UNITED STATES
America
The Editors
In a scene reminiscent of many Hollywood movies, Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne has announced that he would rather go to prison than report an allegation of sexual abuse he heard during a sacramental confession. “It is a sacred trust,” Hart told a radio station in Melbourne on Aug. 15. Archbishop Hart’s defense of the confessional seal was prompted by a report released the day before by Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that included a recommendation to criminalize priests’ failures to report sexual abuse heard during confession. While the commissioners noted the Catholic mandate that the seal never be broken, “we heard evidence of a number of instances where disclosures of child sexual abuse were made in religious confession, by both victims and perpetrators,” the report added.
In 2012 in Ireland, horror at the extent of sexual abuse of minors (as well as a gimlet eye toward a church that had long operated with a heavy hand in Irish civic life) led legislators to propose a similar law. Here in the United States, legislative battles have been waged from Louisiana to Massachusetts to California over “confession carve-outs” in laws that allow for exemptions to mandated reporting for sacramental confessions.
Such stories always draw media attention, in part because of our cultural obsession (and not just among Catholics) with the mysteries and terrors of the confessional box. Nary a cop drama has existed in the history of television without a police officer hiding in a confessional to hear evidence of a crime. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film “I Confess” has as its major plot point a priest who hears a murderer’s confession; the 1994 film “Priest”also features a cleric who is unable to act on a confession of sexual abuse because of the inviolability of the seal.
To the secular mind, the confessional seal is madness—a loophole in the law, a violation of state neutrality with regard to religion, a “medieval law” (to quote a member of the Australian Parliament), a tool for institutional corruption and coverup. And who, after all, wants to see abusers hide behind the sacraments?
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