Confession?

 

Back in what some see as the Golden Age of U.S. Catholicism - the 20 years between the end of World War Ii and the end of Vatican II - frequent confession was increasingly the norm for American Catholics as ever greater numbers responded to exhortations to more frequent Communion and took advantage of the relaxed fasting rules to receive Communion more and more often. In elementary school during that period, we were routinely marched over to church - all 1000+ of us - on the first Thursday of every month, so that the parish priests could dutifully hear all of our confessions. Years later, when I was a pastor myself and was on the receiving end of school confessions, I remember listening to repeated defenses of the practice on the grounds that children needed to get into the habit. Personally I was always somewhat skeptical. Whatever the merits of frequent confession the habit argument seemed self-evidently weak, since it was precisely my generation that had been compelled to acquire the habit and that then had so spectacularly broken that same habit!

There are encouraging signs of religious revival in the U.S. and even in Europe, and certainly some people are going to confession. The sacrament has most certainly not died out, as some may have predicted not so long ago that it would. But the overall pattern of apparent decline may have been set decades ago. The story of the golden age of frequent confession and of its apparently sudden and unexpected collapse is ably told in James M. O'Toole, For I have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America (Harvard U. Pr., 2025).

For anyone (like myself) who is old enough to remember the unique contours of pre-1965 American Catholic life, O'Toole's book is a true trip down memory lane. He begins with a series of historical vignettes - Saint Louis, MO, 1807, New York City, 1897, Milwaukee, 1944, New Orleans, 1951 - that he calls "Four snapshots of American Catholics going to confession," experiences "replicated across the landscape and across the decades." We hear some historic anecdotes about traveling missionaries from the early days of American Catholicism, how they heard confessions and promoted the observance of the sacrament on the frontier. Mainly, we get to remember what it was like - in what is still living memory - when parish priests heard confessions for hours on Saturday afternoons and eves of holy days, and people came in great numbers, weekly, monthly, and on special occasions like parish missions.

O'Toole gives us the experience from both sides of the confessional box. (The box itself gets a lot of attention - in loco publico et patenti in ecclesia.) We recall what the experience was like. - for men, for women, for children, and for different ethnic and linguistic groups. We rehearse the procedures one was expected to follow, from examining one's conscience to being sorry for one's sins, to actually confessing them, to perhaps being questioned or given advice, to saying the Act of Contrition, to finally saying one's penance. But he also gives us the confessor's perspective, how priests were prepared in the seminary for the major time commitment of hearing confessions and how priests themselves actually experienced celebrating the sacrament that was then so central to the rhythm of the week. (One curious omission is the special legislation and expectations concerning the confessions of priests and religious. I can recall how priests and religious were apparently expected to confess weekly and how religious women had to present themselves to their "extraordinary confessor" four times per year, usually at the Ember Days.)

For those interested in the intersection of confession with the law - once again an issue of some concern in certain jurisdictions - O'Toole recounts the famous 1813 case which laid the foundation for the legal protection of the seal of confession in New York, reaffirmed in 1817, and finally written into law in 1828.

How did this time-honored, so very widely practiced sacrament suddenly go into what has seemed like serious decline? O'Toole devotes an entire chapter to the rise of psychology - to early Catholic opposition, especially to Freudianism (e.g., famously Fulton Sheen), and then the rather thoroughgoing embrace of therapeutic culture not just by secular American society but by the Church itself (for example, in vocational recruitment for priests and religious). "Just as some early Catholic critics had feared, a clear sense of sin might be challenged or even abandoned, once psychology had been let through the mental door." And more was changing in Catholics' mental world than the embrace of psychology and psychotherapy, as Catholics in increasing numbers "were enjoying a sense of security, belonging, and self-confidence unknown to their parents and grandparents."

Unsurprisingly, "Collapse" gets a full chapter all its own, starting with an accumulation of dissatisfactions. "The very success of the clergy at urging frequent confession had generated problems of its own, swelling the numbers but creating a new set of expectations. ... Compounding all these reactions was a growing realization that much of what was confessed was trivial." Then, came Vatican II, which, among other things, "demonstrated that church leaders did not always agree with one another." Finally, the crisis over contraception became "a matter of who got to decide what was sinful and how church teaching would be presented and received."

The post-conciliar reform of the rites for celebrating the sacrament seems to get less attention than one might have expected. Rite Two never really caught on in popularity with laypeople, and Rite Three was never intended to be the norm, which effectively has left us with a rite little different from what had been the practice previously. O'Toole mentions but does not much develop the intriguing idea that we might think of the Church as being again where it was when the ancient canonical Penance died out and it took time to develop something new that was suited to a new time and place.

The author seems to have little expectation that efforts to return to more widespread use of confession have much chance to succeed; "lost worlds do not usually come back, no matter how idealized in memory." That said, he seems to recognize that something of value really has been lost. "Despite its many flaws, there was a solidarity in that world, a community formed through participation and collective activity that promoted a reassuring sense of belonging. It connected disparate individuals and families with one another and, they hoped, with the divine. The social distinctions that mattered elsewhere faded."

And, ultimately, there is the problem of our seemingly diminished sense of sin. "At risk of loss, too, is a larger framework for thinking about how we behave with one another, both personally and collectively. How are we to live out our ideals, and how come to terms with those times when we don't."