The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession by John Cornwell – review

By Catherine Pepinster
Guardian
February 23, 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/23/dark-box-john-cornwell-review

The confessional box: John Cornwell asserts that pope Pius X’s decree about children and confession led directly to priestly abuse

Some years ago I was in Lisbon with a group of Jewish people. It was the Day of Atonement and their very liberal rabbi organised a service in a hotel meeting room, so I went along. It began with people offering their thoughts. "I hate the Day of Atonement," said one. "I hate the focus on guilt, and admitting sin and having to atone for it. It's all so negative." "It could be worse," said another. "You could be a Catholic, then you feel guilty all the time."

John Cornwell's account of confession reveals a Roman Catholic world suffused with guilt, as he recounts the way in which the ritual, with its roots in the Day of Atonement, developed as a means of enabling believers to seek God's forgiveness through telling their wrongdoings – their sins – to the intermediary of a priest. They gained absolution so long as they also made clear their desire to make amends and were given penance by the priest – usually a few prayers to say. As Cornwell traces the history of the sacrament – an outward sign of inward grace, as we recited as children – it's apparent that the Church, whose raison d'être was the saving of souls, developed an obsession with the body. And that meant it was obsessed with sexual sins.

The image of the confessional – the dark box of Cornwell's title – and the hazy view of the priest behind the grille came to symbolise Catholicism, particularly in movies. Yet it no longer has the hold it once did on Roman Catholics themselves: attendance has been in steep decline for many years, a decline caused at least in part by Catholics' rejection of teaching on sex, particularly on the sinfulness of contraception. It's an intriguing decline, given we live in a confessional age of therapy and Facebook.

But Cornwell's focus is not so much the present as the past and the scars it has left. He makes the case for the connection between confession and the scandal that has profoundly damaged the reputation of the Church – that of the abuse of children by Catholic priests. He links this to pope Pius X decreeing in 1910 that confession should begin at the age of seven, giving priests easy, intimate access to children without anyone else present.

Child abuse inquiries around the world and readers of my own publication, the Tablet, who responded to Cornwell's request for their stories, reveal that certain priests would use the confessional to solicit children, grooming them for sexual encounters elsewhere or during confession itself.

One of the debates among Catholics about abuse has been whether it was caused by repressions of the past or the more relaxed ways of the post-1960s Church. Cornwell blames both. Before the 60s, men trained for the priesthood with no understanding of human psychology and their own sexuality, turned to children as an outlet for their sexual frustrations, he argues. Then later, he says, priests used the era's more relaxed approach to sexuality to justify abusive encounters with children. And when confession moved out of the box and into one-to-one meetings with no grille between priest and penitent, there were more opportunities for abuse. Here I ought to issue a health warning: read this book and you learn more than you would ever want to know about priestly masturbation.

The Dark Box is a powerful, impassioned treatise about the dangers of confession. Cornwell brings to it personal experience; he himself was abused through being solicited in the confessional as an adolescent. One senses the anger and the violation he feels, but acting as witness and judge can lead to distortion.

Just one life ruined by confession is of course awful, but does this mean that every single priest ruined penitents' lives? The overarching impression left by The Dark Box is that the Church was riddled with confessional abuse, yet talk to Catholics and you find many people with good experiences too. If those views are not given enough credit, it makes it easier for the Church to dismiss this volume as a one-sided rant.

What confession at its best does offer is a communitarian focus. You are encouraged to think about the consequences of your actions, not only on your soul, but on others, as well as alienating yourself from God. Examining one's conscience means you're not sleepwalking through life, but are giving it meaning.

There were other drawbacks to confession. Too often it was a laundry list of sins rather than an exploration of the difficulties of living the Gospel. This was both unhelpful to the penitent and tedious for the priest. On one occasion I spotted my confessor reading the Sporting Life while I recited my list of misdemeanours; I didn't go back for years. What was the point? It's that sense of futility which has caused confession's decline, rather than sex crimes within the confessional's four walls.