For most Catholics in late medieval England, confession was an annual affair undertaken during Lent. Lines were long, and priests and penitents alike were impatient to get it over with. “Pastoral realism therefore demanded that the confession be kept within manageable dimensions,” wrote the Irish historian Eamon Duffy in 1992. “In a time-honoured formula the penitent was to be brief, be brutal, be gone.”
James M. O’Toole, a church historian at Boston College, finds that well into the 20th century, American Catholics held to that same formula. Though they confessed more frequently than their 14th-century counterparts, they were encouraged to be just as brief and brutal—to think of themselves as accuser, prosecutor, and witness in their own two-minute trials, while the priest, acting as mediator for God, played judge. Confession was a serious matter, and for a long time, O’Toole argues in a new book titled For I Have Sinned, the Rite of Penance stood “at the center of what it meant to be an American Catholic.”
Then, in the 1970s, confession collapsed.
O’Toole offers several theories for why. The first is speed: Priests heard confessions throughout the week, but the highest traffic times were Saturday afternoons, when they could be confined to the box for as long as six hours. During those long hours, in which they often heard more than 100 confessions, priests rarely got a break. Many of them came to regard those who held up the line by chatting or enumerating every little venial sin “an annoyance.” That attitude, O’Toole records one woman saying, often made penitents feel like the priest was “too busy” to make them feel properly reconciled to God. And so people decided to become too busy for the priest.
Another theory is the relative severity of Catholicism prior to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Until that point, the church placed a much greater emphasis on sin, especially mortal sin (defined in the Baltimore Catechism—the primary teaching text of the time— as “a grievous offense against the law of God”). Catholics were encouraged to consider most of their wrong actions mortal sins, under the supposition that where damnation is concerned, better safe than sorry. And in the confessional, priests were taught to ask penitents questions—basically, to interrogate them—to determine if their offenses were grievous. It was an uncomfortable routine for all involved. It was made worse by the fact that much of what was confessed was repetitive or trivial (“I talked in church”). In this sense, O’Toole writes, confession may have been a victim of its own success: Americans went so often and said so little of consequence that they came to see it as unimportant.
Neither of these theories is all that convincing on its own. After all, the conditions O’Toole describes had pertained to confession pretty much since the Council of Trent—in the 1500s. It is unlikely that one generation of Catholics would throw them off without some novel influence. Indeed, O’Toole makes a better case for the sacrament’s collapse when he discusses the arrival of the birth control pill in the mid-1960s. The Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive at a time of acute instability in the church. The Mass was being rewritten and, with it, all of church practice was up for reconsideration. Lay Catholics who never would have dared to contravene their priests now openly defied the church after it declared—too late, some said—that it opposed all forms of artificial contraception. It didn’t help that many American priests, worried about upsetting parish harmony, sided with their parishioners and tacitly endorsed their defiance. “We didn’t harangue on birth control,” O’Toole records one priest admitting, “because we sensed people didn’t believe it.”
The confusion over the church’s position on birth control in effect devalued its authority on all questions of morality. If ecclesial authorities could disagree, so could common laymen. The definition of a sin, long understood as the church’s jurisdiction, now became a matter of open interpretation. When lay Catholics made their own determinations, they were more likely to err on the side of leniency to themselves. Add into the mix popular nations of Freudian psychology—in which human agency is deemphasized in favor of the unknowable workings of the subconscious—and it becomes clear why so many people decided that pouring out their shameful souls in a dark box on Saturday afternoon was an outmoded practice, best left in the past.
O’Toole notes that the new form of the Mass, introduced by 1970, very likely gave some Catholics the mistaken impression that the sacrament had been enfolded within the Mass itself and that to confess outside of Mass was redundant. (For non-Catholics: the phrase “I confess, to Almighty God . . .” is said at every Mass.) He also points out that the introduction of face-to-face confession—as opposed to the conventional confessional where there is a screen between priest and penitent—in that same time period coincided with a massive spike in priestly sexual abuse. The new arrangement, designed to make the sacrament more approachable, in fact only made the spiritually vulnerable easier targets for a malignant priest. O’Toole explains in grim detail how many sexual abuse cases began in this newly configured confessional, where the priest, unencumbered by the traditional screen, had full access to his victim. Face-to-face confession may not have directly contributed to the sacrament’s decline, but it certainly perverted its purpose.
But most immediately, O’Toole argues, the church’s attempts to keep up with midcentury intellectual trends are what hastened confession’s decline. By the mid-1960s, many seminaries had in various ways incorporated Freudianism into their curricula. Notions of collective guilt and public morality were in vogue—all to the detriment of the sacrament. “Confession had always depended on penitents’ ability to identify specific wrongful deeds that they themselves had done, to describe these in a few words, and to express their sorrow,” O’Toole writes. “It might very well be a step forward to encourage them to think of sin as an enveloping ‘smog,’ whose destructive effects were subtle. But how could individuals take their own personal share of responsibility for smog?”
The answer of course is that it is impossible. If collective sins against the environment are mortal, then should we confess starting our cars in the morning? Or what about a shopper who buys lettuce picked by non-union migrant workers—is the purchase a sin against justice? The problem with placing more emphasis on the big, abstract evils that plague society is that, for most people, it becomes very easy to write off one’s own peccadilloes in the face of such overawing wrong. “Contemporary man,” said one priest, quoted by O’Toole as summing up the attitudes of the day, “is more liable to think of war before he thinks of masturbation as an example of sin.”
These attitudes still prevail today, in the church and elsewhere. It is much easier to confess other people’s sins, loudly and in public, than it is to admit one’s own shortcomings, even in private. And easier even than that is to look around at all the evil in the world and declare the situation hopeless—in effect to repudiate sin on the basis that everything is sin. O’Toole concludes For I Have Sinned with a lament that, in losing the sacrament, American Catholics have lost “a larger framework for thinking about how we behave with one another, both personally and collectively.” That observation could be expanded more widely, even to non-Catholics: When there is no agreed-upon right and wrong, there may as well be no right and wrong at all.
O’Toole proposes that the church adopt a “new form” of confession, more attenuated to contemporary morality. I have to wonder, though, if it is less the sacrament and more the morality that is in need of reform. After all, when sin is taken seriously, it is much easier to be realistic about human nature.
