Dear Rev. Know-it-all;

A non Catholic I know has a major problem with the seal of confession. She challenged me to provide good justification for a priest not reporting to authorities the knowledge he obtained in confession that a person known to him was molesting children. How does this protect children?

Sincerely,

Hester Prynne  

Dear Hester,

Let me start with the justification you ask for. It is now routine for any counselor, psychologist etc. to greet a new patient with the list of reportable crimes. “If you tell me A, B or C, I must report you to the government. Now, How can I help you?”

I imagine that wife beaters, murderers and child molesters don’t go to counseling much any more if they can avoid it. That avenue of change is pretty much closed to them. There is some hope, however, that through grace, someone who commits a sin that is at the same time a horrible crime and an incurable sickness, may come to a confessional with a sincere desire to stop their predatory behavior. The priest, though he cannot report the crime, may successfully encourage the penitent to turn himself in and in so doing to get that person off the streets.  I don’t know, but with the new laws I suspect that counselors are having a hard time getting predators out of circulation, and perhaps, because of the seal of confession, at least some criminals are doing the right thing. 

( I can hear you asking, “Has this ever happened in your confessional?”  If it has, I couldn’t tell you. People often ask me, “What’s the worst thing you’ve heard in confession?”  My answer is “I wonder if all the rain we’ve been getting really is global warming.”)

Let me define the seal of confession for those who don’t  know what it is. A priest may not betray what he hears from a penitent in the sacrament of confession by word or gesture or any manner, even if it means his own death or the death of others. If a priest does break the holy seal, he is automatically excommunicated and may be restored to the community of the Church only by the pope himself. This means that not only must I be silent about what I hear in confession, I  may not even use that information if  for instance, someone in a confessional gives me a hot stock tip, I may not later call my broker. If a person tells me that he is planning on killing me at such a and such at time and place, I should not even change my daily routine, had I such a routine, and I certainly may not go ask the police for protection for myself. Many priests have died under torture rather than break the holy seal.

You said your friend was non Catholic. If she was a disciple of Calvin or Luther, her anger at the seal of confession would be more understandable. Luther, and even more so Calvin, the great lights of the Reformation, believed in absolute predestination. There were the good and the bad, the chosen and the damned. The damned deserved no pity, and the chosen needed no pity. Calvin once burned a friend of his, Michael Servetus, at the stake, because Servetus didn’t believe in the Trinity. He once forced a citizen of Geneva to do public penance and to beg, not God’s forgiveness, but John Calvin’s forgiveness for declaring in a public meeting that he believed in free will, in which Calvin, then de facto dictator of Geneva, Switzerland, did not believe. Our nation’s Puritan founders were the disciples of John Calvin. The ethos of this country is in large measure the invention of Calvin. In Calvin’s theology there are certainly people beyond God’s mercy. Catholics are not the disciples of Calvin or Luther. We are the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth who wished all men to be saved. Clearly there are predators who cannot be allowed to continue their predation. That is the task of the state. The task of the Church, who is Bride and Mother, is to see beyond the deformity and to recognize her child when no one else dares to do so.  Perhaps it is true that the anonymity and the safety of the confessional do more good and bring more criminals to justice than counseling currently can. Counseling and psychotherapy are real blessings, but the state has invaded the counselor’s office in a way that I believe damages a noble profession. In the stark light of the darkened confessional, perhaps a criminal is able to see himself with the clarity that only grace and truth can provide, and seeing himself as God sees him, he may find the strength to do the right thing and turn himself in.

The Church is radical in her beliefs about forgiveness because that is what she has learned from her Lord. Your friend shouldn’t be angry at the Church but at the God she proclaims. Had Hitler and Stalin repented, God would have embraced them. The graves of untold millions cry out “ NO!” but the Father of Love never turns away the truly repentant sinner, even if that sinner is the worst of criminals. Our sense of what passes for justice in this sorry world is offended by the God in whose infinite heart of  mercy and justice are reconciled. For ourselves, we all want Heaven’s mercy, but there are times when we recoil at His forbearance with evildoers. God does not wish the death of a sinner, even if  we do. In our history we have burned quite a few sinners and heretics, but when we have remembered who we really are, the doors of the confessional have been wide open. Long may they so remain.

On a recent plane trip I sat next to someone who was just finishing his doctorate in Gerontology. He was doing his dissertation on life spans. I was interested to learn that monks and nuns are among the longest lived groups. Parish priests have much shorter life spans. We are able to retire at seventy years of age, which is right around the age we die, if not sooner. I wasn’t surprised. We are the sin eaters. We are the ones who hear confessions, and take your burdens on our backs. Understand what this means. It isn’t unusual for me to stand at two or three death beds in a day, hearing the final desperate confession of a frightened soul. It is a regular part of my life to hear the tragedy and desperation of the everyday kind of sinner in the confessional. I hear about the infidelities, the disappointments and lost loves, the anger, the hurt, and at the end of the day I can talk to no one about it. Sometimes we sleep very lightly. We priests, even the worst of us, take the seal of confession very seriously. I remember once when I was newly ordained, a few of us were at dinner, and one of our colleagues conversation was going in the direction of the confessional. People began to get up and walk away from the table. He realized where he was going and immediately changed direction. That was the closest I have ever come to hearing a priest break the holy seal. So, if your friend is ever on the other side of the fence and needs to confide in someone, sure in the knowledge that her secret will go no farther, she can come to me or any Catholic priest, though we may urge her to turn herself into the police.

Sincerely,

 Rev. Know-it-all