UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail
How a Pope called Pius turned the confessional box into a paradise for paedophiles: From a leading Catholic writer, a devastating exposé of a Vatican ruling
By JOHN CORNWELL
At my Catholic boarding school in the late 1950s there was a jolly priest who heard my confession in his room rather than in a vacant confessional box. After I had recited my laundry list of petty sins, he asked if I was ever tempted to ‘commit a sexual sin by myself’.
He suggested that I take out my penis so that he could examine it to see whether I was prone to sudden erections. I left the room immediately. The next year, his proclivities discovered, he was removed by his bishop to another school.
As a child barely out of infancy, I had joined the long queues in our parish church every Saturday to confess my sins. The confessor sat behind a grille inside a dark box like an upturned coffin, smelling of stale perfume and nasty body odours.
I did not realise that we child penitents were guinea-pigs in the greatest moral experiment ever perpetrated on children in the history of Catholicism.
When I started my investigation into Catholic confession I was shocked to discover that young children were not allowed to go to confession before the 20th Century – in previous eras children did not make their first confession until their teenage years.
It was the anxious and pessimistic Pius X, Pope from 1903-1914, who decreed in 1910 that children must make their first confession at the age of seven. Evidently he had taken to heart the Jesuit maxim: ‘Give me a child at seven and it’s mine for life’.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.