UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Catherine Pepinster
The Observer, Saturday 22 February 2014
Some years ago I was in Lisbon with a group of Jewish people. It was the Day of Atonement and their very liberal rabbi organised a service in a hotel meeting room, so I went along. It began with people offering their thoughts. “I hate the Day of Atonement,” said one. “I hate the focus on guilt, and admitting sin and having to atone for it. It’s all so negative.” “It could be worse,” said another. “You could be a Catholic, then you feel guilty all the time.”
John Cornwell’s account of confession reveals a Roman Catholic world suffused with guilt, as he recounts the way in which the ritual, with its roots in the Day of Atonement, developed as a means of enabling believers to seek God’s forgiveness through telling their wrongdoings – their sins – to the intermediary of a priest. They gained absolution so long as they also made clear their desire to make amends and were given penance by the priest – usually a few prayers to say. As Cornwell traces the history of the sacrament – an outward sign of inward grace, as we recited as children – it’s apparent that the Church, whose raison d’être was the saving of souls, developed an obsession with the body. And that meant it was obsessed with sexual sins.
The image of the confessional – the dark box of Cornwell’s title – and the hazy view of the priest behind the grille came to symbolise Catholicism, particularly in movies. Yet it no longer has the hold it once did on Roman Catholics themselves: attendance has been in steep decline for many years, a decline caused at least in part by Catholics’ rejection of teaching on sex, particularly on the sinfulness of contraception. It’s an intriguing decline, given we live in a confessional age of therapy and Facebook.
But Cornwell’s focus is not so much the present as the past and the scars it has left. He makes the case for the connection between confession and the scandal that has profoundly damaged the reputation of the Church – that of the abuse of children by Catholic priests. He links this to pope Pius X decreeing in 1910 that confession should begin at the age of seven, giving priests easy, intimate access to children without anyone else present.
Child abuse inquiries around the world and readers of my own publication, the Tablet, who responded to Cornwell’s request for their stories, reveal that certain priests would use the confessional to solicit children, grooming them for sexual encounters elsewhere or during confession itself.
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.