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.
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Ed Conroy is a freelance writer, based in San Antonio, for National Catholic Reporter.
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