Posted on 01/31/2007 6:36:01 AM PST by Alex Murphy
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Vatican newspaper denounced an Italian journalist who posed as a penitent and confessed fake sins in order to write an expose on the sacrament of reconciliation.
"Fake confessions in search of a shameful scoop," the newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, headlined a commentary condemning the cover story of L'Espresso magazine, one of the country's leading weeklies.
"Shame! There is no other word to express our distress toward an operation that was disgusting, worthless, disrespectful and particularly offensive," the newspaper said.
The commentary said the article had exploited the good faith of confessors and offended the religious sentiments of millions of people.
"It was a sacrilege, because it violated the sacred space in which a self-recognized sinner asks intimately to receive God's merciful love," it said.
The reporter made his false confessions to 24 different priests in five Italian cities, including Rome. The magazine said the idea was to see how priests handle difficult pastoral situations and whether they followed the strict norms laid out by church teaching.
The reporter, for example, told two priests he was HIV-positive and wondered whether he should use a condom when having sexual relations with his girlfriend. One told him no, and the other said it was a question of conscience, the magazine reported.
More than once, the magazine said, priests gave quite different advice on his supposed "sins," which included matters relating to homosexuality, divorce, stem-cell research, euthanasia and prostitution.
One issue that found unanimous condemnation by confessors was abortion, the magazine said.
Didn't any of the Priests tell him that the only thing he should do is abstain from sex outside of marriage?
Do you honestly think that the 'reporter' is accurately reporting the content of his sacrilegious false confessions. MSM are slugs the world over.
You have something there.
If deceit was at the beginning of this, it will also be in the outcome.
It wouldn't surprise me if both of them told him precisely that, but he wasn't interested in that kind of advice; it was the condom thing that he was going after, trying to get "incriminating" words.
This has got to be one of the lowest stunts ever carried out by a newspaper. What a creep. What creeps.
Confessing fake sins falls into exactly the same category as a penitent who goes to confession without a firm purpose of amendment simply to have the "slate wiped clean" so that the same sins can then be committed again.
Not only does it invalidate the sacrament it also incurs an additional sin; sacrilege.
It would have been possible to obtain the same information simply by talking to the priests outside the confessional and asking them questions about "hypotheticals" such as is done in moral theology classes, for instance. Of course, that would not have attracted the attention that a stunt like this does for it panders to the curiosity that many people have for what occurs inside a confessional.
You're right.
Wow, how wacky. I can't believe that even a liberal priest would not tell the fornicating guy not to give the girlfriend HIV.
Lying and intentional misrepresentions to a priest are sins. These reporters and editors should be ashamed of themselves and have committed grevious sins.
So what's the fascination for the reporter and his readers?
The reporter obviously thinks Catholic practice is all bogus mumbo jumbo, none of it is real. So, from the reporter's viewpoint, who cares what the priests have to say to him?
I suppose the reporter was looking for some instances of hypocrisy to persuade any Catholics left in Italy to just give it up.
the guy lies to get a story, I doubt any word from his mouth. Then again, there was universal condemnation of abortion....
I'm not sure if he had tried this with U.S. bishops, he would have gotten the same result.
Possibly, but I doubt that many, if any, U.S. bishops regularly hear confessions.
I disagree. If the guy were a PURE liar, he could've just made the story up from scratch. I think there's a grain of truth to his misleading story. What is it?
He reports that in every case, abortion was condemned. That suggests that he tested most priests on that issue. Why test only two priests on the issue of condoms with AIDS? Why those two? My bet is that the other 22 priests' answers had made the issue a non-starter: if a priest explicitly teaches that extramarital sex is wrong, why bother asking about condoms and AIDS?
you might be onto something.
It doesn't seem that the reporter found much to write about.
I can't imagine how those who heard his "confessions" must feel.
Nah, nothing sinful about homosexuality, stem-cell research, euthanasia and prostitution.
Do you have a link? Because if you do, I'm going to mount that on a wall.
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