What we need now is a leadership, at this point, that eschews populism but that calmly and deliberately, in the midst of competing voices pushing a variety of agendas, does what has to be done.
And recognises too what can and can’t be done.
I wonder whether Alan Shatter, the Justice Minister, whose bailiwick this is, has thought through the implications of his intention to force priests to break the seal of Confession, in the interests of child protection.
There are all kinds of situations where client confidentiality demands certain in-built protections.
But the Seal of Confession is of a different order altogether – as the standard of secrecy protecting a confession outweighs any form of professional confidentiality or secrecy.
Priests do not just regard it as an absolute duty not to disclose anything that they learn from penitents in the confessional.
They know that if they reveal anything they have learned during confession to anyone, even under a threat of their own death or that of others, that they would be automatically
excommunicated.
A priest cannot break the seal to save his own life, to protect his good name, to refute a false accusation against himself, even to save the life of another.
In a criminal matter, a priest may encourage a penitent to surrender to authorities.
However, this is the most a priest can do.
We cannot directly or indirectly disclose the matter to anyone, civil authorities or anyone
else.
This very specific priest-penitent privilege is usually respected in law and without it a priest’s capacity to fulfil his ministry is inhibited.
In a famous Hitchcock film ‘I Confess’ (1953), a killer confesses a murder to a priest. In the event the priest was accused of the murder but the dilemma the film conveyed was that the priest couldn’t break the seal of Confession, even though his own life was at stake.
It is a measure of the vulnerability of the Catholic Church that part of the package of measures being contemplated by the civil authorities effectively amounts to a rejection of protection in law for what was always regarded as the sacred seal of Confession.
Has it all come to this?