THE DARK BOX

JOHN CORNWELL is the Director of the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge. He is the author of twenty books, including The New York Times bestseller Hitler’s Pope. www.johncornwell.org

ALSO BY

JOHN CORNWELL

Nonfiction:

Coleridge: Poet and Revolutionary
A Free and Balanced Flow (with Colin Legum)
Earth to Earth
A Thief in the Night
The Hiding Places of God (Powers of Darkness, Powers of Light)
Nature’s Imagination (ed.)
The Power to Harm
Consciousness and Human Identity (ed.)
Hitler’s Pope
Breaking Faith
Explanations (ed.)
Hitler’s Scientists
The Pontiff in Winter
Seminary Boy
Darwin’s Angel
Philosophers and God (ed. with Michael McGhee)
Newman’s Unquiet Grave
Meditations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (ed.)

Fiction:

The Spoiled Priest
Seven Other Demons
Strange Gods

THE DARK BOX

A SECRET HISTORY of CONFESSION

JOHN CORNWELL

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

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Pine Street

London EC1R 0JH

www.profilebooks.com

First published in the United States of America by

Basic Books, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

Copyright © John Cornwell, 2014

Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible Revised Standard

Version Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocrypha/

Deuterocanonical Books: An Ecumenical Edition. New York: Collins, 1973.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 954 5

In memory of

Peter Carson

1938–2013

Editor, Publisher, Friend

I was so full of joy, submitting and humbling myself before the confessor, a simple, timid priest, and exposing all the filth of my soul;

I was so full of joy at my thoughts merging with the aspirations of the fathers who wrote the ritual prayers;

I was so full of joy to be one with all believers, past and present …

—Leo Tolstoy, Confession, translated from the Russian by Peter Carson, 2013

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Prologue

PART ONE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONFESSION

One: Early Penitents and Their Penances

Two: Confession into Its Own

Three: Confession and the Counter-Reformers

Four: Fact, Fiction, and Anticlericalism

PART TWO: THE CHILD PENITENTS

Five: The Pope Who ‘Restored’ Catholicism

Six: Pius X’s Spy-Net

Seven: The Great Confessional Experiment

Eight: The Making of a Confessor

Nine: Seminary Sexology

PART THREE: ‘SOUL MURDER’

Ten: Sexual Abuse in the Confessional

Eleven: Confession Imagined

Twelve: Varieties of Confessional Experience

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Notes

Index

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WHEN I BEGAN RESEARCH FOR THIS BOOK, I ASKED CATHOLIC friends: ‘How long since your last confession?’ I heard ‘twenty years’, ‘thirty years’, and an occasional ‘two months’. Sometimes I was told ‘Mind your own business’. It seems only right to state my own circumstance from the outset.

Brought up after the Second World War in London’s East End by a devout mother of Irish extraction, I was instructed in the Catholic faith by nuns from the age of five. I made my first confession at age seven, the day before my first communion. On Saturday afternoons or evenings, all the family, including four siblings, joined the lengthy queues at our local church to confess our sins—all except my father, that is, who only became a Catholic to marry my mother.

In confession, as we were taught, you started by telling the priest how many weeks or months had elapsed since your last confession. You listed the sins committed since that last confession, then said a prayer of contrition. The priest would ask some questions to clarify the nature of the sins you had told him. He might also offer spiritual advice. You were obliged to feel genuinely sorry for having offended God, and to declare that you would try not to commit those sins again. If it was possible to make reparation to the people you had wronged, it was important to do so. The priest then imposed a penance—usually a few prayers—and said the words of absolution. We were told that absolution relieved us of the guilt for the sins we had confessed. We were taught that in the case of a mortal sin (a grave sin deserving of Hell), absolution lifted the dire penalty of eternal punishment. Nowadays, Catholics are commonly told that absolution reconciles them to God’s love.

My father was convinced, like many non-Catholics, that confession allowed Catholics to commit sins, have them forgiven (and feel good), then commit them again. As a well-taught Catholic, I knew better. Absolution did not work unless you had a ‘firm purpose of amendment’. That determination, we realised, was as fragile as human nature itself.

I served Mass at our local church every morning from the age of ten. At age twelve I admitted to our parish priest that I wanted to be like him—a priest. In retrospect, this was odd, for Father James Cooney—austere, desiccated, humourless—was hardly an attractive role model. My mother said that going to confession with him was like ‘going on trial for your life’. But I had fallen in love with the ritual of the Mass and would spend hours in the privacy of my bedroom bobbing up and down before a makeshift altar, muttering mumbo-jumbo pretend Latin. The following year I was enrolled in a junior seminary—a monastic boarding school for boys, 150 miles from home, where I was to spend five years receiving a privileged education, including Latin and Greek, in preparation for senior seminary.

I got on well with most of our priest-teachers, who worked hard to bring us to a high standard of education. They were generally kind men and exemplary models of priesthood. One day, however, I was sexually propositioned by one of our priests while he was hearing my confession. I realised that externals of clerical piety are no guarantee of authentic holiness. I would never again enjoy unalloyed trust in the beneficence of priests, especially in confession. I nevertheless proceeded at eighteen to the senior seminary, where I stayed long enough to complete the course in philosophy of religion and experience the rigorous priestly formation of that era, including instructions that would shape a future confessor. I was becoming a ‘Catholic cleric’. My vocation had become a matter of habit rather than choice. I had confessed every week of my life—from boyhood to the age of twenty-one.

After seven years of seminary life, junior and senior, I came to see that the priesthood was not for me. I knew in my heart of hearts, and in my genitals, that I would not make it as a celibate. Catching up with the world—music, dancing, girls, lay clothes, making my own decisions after years of seminary discipline—was not easy. My understanding tutor at Oxford, where I had arrived to study English literature, quipped one day: ‘My dear fellow, you need to learn in life how to take the smooth with the rough …’

I became convinced that Catholicism, for me at least, was not an impetus for maturity and happiness. At the same time, I was finding it difficult to reconcile Christianity with an increasingly positivist, scientific view of the world. As a graduate student at Cambridge, I finally, consciously, abandoned my Catholicism. For the next twenty years I would hover between atheism and agnosticism. But time, my dream life, and a gradual appreciation of the difference between religious imagination and magic realism opened the way to at least consider the possibility of a God after atheism.

Marriage to a devout Catholic who brought up our children in the faith, and nostalgia for the rhythms of Catholic liturgy, prompted a change of heart—not so much a return as a progression—although I remain circumspect. Notions of a vengeful God have been difficult to exorcise entirely. To this day, moreover, I have occasional, inchoate suspicions that these renewed quests for a once-rejected God mask a search for the lost abusers of one’s childhood. This book, however, while written from the inevitable perspective of an individual member of the Catholic faithful, draws on a wide range of historical sources and the personal testimonies of fellow Catholics past and present.

PROLOGUE

IN THE EARLY PERIOD OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES, penitents would confess in public those major sins that had excluded them from their communities—such as murder, idolatry, and adultery. The ritual of reconciliation into the community or congregation was seldom allowed more than once in a Christian’s lifetime. It was not until the Middle Ages that all adult members of the faithful within Latin Christianity were obliged to tell their sins to a priest in private once a year. The penitent would kneel before the seated confessor, with the possibility of physical contact between the two. The practice of Roman Catholics entering a dark box to confess their sins did not begin until the mid-sixteenth century, following the Reformation and the fragmentation of Western Christendom.

The confessional box is a booth-like piece of church furniture containing a dividing panel. This panel physically separates the penitent, who kneels in the dark, from the confessor, who sits in the light. There is a grille set in the panel that allows for verbal communication; in theory, it obscures the faces of penitent and confessor from each other. Although most devout Catholics born before 1970 used to enter that box frequently, Catholic confession, whether inside the box or outside it, has been largely abandoned, despite pleas from the previous pope, Benedict XVI, and many of the world’s bishops to revive the practice.

In this book I argue that the rejection of confession is a crucial symptom of a wider crisis within the Catholic Church. A gulf has opened up between official teaching and practice. An alteration across a broad front, described by some theologians as a ‘paradigm shift’ (in emulation of great sea changes in ‘normal’ science), has affected the way many Catholics understand sin, virtue, and the nature of God. This shift, in turn, has created new insights into the meaning of God’s love and forgiveness.¹

Over the past four decades, Rome has attempted to make confession more attractive. Today Catholics refer to the sacrament as ‘reconciliation’ (a term used in the early Church), and confessors tend to hear the sins of their penitents in the pews or the sanctuary, or on comfortable chairs in a parish room set aside for the purpose. Yet the more user-friendly circumstances of the sacrament have not brought back the penitents. From the mid-1970s, during the papacy of Paul VI, penitents were offered the option of group absolution—known as ‘general’ absolution; the initiative was quashed by John Paul II in 1983. Mortal, or grave, sins, he insisted, must be absolved in privacy after they have been told to a priest. (Mortal sins, according to orthodox doctrine, include not only the major sins, such as murder, grand larceny, physical violence, and adultery, but also all sexual sins: using condoms, having sex outside of marriage, having homosexual sex, divorcing and remarrying without an annulment, masturbation, and indulging in ‘impure thoughts’.)

Confessions have been so poorly attended in recent years that in many parishes the sacrament is only available by appointment. Some priests will tell you that nobody has sought the sacrament for months. If you go to a cathedral church, you may still find queues of penitents waiting to be confessed in the traditional confessional box; but this is an isolated phenomenon. Many of these old-style confessants, who are nevertheless as likely to be in their twenties as their eighties, cling to a version of Catholicism that most Catholics have abandoned. Many have come from parishes where their confessions cannot be heard, or because they prefer to be confessed by a priest who does not recognise them.

One practice that continues to be upheld throughout the Church, however, despite the widespread decline of confession or reconciliation as a sacrament among adult Catholics, is that of children making their first confession at age seven in preparation for their first communion. A crucial theme of this book is the phenomenon of obligatory confession in early childhood. The story of its universal commencement in the early twentieth century, the widespread oppression it occasioned, and, scandalously, the opportunity it afforded a minority of priests to abuse children sexually reveals the dark face of confession’s recent history.

In the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, there is a handsome illuminated document, penned in black and red gothic script, entitled Memoriale Presbiterorum—an aide memoire for priests. Written in Latin and dating from the early fourteenth century, it has 218 chapters offering guidance to confessors on every aspect of confessional practice. The manual is typical of the many guides for confessors appearing throughout Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.²

One chapter, headed ‘Concerning Children’ (Circa pueros), offers this advice: ‘You ought to know, confessor, that if a child be capable of wrongdoing, near to puberty, he is obliged to confess all his sins at least once a year.’ By the time the Memoriale came to be written, a hundred years had passed since a great council in Rome decreed that all Christians in the Latin tradition must confess their sins at least once a year on reaching the ‘age of discretion’—which, as this manual and many others implied, was around the time of puberty. The age for first confession in the Latin Christian tradition was therefore generally held to be between twelve and fourteen, a view that persisted down the centuries, with local and periodic variations, until the first decade of the twentieth century, when Rome issued a dramatic proclamation on the subject.³

Against the background of the eventful, and at times troubled, evolution of the practice of confession, this book culminates with the story of a historic experiment imposed universally on Catholic children. In 1910, the pope of the day, Pius X, decreed that first confession should be made not at puberty but at the age of seven—which meant that instruction on sin, and the different categories of sins, and the punishments due for sins in Purgatory and Hell, would begin at five or six. The decree also advocated weekly confession for Catholics of every age, instead of annual confession, the former norm for lay members of the faithful. Among the many unintended consequences of that experiment was the inculcation in young children of an oppressive sense of guilt and shame, especially for their bodies, and, for a significant minority, exposure to clerical sexual predators.

These charges are in stark contrast to the undeniable benefits—spiritual and psychological—that result from a mature individual’s admission of remorse for having caused injury to others, and the subsequent forgiveness of the injured party, across a wide spectrum of religious practices and cultural contexts. One of the most beautiful arias in opera concludes Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro—when marital discord, deceit and betrayal end with the husband begging for pardon, and the wife offering unconditional forgiveness. The poignant aria ‘Contessa Perdono’—‘Countess, forgive me’—envelops the cast and the entire audience in a sublime ambiance of harmony and reconciliation. A similar poignant moment occurs in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice when Portia extols the power and beneficence of mercy as a type of divine grace:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.⁴

Poets of every era testify that the act of unburdening in a form of words and in public brings healing, or, as William Wordsworth put it—‘timely utterance’ gives ‘thought relief’.⁵ Yet the widely assumed instinctual universality and healing quality of the tendency to confess—or as young people might say today, ‘fess up’—is a matter of debate. (How many marriages have been wrecked by a spouse’s admission of having strayed?) Nor does Catholic confession—involving the patriarchal judgement of a priest over women and children—accord with voluntary exchanges of remorse and forgiveness within relationships where the parties have equal power.

For many centuries confession to a priest in the Catholic Church was obligatory—under pain of further sin. For centuries the Catholic sacrament of confession involved patriarchal authority, secrecy, and itemized lists of discrete ‘sins’ couched in formalised language. The ‘telling’ of sins, moreover, was normally divorced from the narratives and relationships of a penitent’s life story. The role of the confessor was not that of a representative of an injured party, but of judge, healer, dispenser of penance, and representative of the divine.

The desire to be chastised for wrongdoing in a non-religious context can be traced through the works of many writers from Plato to Sigmund Freud, although Freud maintained that our conscious triggers for guilt hide deeper reasons, buried in the subconscious.⁶ Penances imposed by Catholic confessors today are mild—a few prayers. These ‘penances’, however, are remnants of harsh self-mortification that once included fasts, pilgrimage, exile, and self-flagellation.

Yet the point of Catholic confession goes beyond absolution for wrongdoing. For many centuries confession has been deemed crucial for achieving holiness and Heaven. Of all Christian denominations, the Catholic Church has advocated the importance of confession as a means of salvation. Great saints, such as Teresa of Avila, have extolled confession’s benefits as a means of achieving mystical union with God.

Spiritual writers within the sphere of the monotheistic religions emphasize the importance of the sinner making a decision for God: embarking on a conversion of life. The visible ritual of confession in the presence of a minister, however, makes such a conversion ‘sacramental’—an outward sign of inward grace, sanctioned by the Church. Despite the unhappiness of the Protestant reformers with the medieval conduct of the sacrament of penance, confession would nevertheless be practised in a restricted form by the Lutheran, Anglican, and Episcopalian churches (as well as the Eastern Churches). These denominations mostly administer the ritual in cases where a penitent seeks reconciliation, or spiritual consolation, in crisis, such as in illness or in the face of death. Unlike the Catholic Church, they do not oblige a member of their faithful to confess in the event of having committed a ‘serious’ sin, nor do they maintain rules of annual obligation to confess.

Confession has merged with spiritual counselling across different Christian denominations, especially for people dedicated to a life in religion. In the Catholic tradition, moreover, the power of the priest to bestow absolution extends in cases of emergency to groups of believers, especially when the priest can offer spiritual consolation in time of peril. One of the heroes of the Titanic disaster was Father Thomas Beales, who had twice refused the opportunity to go into a lifeboat. He preferred to stay on the vessel, where he continued to lead prayers and absolve sins even as the ship went down. During the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, Father Mychal Judge was the first dead rescuer to be carried out. He was killed by falling masonry while hearing the confessions of the injured and dying. In time of war, moreover, Catholic chaplains have won praise for their courage in administering, at risk of their lives, absolution and last rites to the wounded and dying on the battlefields and at sea. There are countless instances of priests for whom confession is an occasion of compassion and inclusion. It has been revealed that Pope Francis, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, would go to the city’s red-light district at night to give spiritual comfort to prostitutes, sitting on a roadside bench.⁷

And yet the Catholic history of confession is punctuated with evidence of a darker side. Confessors down the centuries, in the act of administering the sacrament, have been guilty of hypocrisy, avarice, sexual debauchery, and other forms of abuse. Theological disagreements over confession, as well as confessors’ sexual and mercenary abuses, were prime reasons for Protestant indignation at the Reformation. The confessional box, separating confessor and penitent physically and visually, was invented in the Catholic Counter-Reformation to prevent the seduction of women. Sexual abuses nevertheless persisted. The whispering of secrets, invariably involving the marriage bed, would lead to new forms of confessional seduction. By the eighteenth century, anticlericalism, owing in part to antagonism between husbands and their wives’ confessors, led to widespread neglect of the sacrament.

Pius X, later canonised an official saint of the Church, extended universal and frequent confessional practice to young children, believing confession and Holy Communion to be means of bestowing spiritual sustenance and protection on them in the face of secularism, materialism, and a form of heresy he termed ‘Modernism’. The faithful responded: long lines of penitents, including young children now, were a feature of weekly confession-times in Catholic churches the world over. This was the Church familiar to Catholics from the First World War to the early 1970s, often referred to in nostalgic retrospect as a golden age of Catholicism. Catholic public and domestic religious practices increased—processions, pilgrimages, praying the Rosary, grace before and after meals, the Angelus, increased veneration of the pope. There was a surge in vocations to the priesthood—many candidates making their commitment, as I did, in boyhood.

In preparation for first confession, children barely out of infancy were taught the doctrine of ‘mortal sin’, which killed the soul and resulted in eternal punishment. Every sin of thought, word, and deed against chastity, or ‘modesty’, was mortal. Religious instruction at an early stage of moral development laid foundations of beliefs that were more akin to superstition than to faith, closer to fear than to love of God. Adult disciplines such as fasting (from midnight on the day before receiving Holy Communion) were also imposed, often resulting in a child breaking the fast unintentionally. Children caught in this dilemma would go nevertheless to communion under social and familial pressures and suffer consequent guilt. They had been taught that receiving communion after breaking the fast was both a mortal sin and a sacrilege—compounded by a further sacrilege if the sin was not admitted in a subsequent confession.

Moreover, priests now had access to children on a weekly basis in the unsupervised intimacy of the confessional box. Many priests, because of the enclosed seminary education, lacked maturity as well as training in child psychology and pedagogy. In time, child victims of oppression would themselves become priests.

From the 1950s, and with gathering momentum during the period of the ‘sexual revolution’, a significant minority of priests was taking advantage of the intimacy of the confessional to groom young penitents for acts of sexual abuse. Current investigations reveal that priests were exploiting confession to test the vulnerability of children for sexual exploitation and to establish opportunities for abuse outside of the confessional. At the same time, the abusers would exploit confession to square their own offences with their pastoral lives. Priests who have served prison sentences for sexual crimes admit that they would seek out confessors to secure absolution while concealing the ages of their ‘sexual partners’ and their own priestly identities.⁸ Lay Catholics have been angered by the knowledge that prelates right up to the Vatican have harboured or turned a blind eye to sexual deviants.

By the strict standards of papal teaching on sexual morals, Catholics who practise contraception, or who are living together outside of marriage, or who are practising homosexuals, are in grave sin. John Paul II insisted that the use of condoms, even by those infected by HIV/AIDS, is a sin. He also declared that grave sins can only be forgiven in confession. Yet the majority of practising Catholics go to confession rarely, if at all. In Europe the statisticians of Catholic practice have ceased to make enquiries about the reception of confession in their questionnaires. In the United States, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) estimates that only 2 per cent of Catholics go to confession regularly. Anecdotal evidence for Ireland and the United Kingdom, as well as correspondents writing to me from Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, suggests a massive collapse.⁹

The sense of sin taught to generations of Catholic children as an offence against God’s rules barely survives alongside a virtual denial of sin. A recent convert informant, typical of many who were brought into the Church by traditionalist priests, tells me that she has been taught that missing Mass is a serious sin—a mortal sin, in fact, requiring absolution before receiving the Eucharist. In contrast, a pastor in his seventies, ‘liberated’ by the Second Vatican Council, tells me that he never speaks of sin: ‘We have encouraged teenagers in our local Catholic school to see confession as an opportunity to talk about their experience of life, and their difficulties.’ The occasional, and temporary, popularity of confession among groups of teenagers is clearly visible at World Youth Days when the young queue in the hundreds to be confessed. But there is no evidence that these teenagers continue to go to confession back at home, or that their sense of sin bears any relation to official Catholic teaching, especially on sexual matters.

UNDERSTANDING HOW CONFESSION has shaped Catholicism through the past century merits a rehearsal of confession’s historical development, which forms the first part of this book. Confession in private to a priest (auricular confession) of minor as well as major sins (venial and mortal) evolved only gradually, and late in the first millennium, in remote monastic communities that had survived the barbarian invasions and the breakdown of civil society. Individual confession as we know it today grew out of one-on-one spiritual direction in religious communities. It was not until the thirteenth century that Rome commanded all members of the faithful to confess to a priest at least once a year under pain of excommunication, eternal damnation, and loss of the right to be buried in consecrated ground. The obligation to confess, imposed by Pope Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, was as much a tactic in the war against heresy (an opportunity to question penitents on their orthodoxy) as a desire to call the faithful to greater holiness.

The practice of confession from the late medieval and early modern periods was to exert a potent influence on the development of Western ethics, law, and perceptions of the self. Confession gradually replaced trial by ordeal; and yet, in cases of suspected heresy, the Inquisition thought it legitimate to extort confessions (not the sacrament, but ‘criminal’ confessions) by torture. Catholic moral theology’s obsessive interest in what happens between the bed-sheets helped shape our modern understanding of the language of the body and sexual behaviour. Ideas about the examination of conscience, and preoccupation with sins of thought and imagination, encouraged a deepening sense of subjectivity and individual moral agency. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, believers died gruesome deaths—on both sides of the Reformation divide—for the right to practise confession or to refuse it.

The frequent confessions practised by my generation, and the generations of my parents and grandparents, nurtured an identifiable literary subgenre that extended from Paul Claudel and James Joyce through writers such as Georges Bernanos, Evelyn Waugh, Edna O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, and Colm Tóibín. Authors who were Catholic converts, such as Graham Greene, tended to exploit the drama of confession for the adult soul in peril. Others, including Frank O’Connor and Roddy Doyle, have expressed the comic potential of the confessional’s dark box. For the poet Carol Ann Duffy, however, who recollected the confessions of her childhood, the confessional box was a ‘dark cell’ with suggestions of live burial, where a child would ‘stammer’ in fear of ‘eternal damnation’. Sins were ‘those maggoty things / that wriggle in the soul’. For another poet, the late Christopher Logue, the confessional booth was ‘a dark, smelly, wooden crate of a place’ where one retailed one’s ‘so-called sins to a hairy ear’. Logue complains: ‘Proscription rather than examination, the cultivation of guilt, the awarding of punishment and blame—was cruel, abusive, even—if you countenance the thought—sinful in itself.’¹⁰

Logue declared that the universal practice of confession for young children was a form of psychological and emotional abuse. Moreover, the lowered age of confession from thirteen to seven would coincide with the age group of the young most affected by sexual abuse.¹¹ Pius X’s initiative resulted in the frequent exposure of Catholic children to priests who had been removed from the normal, familial company of children for many years. It is significant that the rise in sexual attacks, from the late 1950s through the 1980s, coincided not only with the explosion of sexual permissiveness but also with the tendency for priests to hear confessions outside of the confessional box—in sacristies, parish rooms, and priests’ quarters. Informants have spoken of confessions held in priests’ bedrooms, on retreats, and in cars, and of being invited, at the age of seven or eight, to be confessed on a priest’s lap.

Understanding the current crises in the Catholic Church, and its fate and its future, involves an appreciation of the chequered history of the powerful instrument of confession and the absolution of sins as seen by the laity, rather than through the doctrinal lens of theologians, or the pastoral perspective of priests, bishops, and popes. St. Augustine of Hippo believed that the authenticity of Christianity ultimately depended on the reception of its beliefs and practices by the faithful at large and the ‘echo’ it gave back to official doctrine. The Catholic faithful, en masse, have sent a definitive signal of dissent to the purveyors of ‘official’ doctrine on confession and the nature of sin.

PART ONE

A BRIEF HISTORY of CONFESSION