For I Have Sinned:
The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America
by james m. o’toole
harvard university, 336 pages, $35
Catholics in America:
A Social Portrait
by lisa a. keister
oxford university, 264 pages, $29.95
It is often said that the end of Latin as the Church’s liturgical language was the most obvious change to Catholic life brought by the Second Vatican Council. There is truth to this, despite the fact that the Council neither mandated nor even recommended a wholesale switch to the vernacular. Much the same can be said for the practice of confession. Although barely mentioned in its documents, this most distinctive of Catholic activities virtually disappeared within years of the Council’s conclusion. There are important differences, however. First, the sacramental ritual whereby believers are reconciled to God and the Church by confessing their sins to a priest, receiving absolution, and doing penance is far closer to the central mystery of the faith than is the language used for the Mass. Its decline was, according to John Paul II, a “crisis” for the Church. Second, the sharp drop in confessions was driven not by the Church’s hierarchy but by the decision of lay Catholics simply no longer to avail themselves of the sacrament. Efforts have been made at restoration, including the introduction of new forms of the rite in 1975. Yet, apart from sowing more confusion, they have done little to reverse the trend.
The rise and fall of confession in the American Church is ably chronicled by the Boston College historian James O’Toole. Readers of his excellent The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America will be familiar with his way of relating ecclesial history. O’Toole seeks to recreate what it was like to be a bishop, priest, religious, or lay believer in a particular place and time. His source material is whatever he can lay his hands on: official records, diocesan newspapers, priestly manuals, pamphlets, and personal testimonies. By weaving together what Catholics wrote, read, heard, and experienced, he hopes to capture the warp and woof of the complex reality that is American Catholicism. He has the historical imagination and writing chops to pull it off.
For I Have Sinned begins with a richly textured word portrait of what it was like to be a young boy going to confession at St. Leo’s in Leominster, Massachusetts in the years prior to the Council. On a Saturday afternoon, the candlelit church is crowded with those preparing themselves to receive the Eucharist worthily the next day:
By the time he got to the head of the line, the boy’s random thoughts had begun to focus. He had decided—rehearsed, really—what he was going to say to the priest who, he knew, occupied the center compartment. Just as important, he had decided what he was not going to say. When it came his turn, he walked purposefully, went in behind the curtain, and knelt down. He could hear the little click of the electrical switch in the kneeling pad that turned on the light above his entryway outside, alerting others to his presence so they would not burst in unexpectedly. He waited in silence, aware of indistinct murmurs as the priest talked with the person in the opposite stall. He knew that he was not supposed to make out what they were saying, and he was seldom tempted to try, more concerned with last thoughts of what was about to happen. Then, at once, the wooden panel covering the window that separated him from the priest slid open, sometimes with a soft bang.
O’Toole offers other such vignettes from various regions, ethnic groupings, and historical epochs. His survey ranges from the early days of circuit-riding priests mobbed by Catholics long deprived of the sacrament to downtown parishes in the 1950s boasting “1,000 Confessions a day.”
The rise of confession in early American Catholicism entailed overcoming a series of challenges. At first it was a matter of finding enough priests to enable and inculcate the practice of the faith for the smattering of Catholics who lived throughout the states and territories. Establishing a habit of yearly confession, mandated for Catholics since the Middle Ages, was a high priority for the American hierarchy. O’Toole says that this goal was achieved by the time of the Civil War. “American Catholics were becoming a churchgoing people in a way that they had previously been unable to, setting patterns that would persist.” Later, the bishops had to confront an influx of Catholic immigrants who spoke different languages and brought a variety of ecclesial practices from Europe. The Baltimore Catechism did much to establish a baseline of uniformity in a larger and more diverse version of American Catholicism.
All of this had to be accomplished against the backdrop of Protestant suspicions of Catholicism in general and the practice of confession in particular. Critics rejected the idea that divine forgiveness required human mediation, as well as Trent’s claim that auricular confession had been instituted by Jesus himself. They were also able to titillate the general population with lurid tales of sexual exploitation abetted by the sacrament. Pride of place in this genre goes to runaway bestseller The Priest, The Woman, and the Confessional (1880), written by Charles Chiniquy, a defrocked priest.
American bishops were sensitive to the problems inherent in an unmarried man’s speaking in secret about personal matters with another man’s mother, wife, or daughter. The sin of solicitation has long carried the highest canonical penalty. Accordingly, when it came time to construct urban churches to serve the expanding number of Catholics, they mandated that confession was to happen not in the sacristy, much less in the rectory, but in specially constructed “boxes” placed in loco publico et patenti. Even if this measure did not eliminate the problem, O’Toole notes a lessening of hostility on the part of the Protestant majority. The watershed was the legal recognition of the seal of confession, occasioned by the case of a prominent Jesuit, Anthony Kohlman. Kohlman possessed information, learned in the confessional, that would have enabled the New York City police to solve a robbery and fencing case. Both the victim, James Keating (no relation—my wife checked), and the fencers were Kohlman’s parishioners. When pressed, Kohlman refused to disclose the information, saying: “I should render myself guilty of eternal damnation.” In 1813, the Protestant-dominated New York state court sided with the Catholic priest. In 1828, the state legislature created a statute that recognized a confessional privilege, with other states soon following. In addition to legal recognition, the imaginative power of the seal would play out in books and movies, most spectacularly in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953). By the 1950s, confession had become an accepted, even celebrated, part of American culture.
O’Toole has a great deal to say regarding the heyday of the sacrament, a time when the majority of Catholics went to confession monthly, if not more often. He offers a number of causal factors for the increase. The most important was Pius X’s encouragement of the frequent reception of the Eucharist and the celebration of first communion at the age of seven. Though the pope did not mandate that these children first go to confession, that quickly became the practice. In addition, O’Toole cites the popularity of devotions such as “First Fridays,” dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and “Forty Hour” devotions. In each case, parishioners were encouraged to take communion. As the frequency of the reception of the Eucharist increased, so did the frequency of confession. One consequence is that Catholics became proficient in the details of confessing their sins—in particular, the examination of conscience required for a good confession. O’Toole notes the various lists available to lay Catholics for discerning what constituted sinful behavior: the Ten Commandments, the Six Precepts of the Church, and the Seven Deadly Sins. There were also several distinctions to be made, the most crucial being whether a particular sin was venial or mortal. Though Catholics were encouraged to go to confession even for venial sins, they knew that a single unabsolved mortal sin separated them from God and the promise of heaven. The growth of the practice of confession from the 1920s to the 1960s was inseparable from the fear of hell for an unconfessed mortal sin at the time of death.
O’Toole is no romantic and has no yearning for a return to these days. However, he finds much to appreciate. In particular, he emphasizes that confession is a sacrament that requires the full and active participation of the baptized. Contrary to the common charge that the laity are rendered passive in Catholic rites, the sacrament of penance calls upon the penitent to develop a keen sense for how his actions and failures to act shape his relationship to God and to the Church.
The church had given Catholics the tools, the words, to judge the moral and ethical dimensions of their lives, to know right and wrong. When they did the right thing, they could be confident that they had done so. When they did the wrong thing, they could be equally confident in recognizing it as wrong, and they could take the necessary steps to regret, to repent, and to do better in the future.
Something similar goes for the training of priests, who had to match, if not surpass, the granular analysis of sin demanded of the laity. O’Toole credits the method of casuistry, in which priests were formed in seminary and after, as “a serious moral and ethical system.” Though it had obvious limits, the study of morality through individual cases enabled confessors to acquire the “habit of mind” to form the consciences of those they encountered “in the box.”
The rise of confession in American Catholicism is a remarkable story of success. The book really kicks into gear, however, when O’Toole explains how it all fell apart. His account involves a variety of factors: the laity’s non-reception of the Church’s teaching on contraception, the acceptance of secular psychology, changes in Church discipline, and developments in theology. O’Toole treats each of these in some detail. For those unfamiliar with this period of the Church’s life in America, these chapters will be of special interest. For those who have heard the story before, or perhaps lived it, the point of interest will be O’Toole’s claim that these disintegrating factors were an ironic byproduct of the moral education imparted by the preconciliar penitential system. A laity educated enough to negotiate the complexity of the Catholic moral system was a laity capable of forming its own opinions during the cultural and ecclesial upheavals of the 1960s.
The disruption was to a great degree sexual, in two senses: It encompassed an expanded view of the female vocation and a more permissive approach to sexual activity. O’Toole details how, by the time Humanae Vitae was promulgated, a significant number of Catholic women had already arrived at the conviction that artificial birth control was not intrinsically evil. If going to confession meant being contrite for something one did not consider sinful and falsely promising not to do it again, better to skip the whole thing. Paul VI’s reaffirmation of Casti Connubii might strike us as prophetic, but we are not living in 1968. A morally scrupulous Catholic couple with four children, barely getting by on a blue-collar salary, approached the issue of contraception differently than do modern-day professionals intent on disconnecting the pleasures of sexual intercourse from the possibility of procreation. My point is not theological so much as historical. To understand how Humanae Vitae negatively affected American Catholicism, it is necessary to make an imaginative leap into a vastly different moral universe from our own. We can then appreciate O’Toole’s assertion that the majority of Catholics who first struggled with and ultimately rejected an absolute prohibition on artificial contraception had scruples about sex and wished to be good Catholics. Their inability to agree with their Church on a matter of such importance weakened the practice of regular confession.
The promise of psychology played its own disruptive role. O’Toole relates how early critics of psychology, such as Fulton Sheen, equated it with psychoanalysis. Sheen argued that Freud’s deterministic and hedonistic presumptions rendered his method antithetical to the Catholic view of the human person and a threat to the sacrament of penance. Sheen, however, was a minority voice. In the decades after World War II, more and more Catholics, including Pius XII, acknowledged the benefits of psychological therapy and the need for confessors to be trained in its rudiments. By 1970, therapeutic talk was as prevalent within American Catholicism as in the general society. Sheen’s concerns, however, proved justified. As psychological counseling gained legitimacy, many Catholics saw more value in an hour-long session with a trained professional than in a quick, impersonal exchange with a priest. Equally, psychological theories challenged the fundamental assumption of penance, namely that human beings are responsible and rational creatures capable of assessing their actions. As claims concerning the complexity of human motivation and the power of compulsion gained traction in the public imagination, the previously well-marked geography of sin became more and more murky. This issue was especially urgent with respect to mortal sins, since they require that one has freely chosen to commit a grievous act one knows is wrong.
Among the factors involved in the decline of confession, pride of place belongs to a reconsideration of mortal sin. In a sense, it was bound to happen; the preconciliar conception was theologically unstable. O’Toole speaks of “a steady inflationary pressure that constantly expanded the list of mortal sins.” In the mind of the average American Catholic during the high point of confession, it was fairly easy to carry out an act that merited eternal separation from one’s creator. These included not just obvious serious sins such as murder, adultery, and blasphemy, but also intentionally missing Mass or eating meat on Friday. The last one was rendered incredible when the American bishops lifted the mandatory Friday fast in 1966. This raised the obvious question of how an act could merit eternal punishment in 1965 but be perfectly okay a year later.
In addition to careless and abrupt changes in Church discipline, there were also reconsiderations of the nature of mortal sin on the part of theologians, which filtered down to ordinary Catholics. Bernard Häring, Karl Rahner, and others argued that a believer’s relationship to God involves the totality of his or her personhood and cannot be reduced to discrete actions, whether virtuous or sinful. Rather, one must think in terms of a person’s “fundamental option” toward or away from his supernatural destiny. This holistic approach reflected the personalist theology adopted by Vatican II, and it resonated with the virtue-based understanding of morality being developed by otherwise traditional theologians. Accordingly, it found ready reception among educated laity and priests. But it posed a serious problem for the theology of confession that had guided Catholicism since Trent, in that it seemed to rule out or make extremely unlikely that a single act, no matter how grievously sinful, could cancel out a person’s fundamental option for God. The issue appears in John Paul II’s Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, an Apostolic Exhortation that sought to revive the sacrament of penance. It is worth noting that John Paul did not reject the idea of a fundamental option but simply insisted that it is constituted by freely chosen acts and could, in principle, be mortally wounded by a single sin, sufficiently grave.
O’Toole does not think much of the various efforts by the hierarchy to revive the sacrament, seeing them as adding confusion to an already bad situation. There was the nominal change from the harsh sounding “penance” to the more positive “reconciliation.” Yet, even here, things seemed uncertain, with official documents using either or both. There was a controversy over the timing of one’s first confession: Should it come before or after first communion? The 1970s were a time of experiment and, as noted above, Pius X had left the matter unclear. O’Toole informs us that a majority of American bishops wished to delay first confession until an age when a child might require absolution. Rome, however, thought otherwise and mandated that first confession precede first communion, but did not address the theological question of whether a child of seven was capable of sinning mortally.
Further confusion resulted from the introduction of three possible rites for the sacrament in 1975. The first rite was individual confession. The second was a communal penance service with the possibility of individual confession and absolution. The third was a communal penance service with general confession and general absolution. This last was reserved for times of crisis, as in war or civil unrest, and with the understanding that those with serious sins would confess individually within a year. It was left up to individual bishops to decide what constituted a crisis. The overall intention behind the new rites was to respond to the rapid decline of individual confessions in the decade following the end of Vatican II. It did not work. The second option proved impractical, since few had the time to attend a service and then hang around to confess individually. It also had the downside of separating the sheep from the goats in a rather public manner. I can recall playing music for such a service, at the end of which the priest announced that those with mortal sins needed to stay behind. I had never seen a church clear out so quickly.
It was the third option, however—the penance service with general confession and absolution—that caused the most trouble. Some bishops and theologians saw it as a way to revive the sacrament and liked its emphasis on the communal character of sin. In 1976, the bishop of Memphis provided general absolution for more than eleven thousand people at a local arena. Clearly, he considered the near disappearance of the sacrament of confession in his diocese to be a crisis warranting an extraordinary response. Other American bishops took notice and began planning similar events. Sensing a problem, Rome again intervened, effectively ending the practice. The resulting back-and-forth only sowed more confusion. A 2007 survey of practicing Catholic sponsored by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops found that only 2 percent of Catholics went to confession monthly, 12 percent yearly, 30 percent less than once a year, and 45 percent never. The only bright spot was that the numbers were slightly better with Latinos, the fastest-growing part of the American Church.
O’Toole devotes the final chapter of his book to the revelations of priestly sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance that had simmered since the 1980s but burst into public consciousness in 2002. As one would expect, he emphasizes the way the grooming and violation of the Church’s young was facilitated by the traditional form of the sacrament of confession. He knows, of course, that since these revelations postdate the decline, they were not a causal factor. Rather, they have made, in his judgment, any simple path to a restoration of frequent, individual confession unlikely. O’Toole puts the matter this way:
A practice intended to relieve people of the weight of their sins had too often become the quintessential occasion of sin. And in that lay a final irony. To the extent that such abuse was possible and that it occurred repeatedly, the collapse of confession was maybe not such a bad thing after all.
This is a big claim, and one possible to dismiss as the product of defeatism. What might be the case in Boston is not necessarily the case for the rest of the country. Moreover, American Catholics appear to have shorter memories than is often supposed, and one already feels the effects of those awful days waning. That said, O’Toole is certainly right that the crisis signaled an end to a particular period of Catholic life in America. The question is what the future will look like and what confession’s place in it will be. O’Toole hazards no guess. He simply knows that the confessing of sin, the need for penance, and the promise of reconciliation are too close to the heart of authentic Christianity to be disregarded. New forms will arise. And there the book ends. The job of the historian, for O’Toole, is to recreate the past, not predict the future.
Those wanting to know what this future might look like would do well to consult Lisa Keister’s carefully argued and well-sourced social portrait of Catholics in America. A distinguished demographer, Keister gives a statistical description of who Catholics are today and what they think about a variety of topics. She looks at “social origins” (age, gender, ethnicity, class, and so forth), socioeconomic status (education, work, income, wealth), and individual beliefs on a host of theological and political issues. In contrast with previous efforts to garner these data, she distinguishes between white and Hispanic Catholics. Her approach is to compare each group with white mainline Protestants, white conservative Protestants, Hispanic Protestants (who are also conservative), and the depressingly large number of Americans who now claim no religious affiliation, the so-called “nones.” In addition, she gives a helpful account of the motivations of those who have left the Church. The writing is crisp and comprehensible even for those do not often read social science.
Keister begins by stating her reasons for taking on the project. The first is that, compared to both mainline and conservative Protestantism, the dropoff in Catholic membership since 1970 has been less severe, with Catholics declining from 25 percent to 20 percent of the total population. Even with increased disaffiliation among the young, American Catholicism is relatively stable. It is inevitable, therefore, that Catholics will play a greater role in the future of the country than they have in the past. A related motivation for Keister’s study is the current and unprecedented prominence of Catholics in American life. At the time of its writing, the president, 30 percent of Congress, and six out of the nine Supreme Court justices were Catholic. Such prominence, however, means that it is easy to misunderstand the nature of Catholic influence—depending on whether your first thought is the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Steve Bannon’s fulminations against the deep state, Joe Biden clutching his rosary beads, or Stephen Colbert waxing philosophical on late-night television. Keister intends her book to complicate what is often a simplistic picture of American Catholicism in the public mind. A crucial part of this complexity is the dramatic rise of Latino Catholics. Since 1970, there has been a more than 20 percent increase in American Catholics who identify as Hispanic (from under 10 percent to 34 percent). It is estimated that Hispanic Catholics will make up 18 percent of the U.S. population by 2043. Though they are not the whole future of American Catholicism, they will be a major part of it.
So, what does this newly configured Catholicism look like? In comparing Latino and white Catholics, Keister finds that the former are younger and lag behind the latter in virtually every socioeconomic metric. The happy exception is that the groups are roughly equal in the percentage who are self-employed, a significant indicator of entrepreneurial spirit. Concerning the faith, Keister found important convergences but also important differences. Latinos attend Mass a bit more regularly, have a greater devotion to Mary, and go to confession more often. They are also more likely to report having had a life-altering religious experience.
Whereas slightly more than half of white Catholics are “pro-life,” only 36 percent of Hispanic Catholics describe themselves so. A similar divide exists on whether it ought to be easier to get divorced. Only 40 percent of white Catholics favor easier divorce, compared to 73 percent of Hispanic Catholics. Unfortunately, both groups strongly support physician-assisted suicide and capital punishment, despite Church teaching against such practices. On other political issues, Hispanic Catholics tend to side with the Democratic Party, while white Catholics support Republican positions. Keister rightly acknowledges that this positioning is subject to change.
The most interesting part of the book treats disaffiliation—the greatest challenge the American Church faces. Though Latinos are slightly more likely than whites to stay Catholic, the basic dynamics are the same. Leavers in both groups are younger, more likely to be male, less likely to be married or have children, richer than the average American, and better educated. If there is any good news, it is what Keister has discovered about why Catholics leave. Some do so because of disagreements with Church teaching or dissatisfaction with their experience of being Catholic, but most have simply “drifted away.” Keister draws an optimistic conclusion:
This suggests that targeted efforts to engage—or re-engage—people of all ages in the faith or drawing back in young people at critical life stages might retain members. I also found that many former Catholics left the Church because they interpreted its message as unintellectual or even anti-intellectual. Moving away from simplified approaches to Catholicism and celebrating the Church’s deep intellectual tradition might forestall disaffiliation by those who appreciate this tradition. Other former Catholics pointed to the beauty of particular elements of Catholicism—such as the Mass and church buildings—and spoke about how they missed many aspects of the faith. These reminiscing thoughts suggest that drawing on the beauty of the faith in evangelization may be critical.
Given the realities of the situation, there cannot be better news than that.
Each of these books is helpful for contemplating how the Catholic Church in the United States might respond to the many challenges it faces. Their helpfulness, however, is limited, in that neither deals with the enthusiastic core that will surely lead any widespread revival. There are signs of renewal, as more and more young people seek meaning beyond the superficialities of a culture saturated by social media. Certainly, part of attaining a meaningful life is a realization of the possibility of sin and the need of making amends on the way to reconciliation. O’Toole acknowledges that some Catholics continue to go to confession, but he has little to say about them. One wonders whether their inclusion would have complicated the declinist narrative he offers. Something similar can be said of Keister’s work. By restricting her treatment to those who identify as Catholic and not taking into account different degrees of participation or fidelity, her method cannot tell us from where the new energy will come that will determine what American Catholics will be like in another twenty years. The only hint she gives is that if the trend of disaffiliation is to be reversed, it will be the work of those who appreciate Catholicism’s intellectual and aesthetic traditions. To those traditions I would add, after reading O’Toole, the moral seriousness that regular confession yields.
