Confession

In the Tablet article, "Anyone for Confession" (2001), Annabel Miller comments:

To many Catholics today, the idea of entering a box with a man in black, running through a list of sins and emerging forgiven, can smack of a superstitious ritual rather than a process which actually changes anything.

She notes a Parish priest as saying:

Fr Nick Wilde, of Kirkby, Liverpool, reckons that in a single year only about 20 people will come to him for formal, individual confession. The practice has tailed off completely, almost finished, he told me. Fr Wilde is parish priest at St Laurence's church which has a congregation of 250. In his opinion, many practising Catholics have dropped individual confession because they have developed, with the Church's help, a greater sense of self-worth, and are no longer prepared to whisper guilty secrets to a mediating priest. He spoke of the popularity, by contrast, of communal reconciliation services where penitents either make an individual confession during the service or receive general absolution.

She highlights two things which have brought about this change. The first is what one might call the shift from looking at sins as a list to be ticked off, and looking it as a flawed response of the whole person, what one might call the existential perspective. From a personal point of view, there are some things I have done (or failed to do), which I certainly regret, but to see them as "detached" in that they can just be listed like a shopping list, as if they had nothing to do with the kind of person I am, is somehow just missing the point:

Sr Gemma Simmonds, chaplain at Heythrop College in London University, thinks the traditional form of the Sacrament of Reconciliation is being dropped by English Catholics because people do not look at their sins in isolation – three lies, four impure thoughts – but rather see them as part of a whole pattern of living as a necessarily flawed human being. The old way of going to confession made people feel guilty about trivial things without giving them a sense of responsibility for bigger things, she said. It was part of the minutiae of privatised religion.

The second factor she mentions is the "sin cycle", which, of course, I know from experience of non-Catholic polemic, was easily pilloried, with comments that Catholics go to confession, then having wiped the slate clean, are free to behave badly again. However, as with the shopping list approach, this has an element of truth in it, in that that kind of confession loses sight of the larger picture of the flawed nature of human beings in general. Equally, the idea of "mortal sin" as defined is a kind of category that can exist in a simplistic model of sin as act, but breaks down when pressed too strongly, both exegetically (as it depends on an older proof text approach to scripture, and philosophically, as human acts and choices are more complex and manysided than this kind of division suggests:

Another factor in the waning popularity of individual confession is that Catholics used to be taught to go regularly, in order to be eligible to receive Holy Communion in a state of grace. Each week, they engaged in a sin cycle – confession, communion, sin, confession, communion, and so on. The Church no longer insists on such regular confession – though it is forbidden for anyone to receive Holy Communion who has committed a mortal sin and not confessed it. Most ordinary Mass-goers would be hard-pressed to define a mortal sin, and I, for one, have never heard the definition explained from the pulpit.

As a post-Vatican II Catholic convert, I think the call to reiterate the importance of confession without rethinking it, and just trying to restore old forms, is doomed to failure. Miller quotes Dominian who is surely right in his argument:

The psychiatrist Jack Dominian argued that in its insistence on individual reconciliation, Rome is attempting to impose a spiritual form which no longer reflects the people's experience. As the people of God had matured, he wrote, the paternalistic stance of parent to child in the confessional has come to seem unacceptable.