Is Confession Dead? A Catholic Historian's View UPDATED!

 Is Confession Dead? An Interview with a Catholic Historian

Of course, the state's attempts to root out sexual abuse by focusing, in part, on the privacy of confession assumes that American Catholics are still celebrating the sacrament. But only a minority of the faithful are seeking out confession at all, finds author James O'Toole in his urgent, provocative new study of the sacrament, For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America

O'Toole, professor of history emeritus and the university historian at Boston College, details the growth and eventual decline of confession in the United States, prompting questions about the sacrament's future. A former archivist for the Boston Archdiocese, O'Toole spoke with the National Catholic Reporter about the once-widespread popularity of the sacrament in U.S. parishes, the ongoing controversy surrounding clergy-penitent confidentiality, and the social changes that he says dramatically reduced Americans' visits to the confessional.

NCR: In your book, you note that during the early 20th century "regular confession had taken hold as a defining characteristic of American Catholic religious life." How did the sacrament gain prominence in the United States, specifically? How frequent was confession among Americans in previous centuries?

O'Toole: I see it in terms of the growth of Catholic infrastructure — ready access to church and priests and sacramental activity. In the early years of Catholicism in this country, during the colonial period and up until the time of the Civil War, that infrastructure really just wasn't there, or it was spotty. As the infrastructure was put in place, priests could increasingly exhort their parishioners to develop regular [religious] habits. And laypeople said, "Okay, we'll do that. That's what being a Catholic is."

NCR Your book contains some eye-popping statistics regarding the popularity of the sacrament in the late 19th century. For example, between July 1896 and June 1897, the Jesuit-run Church of St. Francis Xavier in New York City reported more than 173,000 confessions, about 475 a day. How was this possible? Did priests of that era spend most of their time hearing confessions?

O'Toole: They spent an awful lot of their time hearing confessions. Those numbers could be inflated by having schools in the parishes, where kids are brought to confession on a regular basis. 

I think hearing confessions was a central part of what priests did all day long. I write in the book: "Parishioners and pastors encountered one another, however anonymously, most often in the confessional." That was the point of contact, more so than Sunday Mass. At Mass, the priest was up on the altar talking in a foreign language, but in terms of personal encounter, it was in the confessional.

NCR You write that the church developed a complex and specific system for categorizing the gravity of different sins and that the threat of perdition lurked around every corner. Did Catholics mainly understand their faith through avoiding sin? How did this thinking influence Americans' relationship to confession?

O Tolle: That's an interesting way to phrase it. Interesting to me is this notion of occasions of sin, not actual offenses themselves but circumstances in normal, everyday life that might lead me to sin. Once that idea has taken hold, you're going to be thinking of sin all the time. Or you're going to be urged to think about it all the time.

NCR Your book discusses a sharp decline in the frequency of confession among American Catholics over several decades. You cite a 1975 survey that found the number of Catholics who sought out the sacrament decreased 21 percentage points, from 38 to 17%, in a single decade. Recent data reveals that only 23% of U.S. Catholics attend confession at least once per year. Do you expect numbers to decline even further?

O'Toole: Well, I don't expect them to go up appreciably. At Boston College, where I am, students go to confession with their friends. Interview those same students 10 years after they graduate. Will they still be going to confession? I think we know the answer to that. They won't. 

NCR You offer several causes of death for the sacrament. But can you pinpoint a primary cause for confession's current unpopularity among Catholics?

O'Toole: More generally, I'd say the spread and acceptance of modern psychological concepts. As I wrote the book, I came to the conclusion that it was a really important part of the story. It implanted in people's minds the idea that human behavior is a complex thing, and it's more complex than the older system allowed for.

NCR At the end of your book, you ask: "With confession gone, practiced today by only a tiny minority of Catholics, what, if anything, will take its place?" Do you foresee the sacrament evolving into something radically different — or is it really dead?

O'Toole: The sacrament, in its present form, probably is dead. People just aren't doing it. It seems to me the church's response to that circumstance is often: "We'll just tell people again that they should be going to confession. They don't understand how important it is. They don't understand what it can do for them." All that may be true, but just telling people to go back to confession hasn't worked for the last 60 years, and I don't see anything that's going to change it.

That's why I think new forms need to evolve, just as the practice of private confession itself evolved from the older forms of public penance and exclusion from the community. It seems to me the church is at the kind of hinge point it was at in the seventh century. 

UPDATE: THE PRESENT ARTICLE NEEDS TO BE SEEN IN LIGHT OF TWO OF MY PREVIOUS POSTS

Penance Reconciliation, Confession: A History

I reviewed a Commonweal Article about how the Irish changed the Sacrament of Public Penance into the Sacrament of Private Confession. This was all formalized at the Lateran Council of 1215 

What we had after 1215 was the clericalization of spiritual direction and reconciliation into a very juridical system which made Confession a private matter between God, the penitent and a priest rather than as public conversion and reconciliation.  Like the public penance system from the early church, and the private penance system of the Irish monks, private confession of sins was also poorly used by the laity. That is why there is a rule about annual confession for all those who have committed serious sins. Private confession was not popular either.

Casuistry and Clericalism

In response to an attempt by Katherine Kaveny to advocate a more progressive casuistry (case law) practice in the Church, I pointed out how closely related casuistry, especially as practice in confession, is to clericalism.

I pointed out the Latin Council of 1215 requirement for confession applied to all the faithful in regard to all their sins, not simply to those who had committed grave sins. Note that confession was required to one's parish priest or a priest approved by one's pastor.  The requirement for Easter communion is not as absolute as that of annual confession; their pastor could allow them to abstain.  This canon made confession not communion the center of Catholic life. The consequences of failure to observe this decree were severe: excommunication during life and deprivation of Christian burial. This paragraph certainly had the potential for putting into place a Christian theocracy under control of parish priests. 

For most Catholics Confession and Communion became annual events during the Easter Season until Pius X in 1910 lowered the age of first communion from12 to 7 and began to promote frequent communion. That all changed the practice of Confession and made possible frequent, e.g. monthly or even weekly Confession. 

THE BOTTOM LINE! THE PERIOD DESCRIBED IN THIS ARTICLE FROM THE 1910 UNTIL VATICAN II GAVE A VERY UNUSUAL PLACE FOR CONFESSION.  CATHOLICS WERE UNSUALLY CONCERNED ABOUT MINOR THINGS LIKE EATING MEAT ON FRIDAY BECAUSE THEY COULD NOT GO TO COMMUNION UNLESS THEY FIRST WENT TO CONFESSION.