AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
November 15, 2017
By Aida Edemariam
Australian law may soon require priests to break the confidentiality of the confessional and report anything they hear about sexual abuse. Would it simply bring the practice into line with therapy or does it pose a mortal threat to a cherished sacrament?
There’s a story that is sometimes told, in refresher courses for priests who regularly take confession, that goes like this: when a well-known local criminal died, he was given a full Catholic funeral. The faithful were outraged – not only was he a sinner, he was a well-documented, public sinner. Don’t worry, said his son (who happened to be a Catholic priest), I heard his confession on his deathbed. At once, the son was hauled in by his bishop and ticked off – not for taking his father’s confession, but for talking about it. Everyone knew he meant well, said the bishop, but the seal of confession was sacrosanct: under no circumstances could it be revealed who had given confession to whom, and what it was about. If he had done the latter, he might even have been excommunicated.
In August, a commission investigating child abuse in the Catholic church of Australia recommended that any failure to report suspicions of child sex abuse to the authorities should result in criminal charges – even if the discovery was made within the seal of the confessional. “We are satisfied,” the commissioners wrote, “that confession is a forum where Catholic children have disclosed their sexual abuse and where clergy have disclosed their abusive behaviour in order to deal with their own guilt.” The archbishop of Melbourne’s reply was unequivocal: the seal could not be broken, and if that meant going to jail, well, so be it. In the US, in 2009, Rebecca Mayeux sued the Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge and one of its priests for not doing anything about her confession, when she was a teenager, that she was being abused by a parishioner. The case is due to be heard in the first circuit court of appeal, but was dealt a blow in September when the Louisiana supreme court upheld the confidentiality of confession.
Confession occupies a curious place in the culture, especially from the point of view of non-Catholics: shadowy boxes and gabbled catechisms, Hail Marys and rosaries. It is often treated ironically – or, if not, as the life-or-death moral choice of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film I Confess, in which a priest to whom a murderer has confessed ends up accused of the deed himself.
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