Australia’s Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has, I’m sure, the best of intentions, but its recent recommendations concerning the Confessional seal are troubling. The commission proposes that if a priest learns about abuse during confession, or if suspicion of such abuse arises, then he should inform the authorities. Failure to do so should be regarded as a criminal offence.
We can debate whether such rubrics would help or hinder the crucial task of preventing child abuse. On the one hand, a priest would be encouraged to pick up the phone and report an offender. On the other, if a sexual predator feared that his confessions would be divulged, then would he ever risk speaking to his priest in the first place?
This isn’t about feeling sorry for the abuser but more about sustaining the options that are currently open to the priest. An offender can, for instance, be encouraged to reveal his misdeeds to the authorities, speak with the priest about his crimes outside of the sacramental context or, perhaps, any hope of reconciliation could be withheld until the offender took appropriate action.
Similarly, mandatory reporting of abuse would allow the priest to pave the way towards justice for a child who, during confession, bravely told of his or her ordeals. Then again, at present, the priest can urge victims to tell their teachers (mandatory reporters already) or their parents. This isn’t necessarily a case of passing the buck: the confessional might help an abused child who, riddled by confused emotions, welcomes a place where his or her confidentiality is guaranteed.
The moral arithmetic is tortuous, but let’s consider a more fundamental stumbling block. If the Royal Commission’s recommendations made their way on to the statute book it would be hard for any Catholic priest to abide by them. Canon law decrees that “the sacramental seal is inviolable; therefore it is a crime for a confessor in any way to betray a penitent by word or in any other manner for any reason.” If the priest directly discloses matters discussed in the confessional he is to be automatically excommunicated.
Some Australian Catholics, including a number of figures in lofty positions, have suggested that a distinction could be made between a person revealing his own sins during confession and someone who recounts the activities of others. By this logic, it would be acceptable to disclose the testimony of a child who speaks about being abused. One could easily imagine a situation in which some priests were willing to pass on the testimony of victimised children while others refused to disclose anything.
In the face of such fragmentation, the Church’s hierarchy might well feel obliged to issue guidelines and these would likely be of an absolutist nature: insisting that nothing said during confession could be divulged. In any of the most likely scenarios, the state would be enacting a law that few priests would follow: either on principle or from a sense of obedience.
The obvious riposte is that this would be the Church’s problem, so why should that concern the state? Well, such legislation would be heavy on symbolism but light on efficacy and, by striking at a central tenet of Catholic belief and praxis, it would trample on the free exercise of religion. Under the law that latter right is certainly not absolute, but should it be eroded by a measure that would have little meaningful impact?
An alternative prognostication is that divisions within the Australian Church, a febrile kind of place these days, would not be contained, so debates would continue to rage about the nature of the seal of confession. This would hardly be a novel phenomenon. If you’d visited any medieval or early modern university with a thriving theology faculty, you’d probably have encountered impassioned arguments about how the rules should be defined: what to do when a heretic confessed her heterodoxy, when a marriage between close relations was revealed, or a would-be traitor told you that he planned to do away with the king?
It’s striking, however, that a rigid stance on the confessional seal has tended to win the day: indeed, it is a cause for which a fair few saints and blesseds have lain down their lives. That’s because defending the principle isn’t about bloody-minded obstructionism. Still less does it signal, in our own times, an acceptance of the horrors of child abuse. The confidentiality of confession has, far too often, provided a refuge for scoundrels, sexual abusers among them, but misuse of the institution does not undermine its abiding purpose. This comes down, at the purest level, to the fundamental nature and mechanisms of a Christian’s relationship with God: an arena into which secular laws, especially the ill-considered ones, should tread with the greatest care.
Jonathan Wright’s Layered Landscapes: Early-Modern Sacred Space Across Faiths and Cultures, co-edited with Eric Nelson, is published by Routledge
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.