The Erosion of Sin

Readers of the April issue of First Things will have seen James F. Keating’s learned and perceptive review of James M. O’Toole’s excellent book For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America. Nonetheless, some of them may still be interested in reactions to the book from a Catholic-friendly Protestant.

First, I simply want to add my praise for O’Toole. To describe a scholarly book as “saintly” would seem to be a confusion of categories (and might embarrass the author), yet another example of the rhetorical inflation that besets us on every hand, but it is only fitting in this case. O’Toole’s book has many virtues. The research was prodigious; just as impressive is his ability to work it seamlessly into his narrative. He writes with admirable clarity (giving the lie to the notion that one must choose between rigor and “accessibility”). He tells the story he set out to tell in just over three hundred pages (including endnotes). Yet what is most impressive (to this reader, at any rate) is what I would call the spirit of the book, epitomized in the opening and closing pages. 

At the start, we have a brief glimpse of O’Toole (“the boy”) in the late 1950s or early 1960s going to confession. The concluding chapter begins with the boy, “grown old now (he had to admit),” returning to the church he attended so many years before. “The church itself,” he reflects, “seemed smaller than he remembered it, as most places do when we revisit the scenes of childhood as adults.” He lingers there for some time, observing how few people come to the confessionals (only two of the boxes remain now, of the four that were in service when he was a boy). “This scene, he knew, was entirely characteristic of what had happened to confession in America, a sharp contrast to his youthful experience.” Yet that is not the last word; he concludes with a chastened hopefulness. 

Of course, as a Protestant, I can’t honestly lament the loss of the flawed but vibrant culture of confession that O’Toole describes with careful discrimination, but neither do I feel a trace of smug satisfaction. As he makes clear, even as he recounts the lasting impact of abuse facilitated by that culture, deep changes in the very understanding of “sin” eroded the practice of confession.

Those changes were closely paralleled in other Christian communions, across the board. Reading For I Have Sinned, I repeatedly thought how much I would like to read a narrative parallel to his that focused on my own (evangelical) tradition, one that considered quotidian teachings and practices over time as he does. His sources (he must have read or at least skimmed virtually everything available on the subject) include such texts as The Casuist: A Collection of Cases in Moral and Pastoral Theology, which “first appeared in five volumes between 1906 and 1917”; a revised edition appeared in 1924, “to take account of a revision of the universal canon law of the church a few years before.” He adds that these “cases had originally appeared in the pages of the Homiletic Monthly, a magazine for priests that contained advice on pastoral issues, together with sample sermons that could be delivered by those who lacked the time or inclination to write their own.” O’Toole’s narrative is loaded with examples such as this, ranging from scholarly sources to popular digests, taken from all over the United States. He’s attentive to regional and ethnic differences while emphasizing the consensus views that prevailed through the 1950s.

Something very similar to this could be done with evangelicalism. More than you might expect, O’Toole’s book triggered personal memories of sermons and Sunday School classes and much more having to do with “sin.” It might seem quite banal to say so, but I was struck by how pervasive this emphasis was when I was growing up, even as the antagonism between Catholics and evangelicals was (alas) so strong.

“No one was ever free,” O’Toole writes in his concluding chapter,

of the duty to “do good and avoid evil,” as the adage insisted, but personal actions were often reflections of deeper, structural troubles, and those too had to be recognized, condemned, and resisted. Racism, sexism, consumerism, indifference to unfair economic conditions, environmental depredation, and other collective offenses—maybe even cruelty to animals—demanded correction too.

Indeed. You could argue that O’Toole’s concluding “too” is misleading, that many Christians (not just Catholics) now find themselves in a setting in which the understanding of “sin” has not merely been enlarged but rather fundamentally altered. How they will respond remains to be seen.