At Roman Catholic churches this week, priests were busy giving confession to those who wanted to make a clean sweep of their souls before Easter.Some churches even brought in extra priests to handle the overflow of the annual rush during what is known as Holy Week.
But for many parishioners, it was likely the only time of the year they would go to confess their sins one-on-one, if they went at all, as the habit of the regular trip to the confessional fades into the past.
It is a trend worrying to some in the Church, but others say it is a sign that the ancient sacrament is getting back to its essence, signalling a more meaningful commitment to repentance, rather than an obsessive concern about every action of one's life.
"The downside of constant weekly confession, when it was just a matter of reciting your sins and receiving absolution, was that it could easily turn into a form of obsessive-compulsive behaviour," said Lawrence Cunningham, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. "You could over-scrutinize your own life and everything becomes a sin."
Just this month, a story out of the Vatican bemoaned the fact that fewer and fewer Catholics go to confession. It said 60% of Catholics in Italy, for example, never go at all. In the United States, the most recent study, done in 2005, found 42% of American Catholics never go and 32% go less than once a year and only 2% go more than once a month. There are no similar studies for Canada.
The notion of a once-a-week confession, followed by a series of Hail Marys, is a relatively modern construct that some Catholic thinkers say is an aberration in Church history. The norm in the 13th century was one good confession a year, before taking Holy Communion at Easter, but the practice became more frequent over time.
Observers say some significant changes in the past 40 years have combined to reduce the numbers of penitents: the reforms of Vatican II, the way Catholics view sin, the changing view that one-on-one confession is not a prerequisite to take communion, and the shift in the tone of sermons from fire and brimstone and individual sin to love and mercy, and an emphasis on greater social sins.
Even the name has changed: the sacrament of penance is now called the sacrament of reconciliation.
Susan Gibbs remembers going back to confession after an absence of 10 years. It was a moment of profound acknowledgement of something missing in her religious life, she said, although mixed with a touch of screwball comedy.
Ms. Gibbs, who works for the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., made her own return to the sacrament at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome while on a backpacking trip to Italy; a dramatic venue for a return, she said, but "then I had a Japanese tourist leaning in [to the confessional] to see what was going on."
She has recently helped create a unique advertising campaign to bring Roman Catholics back to the confessional in Washington, using a mix of radio, billboard and bus ads called The Light Is On For You -- a reference to the light over the confessional booth to indicate it is free.
"Confession is personal and it's difficult for many people," she said. "It's counter-cultural to the world we're in; it's taking responsibility for what you did. We do not do a lot of that, unless it's on Oprah's couch. It's hard to go in and acknowledge and verbalize to someone else what you did wrong. But there is something extremely freeing about having someone acknowledge it, praying with you and saying this is what you need to do now -- and knowing you can now start fresh.
"Many believed because they hadn't gone to confession in years that the priest was going to yell at them. Our message was, 'We know you haven't been there, but come on back. It's OK.' "
Prof. Cunningham remembers when the priests could be scarier than they are today. "We used to get hell-raising sermons 40 or 50 years ago ... And today it's rare that you hear those kinds of sermons, so maybe the concept of sin itself has been shifted," he said. "Vatican II emphasized the idea of the mercy of God and less the idea of God as a judge."
James O'Toole, a history professor at Boston College who has written about the social practice of confession, also looks to the pulpits as one of the main reasons that the confessional is far less busy than it once was: "There was a change in emphasis on preaching and the way sin was talked about. It was a move from individual sins to social sins like racism, imperialism, sexism and [degradation of the] environment."
Just last week, Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, a Vatican expert on sin and penance, spoke about such modern evils as genetic manipulation and ecological offences. He also spoke of drug trafficking and economic injustice as modern social sins.
The Church teaching of social sin was an effective and important shift, Prof. O'Toole said, "But individual Catholics couldn't decide what to do with that. That's hard to talk about in the confessional. How do I take my own share of responsibility for that?"
He said that it was common practice to go to confession every time before receiving communion, but once the Mass was translated from Latin to the vernacular after Vatican II, many Catholics realized they were already making a general confession and being absolved within the liturgy of the service. They began to think the one-on-one confessional no longer necessary.
Prof. Cunningham said another problem was that there were simply too many mortal sins -- those sins that cut you off from the grace of God.
"I was taught as a child that to miss Mass on Sunday was a mortal sin; to eat meat on Friday was a mortal sin. That was obviously not a very helpful way of thinking about sin," said Prof. Cunningham, 72, who grew up in Florida.
"I remember someone writing that if everything is a mortal sin, then nothing is a mortal sin. If you can go to hell for eating meat on Friday and you can go to hell for committing adultery, then how do you discriminate one from the others?"
Prof. O'Toole said attitudes about birth control might have also played a part in less attendance at confession. While the Church still calls it a sin, "a large number of Catholics didn't think it was sinful."
In his own interviews with clergy, he found that it was not uncommon for a parish priest to hear 200 confessions a week in the past; today, "virtually every parish priest said, 'If I hear 15 a week, it's busy.' " But they also said that it is now the most profound thing they do -- the moment when they feel the most helpful to their parishioners.
Friar Richard Riccioli, pastor at St. Bonaventure Church in Toronto, thinks the lower numbers are a sign of an important change in Catholicism, where confessions are now more profound and probe deeper into what is really going on.
"There is a decline in the numbers, but that's a success," he said.
"We have been able to help people move from one image of God to another. Someone who kept track of every little move you made and held you accountable for every little detail. If you did wrong, you immediately had to confess it. There was a sense you were always teetering on damnation. And so today people look at themselves and their relationship with God instead of isolated individual acts."
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