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Commonweal [New York NY]
November 28, 2025
By Bernard Prusak
James M. O’Toole traces the collapse of confession in America
“Seldom does history offer an example of a practice undertaken for so long by so many that collapsed so quickly,” writes James O’Toole of confession. “The question is why.” For I Have Sinned is his eloquent, thoroughly researched answer.
From the beginning of the twentieth century into the 1950s, regular confession was what O’Toole, a distinguished historian who taught for many years at Boston College, calls a “defining characteristic” of American Catholic religious life. If Sunday was for Communion, Saturday was for confession, and most Catholics were reluctant to take Communion if they had not gone to confession.
But in the late 1960s, seemingly all at once, regular confession became the exception, not the norm. By the end of the twentieth century, penance—rechristened reconciliation after Vatican II—had become a “ghost sacrament,” as a priest quoted by O’Toole puts it. It lingered in preparations for first Communion and confirmation, but the life had gone out of it. Whatever passing hopes there were to revive it for adults faded away with the Church’s sexual-abuse scandal. Now confession largely figures as something that practicing Catholics feel slightly guilty about not doing, if they give it any thought at all.
For I Have Sinned is both a scholarly and a deeply personal book. It opens with an evocation of O’Toole’s early religious practice in Leominster, Massachusetts, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and concludes with “[t]he boy, grown now (he had to admit) to an old man,” visiting his childhood church in the present and noting the differences. The confessionals adults had once flooded into during O’Toole’s boyhood have now been eliminated or remodeled, and only a trickle of adults come by to speak with the one priest on hand in a brief period before Saturday evening Mass—itself an innovation. But it’s not just religious practice that has changed. The changes to what O’Toole calls the “religious consciousness” of practicing Catholics are at once more profound and much less visible. They are the book’s focus.
Confession didn’t collapse because of changes to the rite, which has remained essentially the same since the early Middle Ages. A priest listens, in strict privacy, to a penitent who recites his or her sins (ideally according to number and kind), judges the gravity of those sins, prescribes an appropriate penance, and imparts absolution. In the mid-century United States where O’Toole grew up, the crush of people lining up to confess limited the typical confession to around ninety seconds. Penitents prepared themselves through an examination of conscience, guided either by pamphlets or by lessons learned in grade school, and entered a dark confessional box, with a screen between themselves and the priest. There was usually some trepidation, but it was tempered by the certainty that justice would be served. For “[t]here was always an answer—a correct answer, a definitive answer, a The Answer,” to every moral question or problem that lay Catholics had, and they trusted priests to know it and pronounce it.
Part of what changed is that “a world of well-defined right and wrong,” in which agents’ moral responsibility was normally simple and clear, gave way to one in which moral responsibility appeared blurrier. Judgments of right and wrong had to take into account psychology to an extent that traditional moral theology never imagined. O’Toole devotes a chapter to the impact of twentieth-century psychology on Catholic attitudes toward sin. It “transform[ed] the outlook of Catholics, lay and clerical alike, and prepar[ed] the way for a steep decline in the practice of confessions.” But psychology was just one contributing factor. There was also a mismatch “between the gravity of the sacramental work the church told [people] they were doing [in confession] and the haste with which it was done.” Too much of what was confessed during those ninety seconds felt trivial, and going to confession often felt infantilizing. Yet these problems, O’Toole submits, might have festered without proving fatal. By the end of the twentieth century, penance—rechristened reconciliation after Vatican II—had become a “ghost sacrament.”
In his telling, the decisive factor was the combination of growing lay assertiveness in the 1960s and Pope Paul VI’s appeal to authority in his 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae, which prohibited artificial contraception. In 1972, Andrew Greely suggested that the pope’s basic mistake was to appeal to authority he could no longer take for granted. O’Toole quotes the 1968 letter of a religious sister in Baltimore to her archbishop: “I do not believe that a person can be asked to sacrifice his own conscience for the beliefs of one man.” He comments, “Here was something entirely new: a formal papal encyclical reduced—by a nun, of all people—to ‘the beliefs of one man.’”
On the growing importance of conscience, O’Toole covers the same ground as Peter Cajka in Follow Your Conscience (see my review in these pages). Meanwhile, on contraception, his account is similar to Leslie Woodcock Tentler’s magisterial Catholics and Contraception. Lay dissatisfaction with and even resentment of the Church’s teaching began to build in the 1950s, but penitents continued to confess the use of artificial contraception as a sin, and, as a rule, they didn’t challenge priestly authority on family life. But by the 1960s, American Catholics had begun to vocally dissent from, in O’Toole’s words, “Father-knows-best strictures” and to assert “that they knew more about marriage and family life than the clergy.”
In part, this was because many laypeople were now college-educated professionals and no longer felt intellectually inferior to seminary-educated clerics. Feminism was also becoming a force, and Catholic women were decreasingly inclined to submit to rules devised for them by the exclusively male clergy. Finally, Vatican II emboldened laypeople to think of themselves, too, as the Church. That opened the room to think, as O’Toole’s nun did, that going against the beliefs of the pope didn’t always mean setting oneself outside of the Church. Finally, Humanae vitae both frustrated hopes—which Paul VI had himself encouraged—for changes to the teaching on contraception, and ran headlong into the burgeoning individualism of the age. The practice of confession was one victim. Priests’ standing and self-confidence as authoritative moral teachers was another.
The penultimate chapter of O’Toole’s book is a searching examination of priests’ use of confession for grooming and solicitation, and, once confession began to be practiced face-to-face in the 1970s, as an immediate opportunity for sexual abuse. Of course, as O’Toole acknowledges, “[s]exual abuse flourished in many contexts,” but “[w]hy,” he wants to know, “did it flourish in the context of the Catholic priesthood?” His answer focuses on “factors of power and authority.” Before Vatican II, priests figured as “aristocrats,” a class apart from lower “ranks” in the Church, including lay Catholics who “had been trained to obedience.” A “sense of religious obligation” made some laypeople particularly vulnerable to manipulation.
Coming at the turn of the century, the sexual-abuse scandal was not a factor in confession’s initial decline, but it was a nail in the coffin. In O’Toole’s powerful formulation: “[P]riests were the ones who had been ‘trained to make judgments in moral matters,’ and ordinary believers were supposed to have confidence in them in that capacity. This confidence was now shown, over and over, to have been tragically unwarranted.” Against that background, he wonders whether “the collapse of confession was maybe not such a bad thing after all.”
For I Have Sinned isn’t an argument for or against confession. O’Toole is a highly disciplined historian who respects the boundaries of his craft. Yet he not only allows himself to wonder whether confession’s collapse wasn’t all bad; he also wonders about the good that has been lost. Confession was a means for Catholics to recognize, come to terms with, and move beyond moments when they failed morally. At its best, it was a place for Catholics to encounter the loving mercy of God. Though, as O’Toole observes, confession as it is now offered “no longer speaks to the great majority of Catholic laypeople,” it seems likely that many would welcome something living and new.
For I Have Sinned
The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America
James M. O’Toole
Harvard University Press
$35 | 336 pp.
Bernard G. Prusak holds the Raymond and Eleanor Smiley Chair in Business Ethics at John Carroll University.