ROME (ITALY)
Crux
May 16, 2019
By John L. Allen Jr.
When I started covering the Vatican back in the 1990s, Italian journalist Vittorio Messori was a legend. He was the author of the 1985 Ratzinger Report, the book that made the future Pope Benedict XVI a global lightning rod, as well as Crossing the Threshold of Hope with Pope John Paul II in 1994.
Messori is an epigrammatic guy, and I remember him talking once about stories on the Church no journalist could ever report. Among them, he said, was the story of how many atrocities in human history have been prevented by the sacrament of confession – that unique moment when, in absolute privacy, a priest has the chance to speak heart-to-heart with someone, potentially turning their life around.
The memory comes to mind in light of a bill currently being debated in the California Senate, SB 360, which would effectively shred the seal of the confessional by eliminating an exemption to the state’s mandatory reporting law for “penitential communication.” California is not the only venue in which such a proposal is in the air – both Chile and Argentina, for instance, are other examples.
The bill’s sponsor, Democratic Senator Jerry Hill of San Mateo, claims it’s necessary because “the clergy-penitent privilege has been abused on a large scale, resulting in the unreported and systemic abuse of thousands of children across multiple denominations and faiths.”
To state the obvious, Hill’s assault on the Church is a natural byproduct of its well-chronicled failures on the clerical sexual abuse crisis, including the fallout from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report last year as well as the scandal surrounding ex-cardinal and ex-priest Theodore McCarrick.
The fact the Church has brought all this on itself, however, doesn’t mean every punitive measure one can imagine is necessarily a good idea – and there are multiple reasons to conclude that Hill’s proposal is a spectacularly bad one.
The list begins with the obvious and egregious violation of religious freedom the bill represents. The sacrament of confession is a core element of the Catholic faith, and no state should ever be in the position of dictating doctrine to a religious community.
One might also mention that targeting the Catholic Church ignores the broader context of child sexual abuse.
Recently, the Schools Insurance Authority in California commissioned an audit on the potential impact of another bill currently in the legislature that would make it easier to sue public schools for child abuse. The audit used a baseline 2017 estimate from the U.S. Department of Justice that 10-12 percent of children in public schools suffer sexual misconduct by an employee at some point K-12, and estimated that under the terms of the bill the losses of the California system due to such claims could grow from $813 million over the past 12 years to $3.7 billion.
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