UNITED STATES
First Things
by Ulrich L. Lehner
2 . 17 . 15
In January of this year, the U.S. Supreme court declined to intervene in a case in which the prosecutor wants to force Fr. Jeff Bayhi, a priest of the diocese of Baton Rouge, to testify about a confession in court. He allegedly told a fourteen year-old in 2008 to forget about the sexual abuse she had suffered from a family member. If Fr. Bayhi indeed did this, he will have to take responsibility for this despicable and unpastoral act at a higher, heavenly court—but he cannot be expected to discuss the contents of a confession in a U.S. court of law.
After marriage, confession has always been the most contentious sacrament in the struggle between church and state. Already in the late middle ages Christian rulers felt offended that their rule should find limits in the confessional. The patron saint of confessors is St. John Nepomuk. This fourteenth-century Bohemian general vicar of the archdiocese of Prague was drowned in the river Moldau for not revealing the sins that the queen, the wife of king Wenceslaus IV, had confessed.
Although he was venerated in Bohemia for centuries he was not canonized until 1729, when Pope Innocent XIII declared him a saint for the universal Church. The reason for this sudden decision was not just a series of miracles attributed to him but also political opportunity: The pope declared him a saint in a time when the absolutist states increasingly infringed upon the life of the church and also tried to undermine the seal of the confessional. To elevate John Nepomuk to the honor of the altars as the first martyr who died for the confessional was therefore also a statement that the authority of the state reaches its limit when it touches the integrity of the sacraments. The state has no right to pressure priests to give up what Christ demanded must be kept sacred. It was also a reminder for all priests of the Church how important the integrity of the sacrament was, especially because a number of priests in Portugal had broken the holy seal in the eighteenth century. From 1729 onwards, the Holy Inquisition increased its work to prosecute clerical violators with the greatest severity.
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