were taught that in the case of a mortal sin (a grave sin deserving of Hell), absolution lifted the dire penalty of eternal punishment. Nowadays, Catholics are commonly told that absolution reconciles them to God’s love.
My father was convinced, like many non-Catholics, that confession allowed Catholics to commit sins, have them forgiven (and feel good), then commit them again. As a well-taught Catholic, I knew better. Absolution did not work unless you had a ‘firm purpose of amendment’. That determination, we realised, was as fragile as human nature itself.
I served Mass at our local church every morning from the age of ten. At age twelve I admitted to our parish priest that I wanted to be like him—a priest. In retrospect, this was odd, for Father James Cooney—austere, desiccated, humourless—was hardly an attractive role model. My mother said that going to confession with him was like ‘going on trial for your life’. But I had fallen in love with the ritual of the Mass and would spend hours in the privacy of my bedroom bobbing up and down before a makeshift altar, muttering mumbo-jumbo pretend Latin. The following year I was enrolled in a junior seminary—a monastic boarding school for boys, 150 miles from home, where I was to spend five years receiving a privileged education, including Latin and Greek, in preparation for senior seminary.
I got on well with most of our priest-teachers, who worked hard to bring us to a high standard of education. They were generally kind men and exemplary models of priesthood. One day, however, I was sexually propositioned by one of our priests while he was hearing my confession. I realised that externals of clerical piety are no guarantee of authentic holiness. I would never again enjoy unalloyed trust in the beneficence of priests, especially in confession. I nevertheless proceeded at eighteen to the senior seminary, where I stayed long enough to complete the course in philosophy of religion and experience the rigorous priestly formation of that era, including instructions that would shape a future confessor. I was becoming a ‘Catholic cleric’. My vocation had become a matter of habit rather than choice. I had confessed every week of my life—from boyhood to the age of twenty-one.
After seven years of seminary life, junior and senior, I came to see that the priesthood was not for me. I knew in my heart of hearts, and in my genitals, that I would not make it as a celibate. Catching up with the world—music, dancing, girls, lay clothes, making my
own decisions after years of seminary discipline—was not easy. My understanding tutor at Oxford, where I had arrived to study English literature, quipped one day: ‘My dear fellow, you need to learn in life how to take the smooth with the rough . . .’
I became convinced that Catholicism, for me at least, was not an impetus for maturity and happiness. At the same time, I was finding it difficult to reconcile Christianity with an increasingly positivist, scientific view of the world. As a graduate student at Cambridge, I finally, consciously, abandoned my Catholicism. For the next twenty years I would hover between atheism and agnosticism. But time, my dream life, and a gradual appreciation of the difference between religious imagination and magic realism opened the way to at least consider the possibility of a God after atheism.
Marriage to a devout Catholic who brought up our children in the faith, and nostalgia for the rhythms of Catholic liturgy, prompted a change of heart—not so much a return as a progression—although I remain circumspect. Notions of a vengeful God have been difficult to exorcise entirely. To this day, moreover, I have occasional, inchoate suspicions that these renewed quests for a once-rejected God mask a search for the lost abusers of one’s childhood. This book, however, while written from the inevitable perspective of an individual member of the Catholic faithful, draws on a wide range of historical sources and the personal testimonies of fellow Catholics past and present.
PROLOGUE
IN THE EARLY PERIOD OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES, penitents would confess in public those major sins that had excluded them from their communities—such as murder, idolatry, and adultery. The ritual of reconciliation into the community or congregation was seldom allowed more than once in a Christian’s lifetime. It was not until the Middle Ages that all adult members of the faithful within Latin Christianity were obliged to tell their sins to a priest in private once a year. The penitent would kneel before the seated confessor, with the possibility of physical contact between the two. The practice of Roman Catholics entering a dark box to confess their sins did not begin until the mid-sixteenth century, following the Reformation and the fragmentation of Western Christendom.
The confessional box is a booth-like piece of church furniture containing a dividing panel. This panel physically separates the penitent, who kneels in the dark, from the confessor, who sits in the light. There is a grille set in the panel that allows for verbal communication; in theory, it obscures the faces of penitent and confessor from each other. Although most devout Catholics born before 1970 used to enter that box frequently, Catholic confession, whether inside the box or outside it, has been largely abandoned, despite pleas from the previous pope, Benedict XVI, and many of the world’s bishops to revive the practice.
In this book I argue that the rejection of confession is a crucial symptom of a wider crisis within the Catholic Church. A gulf has opened up between official teaching and practice. An alteration across a broad front, described by some theologians as a ‘paradigm shift’ (in emulation of great sea changes in ‘normal’ science), has affected the way many Catholics understand sin, virtue, and the nature of God. This shift, in turn, has created new insights into the meaning of God’s love and forgiveness.1
Over the past four decades, Rome has attempted to make confession more attractive. Today Catholics refer to the sacrament as ‘reconciliation’ (a term used in the early Church), and confessors tend to hear the sins of their penitents in the pews or the sanctuary, or on comfortable chairs in a parish room set aside for the purpose. Yet the more user-friendly circumstances of the sacrament have not brought back the penitents. From the mid-1970s, during the papacy of Paul VI, penitents were offered the option of group absolution—known as ‘general’ absolution; the initiative was quashed by John Paul II in 1983. Mortal, or grave, sins, he insisted, must be absolved in privacy after they have been told to a priest. (Mortal sins, according to orthodox doctrine, include not only the major sins, such as murder, grand larceny, physical violence, and adultery, but also all sexual sins: using condoms, having sex outside of marriage, having homosexual sex, divorcing and remarrying without an annulment, masturbation, and indulging in ‘impure thoughts’.)
Confessions have been so poorly attended in recent years that in many parishes the sacrament is only available by appointment. Some priests will tell you that nobody has sought the sacrament for months. If you go to a cathedral church, you may still find queues of penitents waiting to be confessed in the traditional confessional box; but this is an isolated phenomenon. Many of these old-style confessants, who are nevertheless as likely to be in their twenties as their eighties, cling to a version of Catholicism that most Catholics have abandoned. Many have come from parishes where their confessions cannot be heard, or because they prefer to be confessed by a priest who does not recognise them.
One practice that continues to be upheld throughout the Church, however, despite the widespread decline of confession or reconciliation as a sacrament among adult Catholics, is that of children making their first confession at age seven in preparation for their first communion. A crucial theme of this book is the phenomenon of obligatory confession in early childhood. The story of its universal commencement in the early twentieth century, the widespread oppression it occasioned, and, scandalously, the opportunity it afforded a minority of priests to abuse children sexually reveals the dark face of confession’s recent history.
In the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, there is a handsome illuminated document, penned in black and red gothic script, entitled Memoriale Presbiterorum—an aide memoire for priests. Written in Latin and dating from the early fourteenth century, it has 218 chapters offering guidance to confessors on every aspect of confessional practice. The manual is typical of the many guides for confessors appearing throughout Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.2
One chapter, headed ‘Concerning Children’ (Circa pueros), offers this advice: ‘You ought to know, confessor, that if a child be capable of wrongdoing, near to puberty, he is obliged to confess all his sins at least once a year.’ By the time the Memoriale came to be written, a hundred years had passed since a great council in Rome decreed that all Christians in the Latin tradition must confess their sins at least once a year on reaching the ‘age of discretion’—which, as this manual and many others implied, was around the time of puberty. The age for first confession in the Latin Christian tradition was therefore generally held to be between twelve and fourteen, a view that persisted down the centuries, with local and periodic variations, until the first decade of the twentieth century, when Rome issued a dramatic proclamation on the subject.3
Against the background of the eventful, and at times troubled, evolution of the practice of confession, this book culminates with the story of a historic experiment imposed universally on Catholic children. In 1910, the pope of the day, Pius X, decreed that first confession should be made not at puberty but at the age of seven—which meant that instruction on sin, and the different categories of sins, and the punishments due for sins in Purgatory and Hell, would begin at five or six. The decree also advocated weekly confession for Catholics of every age, instead of annual confession, the former norm for lay members of the faithful. Among the many unintended consequences of that experiment was the inculcation in young children of an oppressive sense of guilt and shame, especially for their bodies, and, for a significant minority, exposure to clerical sexual predators.
These charges are in stark contrast to the undeniable benefits—spiritual and psychological—that result from a mature individual’s admission of remorse for having caused injury to others, and the subsequent forgiveness of the injured party, across a wide spectrum of religious practices and cultural contexts. One of the most beautiful arias in opera concludes Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro—when marital discord, deceit and betrayal end with the husband begging for pardon, and the wife offering unconditional forgiveness. The poignant aria ‘Contessa Perdono’—‘Countess, forgive me’—envelops the cast and the entire audience in a sub
lime ambiance of harmony and reconciliation. A similar poignant moment occurs in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice when Portia extols the power and beneficence of mercy as a type of divine grace:
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.4
Poets of every era testify that the act of unburdening in a form of words and in public brings healing, or, as William Wordsworth put it—‘timely utterance’ gives ‘thought relief’.5 Yet the widely assumed instinctual universality and healing quality of the tendency to confess—or as young people might say today, ‘fess up’—is a matter of debate. (How many marriages have been wrecked by a spouse’s admission of having strayed?) Nor does Catholic confession—involving the patriarchal judgement of a priest over women and children—accord with voluntary exchanges of remorse and forgiveness within relationships where the parties have equal power.
For many centuries confession to a priest in the Catholic Church was obligatory—under pain of further sin. For centuries the Catholic sacrament of confession involved patriarchal authority, secrecy, and itemized lists of discrete ‘sins’ couched in formalised language. The ‘telling’ of sins, moreover, was normally divorced from the narratives and relationships of a penitent’s life story. The role of the confessor was not that of a representative of an injured party, but of judge, healer, dispenser of penance, and representative of the divine.
The desire to be chastised for wrongdoing in a non-religious context can be traced through the works of many writers from Plato to Sigmund Freud, although Freud maintained that our conscious triggers for guilt hide deeper reasons, buried in the subconscious.6 Penances imposed by Catholic confessors today are mild—a few prayers. These ‘penances’, however, are remnants of harsh self-mortification that once included fasts, pilgrimage, exile, and self-flagellation.
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