Posted on 06/24/2007 12:58:20 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
Albany -- Saturday afternoon Mass at St. Catherine of Siena draws 400 people. The confession period beforehand draws two.
The second makes it just before closing time. It's been about three months since Mariam O'Brien's last confession, and a few days since she skipped Mass.
The 84-year-old shuts the door and enters a soothing room with a red carpet, a box of tissues and a priest, the Rev. Kenneth Doyle, who confesses that hearing confessions is one of his favorite duties. She steps out minutes later.
"I feel like the Lord is listening to me through the priest," O'Brien says outside the confessional, talking candidly with a reporter about things her priest is forbidden from saying to anyone. "I get consolation from it, and blessings."
This scene in Albany speaks volumes about the state of confession in America. The sacrament, once a pillar of Catholic practice, is crumbling. And the way people confess, both what they say and where they say it, is shifting from the old laundry lists of minor misdeeds recited in austere anonymous boxes.
Only 26 percent of Catholics go to confession at least once a year, according to a 2005 poll by Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. A University of Notre Dame study in the early 1980s put the number at 74 percent.
It's an alarming trend for Catholic leaders, who see confession as essential to spiritual health. What's at stake is a route, laid out in the Bible, to examine your conscience, overcome sin and achieve grace.
Signs of concern keep popping up. Pope Benedict XVI talked up the sacrament in at least three recent public appearances, even casting it in modern psychological terms as a remedy for "guilt complexes."
And earlier this year, the Washington Archdiocese tried to lure folks back to confession with a marketing campaign -- catch phrase: "The Light Is On For You" -- that slapped ads on buses and subway cars, and passed out how-to guides and wallet-size contrition cards.
Confession has become so foreign to so many Catholics that priests like Doyle keep sample acts of contrition on hand so sinners can read aloud words they once would have known by heart.
"In the old days the priest wouldn't help you," said the Rev. Gerald Mudd, 67, of St. Francis Chapel in Colonie. "You'd get hell if you didn't know it."
Doyle, also 67, remembers how it used to be when he and his buddies biked to Sacred Heart Church on Saturdays as kids in Troy.
The dark box. The screened-off priest. The second-grader's fear of that first confession.
Now confessionals are sometimes called reconciliation rooms. And sitting for an interview in the one at St. Catherine of Siena recently, Doyle estimated that 80 to 90 percent of penitents choose to come clean in a chair facing him rather than behind an optional partition. ("I have trouble kneeling anyway," one 78-year-old said.)
The Vatican approved this style in the 1970s. The idea was that worshippers, abandoning confession in droves, would find such sessions more meaningful.
"That option certainly didn't bring the large numbers back," said James O'Toole, a history professor at Boston College who studies confession.
An emerging confession style that is attracting interest -- and the scorn of Catholic leaders -- replaces the whisper of priests with the click-clack of computer keys. Protestant churches and secular groups have created Web sites that let users anonymously cyber-dish their confessions to the world.
And what confessions!
Nothing like the G-rated fare that Doyle, who doubles as chancellor for public information of the Albany Diocese, typically hears in his confessional. Those Catholics who still confess regularly "tend to be the ones who are most faithful to their obligations," he said.
So parishioners fess up to not praying enough or not being thankful enough for their blessings. Husbands regret failing to be understanding enough of wives. Parents lament not being patient enough with their kids.
"It's not very often that I meet some people that come in and say, 'I killed the guy next door,' " Doyle said.
You probably won't find any murderers coming clean on confession Web sites like the evangelical service www.mysecret.tv.
But you will find a husband who leads a double life of secret gay hookups. A man disgusted by his addiction to masturbation. A recovering drug addict who molested his little brother.
These Web sites are a new phenomenon. So why, to borrow O'Toole's phrase, has Catholic confession "fallen through the floor"?
"There's a cluster of things," O'Toole said. "People didn't like to do it. And once they stopped thinking that they'd go to hell if they didn't, they could kind of get out of the habit."
Ask Doyle the same question, and he points to one primary explanation: a diminishing sense of sin.
He feels our society chalks up misbehavior to psychological factors. Or socioeconomic influences. Or family upbringing.
"Anything," said Doyle, "but personal responsibility."
O'Toole also pointed to a new emphasis since the 1960s on the social dimensions of sin, the notion that sin isn't so much "I punched my sister" as it is things like racism, sexism and damaging the environment. Stuff that's generally harder to talk about in the confessional.
The professor added that rates of Communion skyrocketed after Vatican II in the 1960s, while rates of confession plummeted. Catholics, he said, got the idea that the Eucharist itself provided forgiveness. For minor sins, Doyle said, that's true.
All of that is much more complicated than the simple reason one parishioner offered for why she prays every night but hasn't confessed in at least 15 years.
"I feel like I don't need somebody between me and God," said Ginny Hartkern, 59, of St. Brigid's Church in Watervliet. "I think you can speak directly to God. You don't need an intermediary."
For those who do, the old ways live on at St. Mary's Church, incorporated in 1796 and the state's second-oldest Catholic parish. It doesn't get more traditional than these confessionals: the lacquered wood, the mustard-yellow curtains, the complete anonymity behind them.
And for parishioners like Ruth, who gave her age as "over 80," this is how confession should be. You remove the anonymity, she said, and "too much personality" gets involved. And doesn't looking at a priest change what you're willing to tell him? "They teach the kids now to go face to face," said Ruth, of Colonie, who did not want her last name published. "I prefer the way I have always gone, behind the screen."
For a newer twist, visit the commercial hub of Colonie's Wolf Road, where if you didn't read the sign you might mistake St. Francis Chapel for the nearby tanning salon.
Here in this strip mall, the Franciscan friars have figured out a two-step formula for keeping confession viable:
1. Make it available where the people are.
2. Be there for them all day.
Instead of just Saturday afternoons or by appointment, the friars are there for you weekdays, too.
They split the day into shifts that end at 7:30 p.m. This lets them hear an astounding volume of confessions by today's standards -- up to 50 a day.
They don't even have to wait in the box for penitents. Every time one enters the confessional, it triggers a sensor that rings a bell in the church office. This happened repeatedly during an interview with Mudd one recent afternoon. Each time, the brown-robed friar excused himself and slipped into the confessional through a back door.
A few minutes from St. Francis, but worlds away theologically, is Lifechurch.tv.
You won't find a confessional there. Most Sundays, you won't even hear a live sermon.
The tennis-bubble-like dome off Sand Creek Road is the "Albany campus" of an Oklahoma-based network of evangelical churches. Lifechurch beams the sermons of its senior pastor to screens at its far-flung member campuses.
Lifechurch launched the confession Web site www.mysecret.tv. Its users include Albany worship pastor Joe Dingwall, who was online in the church's dartboard-equipped office one day when others' confessions motivated him to post his own.
That we're-all-going-through-the-same-thing camaraderie is why Dingwall, 26, prefers sharing his sins online to airing them in a Catholic confessional, something he has tried despite not being Catholic.
Catholic authorities have condemned online confessionals. The Vatican advised bishops and priests not to use them three years ago, the reason being that "ill-intentioned people such as hackers" might read the confessions and use them for nefarious purposes like blackmail.
So is there any bright spot in the Catholic confession landscape?
Yes. Several Catholic priests agreed that the few people who still use the sacrament are using it really well.
Today's penitents are far more likely to talk about "sins of omission," as Doyle put it. People might lament their failures to put in enough effort at work, say, or to be generous with their money or time.
The Rev. Paul Smith, sacramental minister at churches in Altamont and Berne, said parishioners now delve into things like bigotry -- into the attitudes that underlie their misbehavior.
"They're willing to go deeper," he said.
What, we're back up to 33,000 denominations again? Just last month, we were down to 30,000 denominations, from an earlier high of over one million that we hit just three months ago!
It was odd how Paxil kept the evil spirits away. Maybe Paxil is holy...
>> So Cardinal Mahoney was protestant? <<
Well, he sure as Hell ain’t much of a Catholic! HAR!
Probably both.
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Mood stabilizers don’t “cure” depression or bipolar personalities. They allow the person to manage until they can work stuff out, get cured through therapy or whatever. Holding demons at bay is not ridding oneself of them.
Most people make the mistake of believing the only effect of evil spirits is demonic possession. Demonic effects are rarely supernatural. In fact, all temptation to sin and all spiritually harmful thought is demonic. So, mental illness is typically influenced by demons, but that doesn’t make one who is mentally ill more evil than any other sinner, since sin lies in obeying demons, not struggling against them; most psychologically healthy people regularly give in to demonic suggestion, and some psychologically ill people have heroically battled demons.
I thought we had pretty well cleansed mental health of demonology. Evidently not.
I found what I was looking for:
Forms of Demonic effects include:
Demonic Oppression (illness caused by demons, as suffered by Job and St. Paul. The sufferer is in no way sinful for suffering so.), Diabolic infestation, Diabolic obsession, Diabolic subjugation, Demonic possession, Ordinary demonic activity.
The last category includes all temptation.
>> I thought we had pretty well cleansed mental health of demonology. Evidently not. <<
Let me be careful to say that chemical imbalances are real, and are not demonic. The thoughts which sufferers of such imbalances bear are not rational thoughts, nor are they good thoughts. Suffering from demonic influences does not make one evil, and they are not caused by sin, nor do they cause sin.
What you are saying when you say that is merely that mental health is typically described through an alternate paradigm than through demonology.
So, from what I understand through your last comment, Hitler didn't sin, because he was tempted and commanded by demons to kill the Jews, Germans and the Roma? Or did I miss something?
>> So, from what I understand through your last comment, Hitler didn’t sin, because he was tempted and commanded by demons to kill the Jews, Germans and the Roma? <<
WHAT??? Like I said, to sin is to yield to demonic temptation. So, yes, Hitler sinned horribly. I can’t for the life of me fathom how you pulled such a bizarre, warped statement out of what I said.
Thanks for the clarification. Your earlier statement seemed to imply the confusion.
While those who give scandal are guilty of the spiritual equivalent of murder, those who take scandal- who allow scandals to destroy faith- are guilty of spiritual suicide. — St. Francis de Sales
I have been attending a Traditional Latin Mass for the past year. Every Sunday, there is a long line waiting to go to confession. It does my heart good to see it. I haven’t read further than the article (and not even most of that), so I don’t know what comments have been made.. I just had to comment on what I have seen myself.
LOL!!! The number of Protestant denominations are tied to the Consumer Price Index, don't cha know?
As the poster of this thread is not Catholic, it is unlikely that the motivation for offering this thread was spiritual edification and righteous admonishment of Catholics. Rather, one guesses that the airing of this subject matter is a “gotcha!” aimed at Catholics and meant as evidence of the immanent collapse of the Faith.
Further evidence of controvertialist motivations can be found in post 81, where the thread originator (for the umpteenth time) creates an artificial argument about allegations concerning the number of Protestant denominations in this country. The often cited 33,000 figure was used by someone, and he then makes a big deal out of “variations” on that number in earlier threads, apparently unable to distinguish rounding (”30,000”) and hyperbole (”a million”) in the examples he cites.
This type of continued intra-Christian sniping is outstanding witness to the many seekers wading through these threads, I’m sure! It’s one thing to disagree on theological particulars within a thread; it’s something else again to *initiate* threads whose purpose is to denigrate particular brands of Christianity that differ from the thread poster’s. That’s childish.
You can watch shows like Jerry Springer, Oprah and Dr. Phil and see confessions everyday. There is no thrill when confessing to a priest.
And David said to Nathan: I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said to David: The Lord also hath taken away thy sin: thou shalt not die. (2 Samuel 12.13)
And again he entered into Capharnaum after some days. And it was heard that he was in the house, and many came together, so that there was no room; no, not even at the door; and he spoke to them the word. And they came to him, bringing one sick of the palsy, who was carried by four. And when they could not offer him unto him for the multitude, they uncovered the roof where he was; and opening it, they let down the bed wherein the man sick of the palsy lay. And when Jesus had seen their faith, he saith to the sick of the palsy: Son, thy sins are forgiven thee. And there were some of the scribes sitting there, and thinking in their hearts: Why doth this man speak thus? he blasphemeth. Who can forgive sins, but God only? Which Jesus presently knowing in his spirit, that they so thought within themselves, saith to them: Why think you these things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the sick of the palsy: Thy sins are forgiven thee; or to say: Arise, take up thy bed, and walk? But that you may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the sick of the palsy,) I say to thee: Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thy house. And immediately he arose; and taking up his bed, went his way in the sight of all; so that all wondered and glorified God, saying: We never saw the like. (St. Mark 2.1-12)
He said therefore to them again: Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent me, I also send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained. (St. John 20.21-23)
And many of them that believed, came confessing and declaring their deeds. (Acts 19.18)
And to whom you have pardoned any thing, I also. For, what I have pardoned, if I have pardoned any thing, for your sakes have I done it in the person of Christ. (2 Corinthians 2.10)
But all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Christ; and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation. For God indeed was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not imputing to them their sins; and he hath placed in us the word of reconciliation. For Christ therefore we are ambassadors, God as it were exhorting by us. For Christ, we beseech you, be reconciled to God. (2 Corinthians 5.18-20)
Is any man sick among you? Let him bring in the priests of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick man: and the Lord shall raise him up: and if he be in sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess therefore your sins one to another: and pray one for another, that you may be saved. For the continual prayer of a just man availeth much. (St. James 5.14-16)
The Bible is full of verses showing that confession was made orally to a priest both in the Old and New Testament, and St. Paul quite clearly claims the power to forgive sins and the possession of such a ministry from God.
Only 33,000? No wonder my portfolio stinks.
I would be surprised if there was an Adoration Chapel in my entire diocese. I have to leave the state to find the nearest one.
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