Posted on 07/19/2025 3:48:03 AM PDT by C19fan
A federal judge on Friday blocked a Washington state law requiring Catholic priests to report suspected child abuse or neglect, including any information they learn from sacramental confession, raising concerns about religious liberty.
The law, Senate Bill 5375, was slated to go into effect on July 27, but was blocked Friday after Judge David Estudillo of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington granted a preliminary injunction.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Finally, a Judge that makes a good decision!!! The Confessional is SACRED!
So children may continue to be abused and neglected because the information was passed during confession? What an absolute crock of crap. Child abuse is one of the heinous crimes EVER, protecting or ignoring that reality is a true crime against God and shows how much people don’t care about kids.
Looks like the Regal Judicial Branch is joining Satan’s Army
So you don’t care about religious freedom. What other freedoms do you wish to limit? Guessing you support the EV and vaccine mandates as well.
Let the priest do the work. The creep wasn’t bragging in the confessional. He was admitting the sin and asking for help.
Call me pollyannaish, but I feel God is needed to turn these lost souls around. Confession was a BIG first step. If God is skipped, there is little chance that a jail will work.
If God’s plan is to have the creep later turn himself in, I will not argue with it.
EC
I love how these threads expose all the anti-Catholic bigots here on Free Repiblic.
Apparently you aren’t Catholic and don’t understand the sanctity of the confessional.
Things learned during sacramental confession are off limits, but abuse learned in other ways should be reported.
“Apparently you aren’t Catholic and don’t understand the sanctity of the confessional”
Or that the privileged communications of other professionals were not exempted by the law. This was clearly targeting the religious practice/doctrine of the Catholic church.
Yes, it protects attorneys and psych therapists while denying the same protection to clergymen. You have to work at it to have a more blatant attack on religion than that.
Not only can’t the priest reveal what was said in the confessional., but he also cannot say that that person came to him in confession.
So you get information, which is hearsay anyway and not admissible in court, on a person which the priest may or may not have even seen, and the priest's career is instantly ended, so you will never get any more information from him; he's done.
Or, OTOH, the priest disobeys, and you get to live in a country which makes a travesty of its own Constitution by puting clergymen in prison for practicing their faith. Just like Soviet Russia, North Korea, etc.
It's a dark road to go down. Once government finds an excuse to trample rights, they'll find more and more of them.
Yup. Like a red cape in front of a bull or moths to a flame. They just can't control themselves.
It’s a stupid idea on the face of it. If a criminal molester knows that a priest is obligated to report him to the law, do you think he would even confess it to the priest? The main effect would be to keep the person from going to confession at all, where at least he might get some counseling to repent and do the right thing in the eyes of the law.
I’m not Catholic. But this is a good decision.
Exactly, attorneys for instance.
Anti-Catholic bigots are thick at Free Republic.
They learned to be so at their Sunday schools.
How would have that worked anyway? The confessor is anonymous, identity unknown.
A priest assigns a penance to the penitent, which must be done for the sacrament to be valid. Usually it’s some prayers or a kind act, but in cases like this, it would have to be turn yourself in and accept the punishment, for the priest to be in good conscience.
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