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Maybe the Church should have a "Year of the Sacrament of Confession". Silouan

What happened to confession � Changing mores reflective of use

By Ed Conroy
2/7/2007
National Catholic Reporter

SAN ANTONIO, Texas. (National Catholic Reporter) � Lyn Woods, a middle-aged Catholic woman who teaches ceramics at the Southwest School of Art & Craft in San Antonio, said that, although she goes to church, she hasn�t been to confession in many years.

She says her childhood experience of the sacrament of reconciliation explains much of her adult attitude toward it today.

�When I was 7, 8 or 9 years old,� she said, �I found myself repeating the same sins over and over to the priest. It seemed to me they weren�t really sins but simply human nature. On the other hand, if I did something really serious, the guilt alone would drive me to confession.�

Woods� opinion that confession is often meaningless seems an increasingly common one among American Catholics.

Over the past decade and a half, an increasing number of Catholic scholars and clergy in the United States have been seeking to understand the changing dynamics of confession, now called the sacrament of reconciliation, in the life of the American church.

Their inquiries are spurred by one undeniable social fact. Since the 1970s, the number of American Catholics making private acts of confession to their parish priests has, in the oft-quoted words of Boston College historian James O�Toole, �fallen through the floor.�

O�Toole made that dramatic statement at a 2004 conference on the �state of confession� held in Washington at The Catholic University of America.

Organized by Leslie Tentler, a professor of history at Catholic University, the conference has been widely cited in articles written for U.S. diocesan publications during Lent, the time when priests generally encourage more lay participation in the sacrament.

Despite such encouragement, however, American Catholic churches that in the 1950s and early �60s were filled with people going to confession on Saturday evenings are now full of people fulfilling their weekly Mass obligation.

Catholic sociologist James Davidson of Purdue University says it is necessary to see such changes historically, as part of a �bell curve.�

�It is important to remember,� he said, �that at the turn of the 20th century the Catholic church in our country was characterized by a lack of vocations and a general lack of popular participation in the sacrament of reconciliation.�

Davidson observed that the social situation of 100 years ago was not very different from that of the present time, and that the church has come to a trough in a curve that was at its peak in the �50s.

�In the 1950s, American Catholics banded together after experiencing decades of anti-Catholicism. You saw a great upsurge in vocations to the religious life and a tremendous public participation in private confession in the churches on the weekends,� he said.

Davidson�s perspective is informed by the research work he undertook with colleagues William D�Antonio, Dean Hoge and Katherine Meyer, which resulted in their highly respected 2001 study �American Catholics: Gender, Generation and Commitment.�

According to Leslie Tentler, issues of gender and generation have played a role in shaping popular participation in the sacrament, as have disagreements over what behavior constitutes a sin.

Take, for example, the issues around contraception.

Tentler, who has extensively studied North American women�s responses to Pope Paul VI�s 1968 encyclical, Humana Vitae, says there is no doubt that reproductive issues have had an effect upon American women�s approach to the sacrament of reconciliation.

After interviewing parish priests around the United States and women who practiced birth control and still attended Mass, Tentler observed that �many women simply did not regard contraception as a sin, and so they simply stopped going to confession.�

Tentler also said that the response to that situation from American Catholic clergy in the field has been cautious.

�In general,� she said, �most of the parish priests I interviewed said although they agreed with Humana Vitae, they did not bring it up with their parishioners because they did not wish to alienate them from the life of the church.�

Tentler�s study of women who stopped going to confession because they did not consider contraception a sin suggests that they did not wish to lie to their confessors or found it prudent simply not to confront their parish priests with their disbelief in contraception as a sin.

This tension between sincerity and prudence in the confession of Christian faith has existed since the Renaissance, notes John Jeffries Martin, chair of the Department of History at Trinity University in San Antonio.

In his book, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, Martin explores the crises of conscience experienced by some notable Catholics in mid-to-late 16th-century Venice, Italy, when they began to feel conflicted over whether they should publicly profess their new Protestant beliefs.

�The most famous of such cases was that of Francesco Spiera, a sophisticated lawyer from a town north of Venice, who had converted to Calvinism but, when called by the Inquisition, lied and said he was faithful to Catholicism,� Martin said. �Spiera later felt he had committed an unpardonable sin, and although both Catholic and Protestant friends tried to dissuade him of that belief, ultimately committed suicide.�

Spiera�s case became famous throughout Europe. It was even cited by early Puritan clerics after a spate of suicides in England, apparently brought on by similar crises of conscience, as reason not to hold the faithful too strictly accountable for their sins, Martin said.

Martin points out Catholics such as Spiera who converted to Calvinism rejected individual confession in favor of �the idea that one�s whole life should be a confession.�

�At the same time, however,� Martin said, �Cardinal [Charles] Borromeo in Rome was instituting and promoting the idea that Catholic private confession should take place in the confessional box.�

What Martin sees as significant in this bifurcation of Calvinist and Catholic approaches to confession during the Renaissance is that both are intensely concerned with the exercise of the individual conscience.

�The Calvinist was constantly testing his sincerity, asking, �Are my motives pure, for if they are not pure and I am not sincere, I am not of the elect,� � Martin said. �Catholics, too, shared this deeply introspective quality in the process of the privatization of confession.�

Today, centuries after the Reformation, does private confession to a priest offer the possibility of spiritual experiences that can be uniquely beneficial?

Oblate Father William C. Davis thinks it does.

Father Davis, who currently serves as pastor of the predominantly Hispanic Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Houston, Texas, served as pastor of St. Mary Church in downtown San Antonio in the 1980s and �90s.

In an interview in Houston, he said he saw the pressures of modern life as a whole bringing a great diversity of people to him at St. Mary Church, in unusually high numbers, for private confession.

�I was surprised and delighted to find numerous Protestants coming to St. Mary�s for confession,� he said.

�They said to me, �Father, we don�t have this in our church, and I want to talk directly to you.� So, I heard their confessions, and often would bless them by laying my hands upon their heads. When I told them that they received God�s forgiveness and the blessing of the Holy Spirit, I could see what a difference it made for them.�

Father Davis, now in his 70s, is also one of a great many parish priests who have received training in family and individual counseling and who see their work as counselors as part and parcel of their pastoral practice.

Father Davis� emphasis on helping the penitent obtain some kind of psychotherapeutic experience is no doubt supported by his �laying on of hands,� a more charismatic manner of administering the sacrament than the rather formulaic conversation many Catholics experience in the traditional confessional box.

The larger question remains, however, as to whether private individual confession lends itself to psychological healing or to a meaningful spiritual experience among the general Catholic lay population of the United States.

It appears Catholics are willing to talk about the sacrament, if able to do so anonymously. Several persons raised in the Catholic faith and interviewed for this story recounted they no longer go to confession for a wide variety of reasons but refused to be identified.

Those reasons ranged from a general lack of trust of priests, reticence to speak of sexual matters, the seeming irrelevance of traditional penances, doubt of the priest�s power of absolution, and the feeling they said that confession gave them of being trapped within personal weaknesses, always guilty, always in need of forgiveness.

Such feelings may well be driving people in other directions for meaningful spiritual experience. James Davidson said his sociological research at Purdue suggests that other forms of spiritual practice may be replacing that sacrament for American Catholics as the central feature of their spiritual lives.

�I think it is also important to note there are now many ways in which laypeople find a sense of spirituality that they also integrate with their participation in the life of their parish churches,� he said. �They may range from some form of social service to the practice of contemplation to various forms of physical activity such as tai chi or yoga.�

Davidson noted those forms of spirituality emphasize social engagement with the world, or the development of the interior life, or a new relationship to the human body through meditative forms of exercise.

If sacramental confession continues to change within American popular culture, so too has psychotherapeutic confession changed in the context of popular culture.

Once largely practiced in private between a therapist and client, the sharing of secrets about perhaps taboo forms of behavior or thought is now increasingly becoming public.

Today, millions of people are daily entertained by �the stories you can�t tell� that other people now confess, with little or no shame, on television shows hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Phil and the like.

Many other people confess anonymously, or participate vicariously in such confessions, on various Internet Web sites.

Do these forms of expression cultivate the exercise of conscience or simply provide a brief moment of catharsis soon forgotten? Are they meaningful in ways not yet generally appreciated and challenge the church to find new ways of making sacramental confession relevant to a new generation?

Scholar Martin sees the emphasis upon sincerity and the exercise of individual conscience, a legacy from the Renaissance, as now pervading American cultural life.

�Maybe it is possible to extrapolate and say that we in America live in a culture that pretends to be sincere and we appear to tell one another everything all the time,� he said. �In such a world, what need would people have to be introspective in the company of a priest when everyone is doing so elsewhere?�

That question calls for a creative examination of conscience about how American Catholics practice the sacrament of reconciliation, as individuals and as a community.

"It seemed to me they weren�t really sins but simply human nature."

Was this poor woman never taught that our human nature is inherently inclined to sin? Sadly, it would only be par for the course.

She is half right: these sins are a result of human nature. But that doesn't mean they aren't sins.

Logos - Alexis

Father Silouan:

Christ is in our midst!! He is and always will be!!!

If you read this article and notice the "bell curve" that Professor Davidson mentions, you've got to see here a modern lens placed against a long period of history. The reason that there was a scarcity of confession in the practice of the turn of the 20th century was for a vastly different reason than a mere historic cycle.

In the Latin Church before the indult of Pope St Pius X that encouraged frequent Holy Communion and allowed children to be given the Eucharist before they were confirmed, the general practice was NOT to confess or commune regularly if one were a layman. The fact that people were so concerned to receive during the period of time preceding and after Easter in order to fulfill one's "Easter Duty" was a big part of that time. Additionally, there are stories related to the lives of saints of the last 19th and early 20th centuries that mention having to ask permission to receive the Eucharist even after one had been to confession. Contrast that to today when people become upset when the reading from St. Paul is read at Corpus Christi that warns people about approaching the Eucharist without examining oneself. Even in the 1950s when the regulations were further relaxed my parent and grandparents had a hard time with the idea of people, especially children, receiving Communion every week if we had not been to confession the day prior. So the analogy of infrequent practice of confession between the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries falls on its face.

The decline in confession can be directly traced to the confusion after the Vatican Council when there was a general, though erroneous, opinion that unless one had great, terrible sins to confess that one didn't really have to go to confession--that the Eucharist would take care of that and the Lord's Mercy would somehow make it all okay. No one seemed to give much credence to the idea that this borders on the sin of presumption, but that is another sotry for another day. Gradually the whole idea of sin came to mean something like ax murders or acts of commission in that genre. This was also linked to the idea that the whole "disciplined" approach to living the Christian life was soemthing that we no longer did or had to do or even should do.

Beyond this, there was and continues to be a definite move away from the idea that the ascetic life--regular prayer, penance, fasting, discipline, etc.--is part of the Christian's life or should be. I remember well reading one bishop in that period being quoted as saying he was glad we had thrown off all the ascetic practices that had been so much a part of Latin Catholic life. Some years ago I taught a religious education class for seventh graders and mentioned the one hour Eucharistic fast. It wasn't long before I heard from many parents that were indignant that I would mention something that "was no longer required" (though it still is officially). At my nephew's confirmation, I mentioned to my sister that he was breaking the fast by eating on the way to church and was told that their pastor had specifically told them that they no longer teach that as part of Catholic practice.

So is it any wonder that the average person doesn't practice confession? If the little practices like a simple fast or regular prayer in the home are no longer taught as being necessary, why would confession be so? The whole thrust seems to me to be that "I'm okay; you're okay" as long as we're both sincere. Or as I've been told, "lighten up!"

In my own parish, we're being taught that we can do so many things ourselves that it wouldn't surprise me if we were next taught to do a "do-it-yourself" confession. After all, we've got "do-it-yourself" home blessing kits for Epiphany and books that tell us how to bless our own sacramentals. Why not confession? (If any of you wonder why a Latin Catholic is here, look back over this. You're my touchstone with reality in the spiritual life.)

Going back to confession, it will probably not return to its former, more frequent practice because of the way children are currently trained. It is a very common practice to separate the first confession from first Holy Communion by months instead of days--to emphasize, we're told--that they are two separate sacraments and need not be practiced together. Often one hears of those who have never made a second confession. Additionally, the whole idea that one should examine one's conscience at the end of the day is something even some younger priests have not been taught and do not practice themselves.

The American idea of the rugged individual going it alone is sunk deep into the vacuum of cast-aside spirituality and discipline that once marked Catholic life in the U.S. In fact, the very word "discipline" is a dirty word for some clergy. But enough from me tonight; enough from me.

In Christ,

BOB

Bob,

My understanding (and I could be mistaken about this) is that in the ancient Church, confession was only for grave sins and that grave sins were generally held to be publicly scandalous sins (fornication, adultery, abortion, murder, etc). I remember reading, at one time, that the practice of regular (weekly) private confession was introduced in the west to the Irish in the middle ages. Of course, it is actually the case, as you point out, that in most of Christian history, Christians did not commune weekly. Perhaps, the discipline needs to be adjusted to times. In times where a general lack of self-consciousness regarding sin is prevalent, a more strict discipline should prevail. In times where there is a general sense of the sacredness of the Liturgy and Eucharist and an awareness of the reality of sin, then the discipline should be relaxed to allow for individuals to receive communion more often before going to confession. I'm not a spiritual father though, so these are just some reflections. God bless.

Joe

The loss of Confession is itself a symptom of spiritual illness. Partly, people do not have as keen a sense of sin as they used to have. Partly, people do not understand sin as spiritual illness --often, chronic illness-- that requires spiritual treatment. Partly, the Church has lost credibility to preach on sin, given the contradictions in many of the lives of its priests in recent times. That is exacerbated in the Catholic Church with its teaching on birth control, which has been poorly taught (when it has been taught) by priests and bishops, and which most Catholics (including most priests and bishops?) seem to reject. All of this can only be corrected (in my opinion) by reviving the therapeutic model of sin and salvation: that sin is illness, and Christ is our Divine Doctor, and the Church is the hospital for our healing and for growing in spiritual strength and life. But that demands living the inner life of the Holy Spirit, especially by priests.

-- John

Joe,

Actually, from what I've read, the Early Christians communicated regularly, and would, in fact, bring some of the Eucharist home to have before every meal (see the section on the origins of the Liturgy of the Presanctified in "Evening Worship in the Orthodox Church" by Uspensky). Confession was held for grave sins only, and was public.

Our usage of all of the Holy Mysteries has changed much over the years. Frequent Confession, even for what we might see as common, "human" sins (e.g. lying to get out of an uncomfortable dinner, etc), is good for our souls, and frequent examinations of conscience are good for promoting inner change and true metanoia.

The Church's use of the Holy Mysteries will change, and should change, as the times change. Christ told us as much when he instituted Confession in Matthew 16:19.

On the most basic spiritual and human level, confession is GOOD for the person doing the confessing. Why wouldn't a person WANT to do something that is good for them?

Same with fasting and going to church and receiving Communion. All are good for us.

Sometimes I think there is the basic individual push back against anything viewed as an "obligation," particularly among American Catholics. We are not people who like to be told what to do. But, really, these things that are called "obligations" are much more like GIFTS.

Also, the lady in the article reminded me of this: I admit, like many people, I often go back and confess the same sins again and again. I'm happy if I manage to omit one sin from list or at least avoid more than before - and I'm embarrassed if I have to add a new one to my list. However, I have found that talking through that aspect of my "changing sin list" with an attentive priest is helpful.

Actually, I like the Syrian description of the Mystery of Repentance - it is a "baptism of tears". Part of the issue is also that we do not fully appreciate the great gift of divine sonship and theosis given to us through the Mysteries of Holy Baptism and the Holy Eucharist. If one does not see that he or she is called to be priest, prophet and king in the world, why bother receiving the healing of confession to help grow in perfection? If one does not believe in the sacramental reality of the Holy Gifts, why cleanse the vessel of the soul to receive them?

Of course the loss of a sense of sin is also part of the issue...but so is the loss of a sense of the holy.

Gordo

I would agree with Domilsean saying frequent confession is good for our souls regarding the common 'human' sins and go a little further and say I think it`s necessary to prevent rationalizing these sins away as human nature until they are almost no longer sin at all but become just "human nature". Yes, to me that is most definitly the sin of presumption and can easily lead to rationalizing away graver and graver sin.

Too bad it`s considered an obligation and approached with a sense of reluctant duty and not the healing experience it`s meant by the Church to be. Actually the worst thing is probably that confession isn`t even thought about at all by many Catholics. Annie mentions repeating the same sins over and this happens to most everyone probably. At least people who take the trouble to examine conscience realize where they are at and where improvement is needed.

Joe:

Christ is in our midst!! He is and always will be!!!

While confession wasn't practiced in the same way in the ancient Church, the analogy was made between a period at the beginning of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, not some period much earlier.

In Christ,

BOB

Slava Isusu Khrestu

Hello Joe
You are correct in assuming the Eucharist was used for the forgiveness of sin in the early church. Eucharist was called the primordial sacrament. Confession was need for three great sins 1 Murder, 2 Apostacy, 3 Adultery.

Z Bohom
Unworthy
Nycholaij

This news story seems timely:

http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=49147

I haven't read Bishop Wuerl's letter yet. I'll do that soon.

Joe