The Dark Box

by John Cornwell

  Another writer, the late Anthony Burgess, told how he believed he had broken the fast on his first communion day walking to the church in the rain by opening his mouth with joy to taste the shower. ‘Wasn’t that liquid nourishment?’ it dawned on him, as he made his way to the communion rail. Mortal sins lay in wait for the growing child like a heavily infested minefield. ‘It was all too easy to sin’, Burgess commented. ‘Life, indeed, seemed all sin. I bought a twopenny sausage roll at Price’s and then remembered it was Friday. I ate it nevertheless. Still chewing, I ran to evening confession. Swallowing the last flake, I began to whimper.’10

  For many children, the mental torture of confession began with the difficulty of finding ‘sins’ to tell. Many children invented sins only to regret it, realising that they had committed a sacrilege by telling a lie in confession. In his memoir This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff recalls that he could not think of a single sin to confess. Having failed to come up with anything, he was sternly dismissed from the confessional box and told to return when he had something to tell. In the end he appropriated a list of sins verbally suggested to him, merely as examples, by his nun catechist. He had continued to find it impossible to isolate a single sin from his memory: ‘It felt like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you’ve snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line.’11 The problem was production of the ‘list’: the labelled, numbered items, detached from relationships, isolated from the narrative flow of life as experienced and imagined.

  The injustice of the punishments of Hell was baffling to the child. Through to the 1960s, Hell—mostly taught by classroom nuns, and preached by Franciscans, Redemptorists, and Passionists on parish missions—meant eternal punishment for anyone who died with their sins unconfessed, whether that sinner was a mass murderer or a child who had merely missed Mass. For the generation of Catholic children who were raised under the threat of imminent nuclear attack, there was the additional fear of sudden death in a state of unconfessed mortal sin.

  Then there was Purgatory, where time was measured, as on earth, in days, weeks, months, and years. The novelist Roddy Doyle, pondering Purgatory, stoically exemplifies through his boy hero in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha the cruel insanity of that place. It was like Hell, but not forever: ‘It was about a million years for every venial sin[.] . . . Telling lies to your parents, cursing, taking the Lord’s name in vain—they were all a million years. . . . If you made a good confession right before you died you didn’t have to go to Purgatory at all; you went straight up to heaven’—which raised a question: ‘Even if the fella killed loads of people?’ The answer: ‘Even.’12

  And there was more than just fire and brimstone to the infernal torments. For Christopher Durang, author of the bitingly satirical play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, instruction on Hell in preparation for confession involved another added extra: ‘I picked up the understanding that mortal sin not only sends you to hell, they also pound the nails into Christ’s body—sort of working in retrospect. And you know you’re causing our all-loving Lord his infinite agony by something you’ve done.’13

  Antonia White’s convent school girl, in her novel Frost in May, writes up her thoughts after the annual retreat, at which the visiting priest has spoken luridly of death, judgement, and Hell. She notes that the cruel physical tortures suffered by the damned are enhanced by an added psychological factor: ‘The damned suffered always from appalling thirst, their swollen tongues were parched and cracked.’ But they suffered still more, she goes on, ‘from agony of mind, from the separation of God, after Whom they now so bitterly longed.’ They would gladly endure ‘ten thousand years of torment for the sake of one second of earthly life in which they might repent and be reconciled to Him.’14

  Catechists worked hard to get across the concept of eternity to their small charges. In his memoir The Inside Story, Neil McKenty (for whom the confessional was ‘an up-ended coffin’) remembers the description conjured up for him, when he was just seven, by a visiting Redemptorist priest at his hometown parish in Ontario, Canada: ‘Now imagine a bird flying over a sand beach a thousand miles long, a hundred miles wide and fifty feet deep. This bird flies over the beach just once a year. And each year the bird picks up just one grain of sand. By the time the sand will all be gone, eternity in the ovens of hell will be just beginning.’15

  Frank O’Connor’s version of Hell’s eternal punishment, as explained by a nun, was typical of the comparisons drawn by generations of catechists. The teaching sister produces a candle, takes out a half-crown, and offers it to the first boy who can hold one finger in the flame for five minutes by the school clock. No one volunteers. Then she says, ‘Are you afraid of holding one finger—only one finger!—in a little candle flame for five minutes and not afraid of burning all over in roasting hot furnaces for all eternity?’ Then she expatiates: ‘All eternity! Just think of that! A whole life time goes by and it’s nothing, not even a drop in the ocean of our sufferings.’16

  And then, as children advanced towards puberty, there were the sins and the language of ‘impurity’ to deal with. The philosopher Michel Foucault argues in his History of Sexuality that confession shaped the modern language and perception of sexuality and the body. A bitter-sweet example is Molly Bloom’s dramatic monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where she reminisces about reporting a bit of adolescent groping in confession: ‘I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and have done with it . . .’17

  For the writer Margaret Hebblethwaite, the difficulty of managing the language of sex and the body made confession-going baffling: ‘How should we go to confession, if we did not know how to name our sins? Supposing they were sins to do with sex, and we did not know how to find words for them?’18

  The technical language of contrition, involving such principles as ‘occasions of sin’ and ‘firm purpose of amendment’, was easily grasped, but not so easily applied to situations in real life. There could be life-changing misunderstandings. Edna O’Brien had been taught that a mere kiss was ‘an occasion of sin’, and therefore a mortal sin, and that her inability to make ‘a firm purpose of amendment’ never to do it again made her confession invalid. Her account evokes an entire era of neurotic scrupulosity inflicted on generations of young Catholics.19

  MANY INFORMANTS, responding to my article on confession in The Tablet on 18 August 2012, had childhood memories of confession as an oppressive and disturbing experience.20

  There were confessors whose oppressive intimacy was verbal rather than physical. An anonymous female correspondent wrote from the United States of her experience, at the age of ten, at the hands of a ‘troubled and alcoholic’ curate who ‘began questioning girls in explicit and obscene detail about their sex lives during confession, suggesting things—masturbation, oral sex, even incest.’ These were actions, she commented, that they had not even read about. Her reason for not complaining about this priest sheds light on a curious aspect of the ‘seal of confession’ from a child’s point of view. ‘Individually sickened, but terrified of violating the seal of the confessional and believing our word would not be trusted, we endured the lewd catechizing for weeks, not even telling one another.’

  Another correspondent, a ‘Ms M’, told of her traumatic first confession at the age of seven: ‘When it came to making my act of contrition, the priest suddenly shouted at me: “Stand up! Say the prayer again and say it as if you are truly sorry!” He made me say it three times on my feet, shaking from head to toe. I came out of that confessional box a nervous wreck.’

  A woman wrote from Australia of ‘so much fear on entering the dark box’ when she was an inmate in a Ca
tholic orphanage. ‘My feet’, she remembered, ‘were soaked in my own urine from fear.’ On exiting from the confessional, a nun dragged her ‘by the ear to get the bucket and mop in front of everyone to clean it up.’

  There are many accounts of incongruous reactions on the part of confessors. ‘Ms B’ in the United States wrote that she told a confessor that she was being sexually abused by her father. ‘I agonised for weeks until I finally made the decision. . . . I wasn’t expecting a miracle but just some words of encouragement I could hang on to.’ The priest listened carefully, then responded: ‘Try to avoid that occasion of sin.’ She went on: ‘With those words he dumped all the responsibility of what was happening on my shoulders. I was nine years old. I was devastated.’

  Encounters with bullying confessors led to life-long disillusion. ‘Mr F’, in his eighty-sixth year, wrote: ‘I gradually realised that loyalty and obedience could easily become words hiding a submissiveness and an unwillingness to assume responsibility for one’s actions and encouraged those in authority to become unreasoning bullies.’

  Many of the male respondents recalled the oppressive obligation to confess masturbation. A sixty-eight-year-old man wrote that the unseemly curiosity on the part of his parish priest started before he even had the language to understand the ‘sin’, let alone the experience of it. ‘“Have you been touching yourself?” he’d say. I knew nothing about sex, had no language to talk about it.’

  Many wrote of the way in which confessors would probe for indications of sexual sin. A fifty-three-year-old gay man wrote: ‘I found confessing, at best, a sterile experience; at worst, it was profoundly uncomfortable, with most of the confessors taking too keen an interest in my impure thoughts and acts.’ ‘Miss MG’ wrote: ‘I was even refused absolution and made to go to see a doctor because of my masturbation “sin.” . . . It ruined my adolescence.’

  The majority of correspondents recalled instructions on sin and confession that prompted guilt anxieties, commonly known as ‘scruples’—a form of obsessive conscience underpinned by terrors of mortal sin and eternal Hell. A ‘Dr. S’ wrote: ‘The catechesis of the time was just incredibly damaging, and left many children marinated in guilt and scruple, myself included.’

  Another correspondent, ‘Ms JN’, wrote of the shock she received, at the age of twelve, on learning from the nuns that ‘touching anyone else’s private parts was very sinful’. Ms JN added: ‘Just at the time when we were fizzing with hormones and curiosity . . . I developed scruples[,] and they made my life a misery for countless years even after I married and had children. I never discussed them with anyone.’

  Nuns were given to prompting guilt feelings with outlandish suggestions. A ‘Ms I’, in her eighties, wrote: ‘My children were told by a lovely Servite nun that if the [communion wafer] touched their teeth (during Holy Communion) they had committed a mortal sin.’ Another woman, Diana, said that scruples induced in her adolescent years by confession almost led to her committing suicide. ‘My scruples began to worsen. Had I swallowed toothpaste when cleaning my teeth before mass, had I fasted for long enough before communion? I would wake in the morning and look out at the beautiful, cloudless sky, only suddenly to remember these unbearable thoughts which I could not avoid.’

  Correspondents had an array of stories of inappropriate behaviour on the part of confessors. Many remember being placed on a priest’s lap to make their confessions. One recalled being caned by a priest for alleged misbehaviour. ‘He then sat down and took me standing between his knees to receive my confession. I was too small to kneel.’

  An anonymous writer recounted his experience as the son of a Catholic prison officer. The prison chaplain acted as their parish priest, and their Sunday devotions, including confession, were held in the prison chapel: ‘There was no private space in which to hear confession, except that is for the Ladies and Gents cubicle style toilets at the front door. So that is where we went for Confession. . . . Father would be seated on the toilet bowl seat, and I would kneel down in front of him.’

  Of all the bizarre stories of peculiar confessional circumstances, one especially stands out. A correspondent wrote that as a little girl her first confession was heard ‘in the corridor of the church, with the priest’s two big dogs on either side’ of him as he stood before her.

  Although it is the sobering argument of this book that countless children were oppressed, and many traumatised, by the practice of early confession, there are no reliable statistics, only the memories and testimonies of those surviving generations who endured it. Less widespread, and yet profound and lasting in its consequences for victims, was the exploitation of the confessional for sexual child abuse. To understand the systemic connection between confession, the confessional oppression of children, and clerical sexual abuse of children, it is necessary to explore the seminary formation and the culture of clericalism that flourished after the pontificate of Pius X.

  Eight

  The Making of a Confessor

  Total institutions disrupt or defile precisely those actions that in civil society have the role of attesting to the actor and those in his presence that he has some command over his world—that he is a person with ‘adult’ self-determination, autonomy, and freedom of action.

  —Erving Goffman, Asylums

  It is not surprising that men kept in short trousers for years should be incapable of authority and responsibility when thrust upon them as parish priests in middle age.

  —Charles Davis, A Question of Conscience

  SEMINARY LIFE FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1960S WAS largely a product of Pius X’s ‘restorations’ of the Church in the first decade of the century. The seminary training for Catholic priests, regulated centrally from the Vatican department known as Discipline of the Clergy, involved six years of full-time cloistered residence. Many seminarians had already spent between five and seven years in junior seminaries, which were similarly monastic. The aim was to create a ‘cleric’ whose characteristics included prompt obedience to authority in the vertical hierarchical structure, along with doctrinal acquiescence to Rome’s teaching, both in content and interpretation, especially on sexual and ‘life’ matters. As we have seen, Pius X’s seminary reforms emphasised segregation from the laity and especially from women. In theory, this was meant to produce dedication to celibacy and the disciplines of sexual continence. But the consequences also included a guarded, patriarchal attitude towards women; an expectation of deference from the lay faithful; and a tendency to close protective ranks against outsiders, involving instinctive secrecy.

  The seminary prepared its ordinands to be judges and healers of souls: the arbiters and exemplars of what constituted sin and virtue. The newly ordained priest was endowed with sacramental ‘faculties’ bestowing powers, sanctioned by his bishop, to administer or suspend absolution of sins.

  ARRIVING AT THE SENIOR SEMINARY for the Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham at the age of eighteen in 1958, I entered a red-brick neo-Gothic edifice with gables, turrets, and a cloister wide enough to drive two buses abreast. Situated north of the city of Birmingham, and bordered by two highways and a cemetery, Oscott College was screened by groves of trees. There were bars on all the ground-floor windows. The building resembled, as did many Catholic seminaries at that time, a Victorian mental asylum; and it was indeed a ‘total institution’ as defined by sociologist Erving Goffman: ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.’1

  I entered the seminary several weeks before the death of Pius XII, who had been pope for nearly twenty years, and the election of the stout and cheerful John XXIII. The ambiance of the clerical culture was patrician; legalistic in language and perspective. Attitudes towards other Christian faith groups were aloof; towards non-Christian faiths, dismissive. Seminary formation, the Church, and the priesthood appeared to us as unchanged and unchanging—semper ead
em.

  The seminaries were booming and turning out ever more ordained priests. There were 21 seminarians in my year, known as First Year Philosophy, and similar numbers in each of the years ahead of us, comprising Second Year Philosophy, followed by four years of Theology, making 120 students in all, with a dozen professors or lecturers. There were at that time five senior seminaries in England with a similar student intake as well as four exclusively English seminaries abroad—one each in Lisbon and Valladolid, and two in Rome—all full. In the early 1960s, when I was due to be ordained, England was routinely turning out 200 ordained priests each year, about 120 diocesan and 80 from the religious orders. Elsewhere during that period ordinations amongst sizeable Catholic populations were at an all-time high, especially in Ireland, Western Europe, and the United States. Yet many of us had an impression of staleness and aridity even during those apparently halcyon years.

  Only in retrospect would it be obvious that there had been something dysfunctional in the state of Catholic clericalism during our era. Given Pope John’s age—he was seventy-six—nobody could have guessed that he would initiate an epoch-making council that would shake the Church to its foundations, promoting the idea of the faithful as a pilgrim people of God, engaging with the world. The shock would expose the deep-seated problems of priestly formation. The mass exodus of ordained priests worldwide from the 1960s to the 1970s, and the collapse in vocations, would speak for themselves. Locally, in England and Wales, since the year 2000 the number of newly ordained priests, diocesan and religious, has averaged just above 20 each year; compared with the early 1960s, that is a decline of 90 per cent. In the United States the ordinations collapsed from 1,575 in 1965 to 450 in 2002. The decline of potential confessors would have been critical for the fate of the sacrament of confession even had the faithful not rejected the practice: which they did.