MILWAUKEE (WI)
The Economist [London, UK]
June 5, 2026
American states take different approaches
Atlanta GA – Travel through central Europe and you will eventually come across one of thousands of statues of a man on a bridge with his finger pointing to his tongue. According to lore, John of Nepomuk, a 14th-century clergyman, heard the queen of Bohemia’s confession, only for the jealous king to ask him to divulge his wife’s secrets. When he refused, the king had him drowned. Poor John was martyred for one of Catholicism’s most sacred tenets: the absolute seal of confession.
Six centuries later, tight-lipped priests are once again being tested—this time by state legislatures. State laws govern which adults are required to report child abuse that they learn about on the job. In most places teachers, doctors, therapists and camp counsellors have to tell the police and can face fines or even jail time if they don’t. As part of a reckoning with the church’s recent history, more states have added clergy to the list. But this spring twin bills in Missouri and Vermont took it further. They aimed to scrap an exemption that allows priests to withhold information disclosed during confession.
Policy on the matter is already a patchwork. Clergy everywhere in America enjoy some form of “penitent privilege”, which broadly shields conversations that take place in a spiritual context from the courts. But states differ on whether the protection applies when it comes to child abuse. At least six states—New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas and West Virginia—don’t recognise it in these cases or override it, as the new bills aim to. Others, such as California and South Carolina, preserve it narrowly by exempting a priest who learns about a crime during confession but not while teaching a class, for example, or when a perpetrator confesses rather than a victim. That inconsistency of rules has ignited a battle between child-safety advocates and religious-liberty lawyers.
Under Catholic doctrine, “breaking the seal” of confession is one of the worst offences a priest can commit. Because a spiller of secrets is automatically excommunicated and referred to Rome for discipline, mandated reporting puts American clergy in a bind. “Practically, you have all these priests who will have to make a choice between violating canon law and violating civil law,” says Kurt Martens of the Catholic University of America.
A band of right-wing lawyers saw a constitutional problem in that. When Washington state passed a similar bill last year, they argued that it violated the First Amendment’s protection of exercising religion. Their case hinged on a contradiction: if uncovering child abuse was important enough to justify burdening religious practice, how could the state exempt lawyers from the same reporting mandate? (What clients confess to their lawyers can remain secret.) “If you provide any exceptions to your rule, then by definition under Supreme Court precedent you don’t have a compelling interest,” says Hiram Sasser, who argued for the First Liberty Institute. The Department of Justice joined the lawsuit last June and a judge temporarily ruled against Washington state. Its lawyers chose not to appeal.
Marci Hamilton, who founded the CHILD USA think-tank, finds their argument legally indefensible. She believes that the state has an overriding interest in protecting children—and that the church’s defence of the confessional privilege is hypocritical, given that it has received thousands of abuse reports over the past 25 years and mishandled them. (To make matters worse, many cases of priests abusing children happened in the confession box.) “If they are permitted to continue to keep the secrets, then we’re conceding that a certain amount of child sex abuse simply will not be prevented,” she says.
Victims of clerical abuse say the confessional can be a place for uncovering crimes that would otherwise go undetected. A seven-year-old boy entering the box may well have internalised sexual abuse as his own sin and confess it as such, says Peter Isely, who was raped by his “spiritual director” while at boarding school. “I felt—and he told me this—that I was making him do these things.”
As the weather warmed and state legislative sessions ended, both the Missouri and Vermont bills died in committee, never reaching the chamber floor. Esme Cole, the Vermont lawmaker behind the bill, is not giving up. Child-safety advocates argue the defeats could mark a moment of peak influence for the religious right on the issue, and that the pendulum will swing back. Others are not so sure. “The church always wins,” says Mr Martens. ■