[soycd]

If you are diddling kids, go to jail. No law should ever protect you.

[CondorFlight]

All that will happen is that you will have a lot of priests in jail for refusing to break the seal of the confessional. You won’t get the info from them, and society will be short of priests.

But that will probably be just fine with our Brave New World agendistas...

(If we had better judges who understood where our freedoms come from, and how hard it was to obtain them, and how easy it is to fritter them away, we wouldn’t have such crackpot decisions. )

[Cboldt]

I assume you hold that attorney-client privilege should not exist, either. Likewise, spousal privilege. All of these potentially stand in the way of your objective.

[goodwithagun]

If you’re concerned about pedophilia you need to bark up another tree. I believe Mrs. Don-o has the info on all the other religions that have a bigger problem with it.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

It is not protecting the molester but the priest.

His vows are one of silence when it comes to things said to him in confession.

[rmichaelj]

This isn’t about that. The judge is stating that laws protecting the seal of the confessional favor religions that practice formalized confession over those that don’t.
The judge is an idiot. The reason that formal confessions are protected is precisely because there is an expectation of privacy which is inherent to a formal confession as an integral part of certain faiths.
If the Jehovah’s Witness’s want the same protection then they will have to formalize confession.
Also note, any evidence obtained from a minister in confession would be considered hearsay unless recorded- which is absolutely prohibited in all faiths with sacramental confession that I know of.
Finally, even if there was no confession of child abuse, a priest would still not be able to defend himself by revealing what went on.

[al_c]

What on earth does that have to do with the sacrament of reconciliation? Or is that just another driveby shot at the RCC?

[Mrs. Don-o]

This is just stupid grandstanding on the part of the Delaware judge.

• First, if offenders knew that Sacramental confessions would be revealed, they would certainly not go to Confession.

• Second, I don't know if a single case where it has even been alleged that the offender revealed his crime in a Sacramental confession.

• Third, it would be impossible to enforce: Who'd tell that the priest had failed to alert the police? The Penitent? or the Confessor?

• Fourth, are they going to record confessions, so some Police Detective can sift through thousands of hours of "Father, I ate a hamburger on a Friday in Lent" in order to detect some probably-nonexistent criminal confession?

• Fifth, what a priest can do, and is supposed to do, if a person confesses a felony, is instruct the penitent to contact the police, and withhold absolution until the penitent self-reports his crime.

• Sixth, if there's worry that the specifically penitent-priest-Confession-Catholic context privileges the Catholic Church above other religions, the obvious remedy is to extend this sacred privacy right to analogous penitent-clergy relationships in other religious denominations.

The political authorities surely realize all this. Which is why I can't see it as anything other than making a show of pointlessly bullying clergy in order to score politically with the bigot constituency.