Why a Priest Would Rather Face Jail Than Betray a Penitent
By Mark Dooley
The Government of Ireland is currently drafting legislation on the mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse. If passed, this will oblige Catholic priests to break the seal of Confession in order to report those abusers who seek absolution. Many have vowed, on pain of imprisonment, never to break the sacred seal. In a country which has abandoned its sense of the sacred, it is difficult for many to understand why a Catholic priest would rather face jail than break the confessional seal. Why, people may ask, would a priest knowingly protect a paedophile when he could save a child from further abuse? How could he offer spiritual consolation to someone who violates his vows to prey on the innocent? For those of us who regard clerical child abuse as a terrible evil, those are difficult questions to answer. For far too long, the confessional was used by abusers to salve their soul before succumbing to the next bout of wickedness. For far too long, they tarnished one of the great sacraments of the Church in order to avoid divine condemnation. My own view is that absolution ought to have been made conditional on a penitent confessing the crime of child abuse to the civil authorities. After all, if you are truly repentant you will seek to publicly atone for your misdeeds. You will want to claim full responsibility for any hurt caused so that justice may be served. But didn't Christ offer unconditional mercy to those who sought it? It is true that Jesus refused to condemn those, like the adulterous woman, who had grievously sinned. Yet, did He not say to that same woman: 'Go, and sin no more'? The aim of Confession is not to clear someone's conscience so that they feel free to repeatedly commit a sin. It is to reveal the mercy of Christ so that they will strive to sin no more. In other words, the penitent must leave the Confessional with the honest intention of permanently reforming his life. That said, to legally oblige priests to break the Confessional Seal is not just an attack on the clergy, but on all Catholics. It is so because Confession is not simply a more antiquated therapy session. For religious people, it is nothing less than a divine sacrament instituted by Christ Himself. The fact that a relatively small group of clerical deviants abused the rite of Confession does not diminish its sacredness. For those Catholics who avail of it, Confession is yet another path to sanctity. It offers us a means of reconciling with Christ so as to lead better lives here on earth. By demanding that priests sever the seal, the Government is not asking them to report a casual conversation. It is asking them to violate a sacrament and betray the trust of those who believe they are confessing their sins, not to a priest, but to Christ. Through their blameless and holy lives, such penitents are model citizens who stand as moral examples to the young. That is why priests of all complexions are united in their defence of the Sacrament of Confession. For, once the seal is broken, the confessional will never again be considered a sacred space. The trust upon which the sacrament depends will have been shattered for good. It is a sad fact of human nature, that there will always be those who think nothing of desecration. Those priests who molested children by night, only to seek solace in the Confessional by day, desecrated the source of sacramental forgiveness. For those whose sacred sense has not been compromised, that is no less sacrilegious than vandalising a tombstone. Still, we live in an age when the sacred – especially as perceived by Christians - is routinely rubbished and disrespected. We live at a time when people no longer understand why there are those who would sacrifice their lives for what they consider holy. What is the big deal, they will ask, when it comes to the subject of the Confessional seal? Suppose, however, the Government decided that, in order to prevent future terrorist attacks, they would introduce legislation obliging Muslims to report imams who used Friday Prayers to condone martyrdom. In such circumstances, I suspect the chorus from civil liberties groups would be deafening. I also suspect that opposition to such legislation would be based on the fact that, not only would this threaten religious liberty, but would be a violation of what Islam considers sacred. We ought to recognise that Catholics are no less offended by assaults on those times and places which they regard as sacred. This is not to defend the Confessional as a place of spiritual refuge for paedophiles. For, to repeat, it is Catholics themselves who are most offended by such desecration of the sacrament of reconciliation. What I am suggesting is that, by forcing this legislation, the Irish Government will do little to protect children from priestly predators. For, should any still exist, I doubt that offending clerics will ever cross the door of a Confessional again. What the Government will do, however, is serve to undermine the sacrament itself, and, in so doing, deprive countless good people of the confidence they need to confess their sins in peace. They will, in sum, be trampling over sacred ground. Even in this era of widespread desecration, that is not something we should casually countenance. For once we permit a government to interfere with the sacred, we have already become an uncivilised society, one in which the law is a natural enemy to all things holy.
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