Unforgiven

To discern whether someone was Catholic in 1897, you needed to ask only two questions. What didn’t he eat on Friday evening, and where did he go on Sunday morning? The near-universal answers: meat and Mass. To complete the weekend rota, you might ask what he did on Saturday afternoon. That, too, would have been a safe bet: He’d make another trip to church to share his sins with a priest—receiving penance, absolution, and God’s forgiveness.

Parish records paint the picture. New sanctuaries in Manhattan, born to keep pace with the city’s immigrant population, sprouted across the city. At St. Francis Xavier, between July 1896 and June 1897, 10 priests reported hearing 173,394 confessions. A similar dynamic obtained uptown, at St. Ignatius, where Fr. Patrick Healy kept meticulous notes. He heard 9,047 that fiscal year, accounting for about 11 percent of the parish total. The schedule varied with the season—August being a slow month (253 penitents), October the busiest (1,188)—but the demand was a given and spanned all hours of the day, all week. On May 30, 1896, Fr. Healy heard 73 in the afternoon, and 102 more between 7:45 and 11 that night. Come June 11, he noted in his journal that the pace had been “slack,” for he heard “only 88.”

This history is interesting because for thousands of Catholics today, it is foreign. Regular confession, a once distinctive feature of the faith, now occupies a less-pronounced place in the life of the Church. Read the bulletins at both New York parishes and you’ll find the sacrament is offered for one hour on Saturday afternoons or by appointment, the norm in many American Catholic churches. The long lines of penitents, a familiar sight before liturgical celebrations, have been reduced to a handful. What happened?

James O’Toole, an emeritus professor of history at Boston College, searches for an explanation in For I Have Sinned. The task is more difficult than standard historical fare: Confession is private and conducted orally. Trace of the encounter ends as the penitent leaves, and the sacramental seal is inviolable, forbidding priests “to betray in any way a penitent in words or in any manner and for any reason.”

O’Toole rises ably to the challenge by scouring Catholic magazines, school textbooks, clerical manuals, pamphlets, and personal testimonies. This is the book’s greatest virtue, sketching in detail how the faith took root in America and how the faithful took it seriously. Communicants looked to the Church for guidance, informed by an unbroken line to the first Christians.

The sacrament’s foundation is scriptural, with Jesus explicitly entrusting it to his disciples after his resurrection. Naturally, while the theological principles underlying the institution have been constant, the Church’s means of celebrating the sacrament have evolved over time. Public rituals began to turn private in seventh-century Ireland, and by 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, the Church required Catholics to confess and receive the Eucharist at least once a year. Three centuries later, in the Council of Trent (1545-63), it taught that those conscious of having committed mortal sin are obliged to refrain from Holy Communion until they’d reconciled themselves with God in the sacrament of penance. Those obligations, especially in the new world, demanded itinerant priests.

O’Toole reports on the letters Fr. Joseph Mosley sent to his sister in England in the 1750s and ’60s: “We have many to attend … and few to attend them. I often ride about 300 miles a week.” Friends suggested he moderate his schedule to look after his own health. The souls of a growing church—many of whom hadn’t had access to the sacraments for months—mattered more. “Must I, when at the Chapel, refuse to hear half that present themselves?” he wrote from Talbot County, Md. The people cared about their behavior, about sin and the rejection of God in their lives, which they believed had eternal consequences. They were taught they’d been given a gift to repair such fractures—a sacrament, St. John Vianney described, “that heals the wounds of our soul”—and so they sought it.

“By the time of the Civil War,” O’Toole writes, “American Catholics were becoming a churchgoing people in a way that they had previously been unable to.” They established dioceses, constructed churches and, with them, proper confessional boxes in loco publico et patenti—in public and conspicuous places. Priests reliably standardized and announced when confessions would be heard. There would be “no lack of penitents,” read an 1866 statement from bishops, “if only the confessors are there to hear them.” Such texts as the Baltimore Catechism (1885) offered a sophisticated understanding of sin—what it was, how it was classified, why it mattered—and a framework to examine one’s conscience.

Catholics had more help yet. Popular 20th-century diocesan newspapers ran a regular feature, often rendered as “The Question Box,” in which the laity could converse with clergy. The “narrowness” of some questions, O’Toole writes, is a “measure of how seriously Catholics took the whole matter,” how much they had “internalized” the Church’s teachings. “A.G.” in 1964 asked how sinful it was to curse; another wondered whether dieting was morally licit.

O’Toole calls these concerns “petty.” Alternatively, that ordinary Catholics cared to ask suggests the presence of sophisticated consciences—or at least the aspirations of exercising them. Americans sought spiritual direction because they believed the whole of their lives was significant. That may have invited scrupulosity, but it was nothing proper catechesis couldn’t fix.

All this persisted for decades—a robust sacramental life, encouraged by priests and accepted by penitents—”and then,” O’Toole writes, “with a speed that may fairly be described as breathtaking, confession all but disappeared.” One 1975 survey found the number of Catholics who “never” or “practically never” confessed had risen from 18 percent to 38 percent in the previous decade. Ten years later, 35 percent of “core Catholics,” who participated in their churches most actively, said they did so maybe once a year.

The decline, O’Toole suspects, owes to several factors, many of them superficial. Priests could be brusque. “Some … seem too anxious to get on to the next [person], like supermarket checkers,” one woman apparently said. Conversely, some penitents grew to dislike priests who took their time—”dawdling” could become an annoyance. Others grew tired of mechanical confessions, repeating the same sins, week over week.

All human impulses—as consistent as sin itself—but reason suddenly to dispense with the Church’s authority, its recognition that the sacrament is necessary for salvation, and full participation in its rituals?

The same question occurs as O’Toole attributes part of the sacrament’s decline to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Its reforms transformed the Latin Mass into a more participatory event, conducted in the vernacular. Communicants could now understand parts of the liturgy, like the Confiteor, a penitential prayer that begins with the congregation saying, “I confess to Almighty God … that I have greatly sinned,” and ends with the celebrant responding, “May Almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins.” O’Toole writes that this had a “real, if unconscious effect. … Was more forgiveness needed than that?”

To the extent anyone believes this, their ranks would be marginal, perhaps the product of poor formation, or otherwise a contrived justification for not going to confession. Why would the Mass, translated into a different language, render one of the Church’s seven sacraments superfluous?

Likewise, why would the church no longer considering Friday abstinence a grave matter—another of O’Toole’s theories—lead Catholics to believe they could “engage in [their] own reconsiderations” of moral matters? Fasting, a Church discipline, had always been subject to change, different in kind than unchangeable doctrinal or sacramental teaching. Both explanations are wanting, for they fail to explain why, in a few years’ time, Catholics began to conceive of themselves as better arbiters than the Church.

O’Toole offers a more convincing explanation in his discussion of contraception. As a Vatican commission assessed the new technology, many Catholics began to believe the Church’s teaching “might not be so irrevocable after all.” Reports had leaked that a majority of the body had coalesced in favor of revision, the anticipation of which seemed to affect parish lives. O’Toole writes of a Chicago priest who said, “We didn’t harangue on birth control because we sensed people didn’t believe it.” The same priest later admitted that he didn’t, either. “A year ago,” a woman from the Bronx told Sign magazine in 1968, “I received permission from my confessor to use contraceptive pills.”

In other words, by the time Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae vitae in 1968, affirming that contraception was intrinsically wrong, many Catholics had become accustomed to clergy who taught otherwise. The pontiff enjoining husbands and wives to honor the precepts of natural law was jarring. “How can persons of integrity confess as a sin something which their consciences tell them is not an offense to God?” one married couple asked. A religious sister in Baltimore wrote to her archbishop: “I do not believe that a person can be asked to sacrifice his own conscience for the beliefs of one man.”

Never mind that the “man” was the vicar of Christ on earth—and that to be worth anything, consciences must be formed properly, by the magisterium of the Church.

What explains the misguided flock?

In many cases, bad shepherds. Nearly half of U.S. priests, according to a contemporaneous survey, believed they should simply affirm what in effect were penitents’ opinions. Only 13 percent denied absolution to those who confessed to using contraception and refused to stop, centuries of Church law notwithstanding.

O’Toole writes that “sin was being redefined,” thanks in part to gymnastics in moral theology by figures like Karl Rahner. So long as Christians had directionally chosen God, the thinking went, they needn’t worry as much about discrete behavior. “Mortal and venial sin are a frightfully inadequate way to describe human acts and the presence of evil in our world,” said one Jesuit at the time.

Many in the Church, meanwhile, began to preach less about individual sin and more about collective wrongs. O’Toole writes of a seminarian who was taught to think of sin more generically, “less likely to be found in ‘specific acts’ than ‘hanging like a smog of bad atmosphere’ around human life and activity.” The ascent of pop psychology likewise injected a deterministic view of human affairs into the mainstream. The faithful needn’t worry about discrete behavior because they weren’t in control of their choices anyway.

The consequences were lethal for a practice in which personal reflection and individual responsibility are necessary. No matter the ecclesial innovation, such as recasting the sacrament as the more-inviting “reconciliation,” participation dropped. That was arguably inevitable for a Church suffering, as Pope John Paul II put it in 1984, from the eclipse of conscience and loss of a sense of sin.

To recover, O’Toole suggests returning to the drawing board. The current form of confession “no longer speaks to the great majority of Catholic lay people,” he writes. “A new form is needed.”

Yet perhaps the problem isn’t that the sacrament doesn’t speak to people and that for decades priests haven’t adequately spoken about the sacrament. Recent polling suggests that when they do—when they preach about the gravity of sin and the means for atoning for it—the lines will form.

That has been the experience in dioceses like Arlington, Va., that explicitly advertise confession. The same is true in my corner of Manhattan, where the queue is steady because the priests preach that it is necessary and then sit in the confessional for at least 45 minutes a day. There, the sacrament hasn’t lost its “potency” as O’Toole suggests. It is being discovered, in all its splendor, by a people who yearn for order and mercy—goods that the world fails to offer.

There’s no need to be fearful of that encounter: Those who enter sit before a “tribunal of mercy rather than of strict and rigorous justice”—before a God who never tires of forgiving and of imparting sanctifying grace.

There’s also no need to repackage that gift. Simply telling people that they ought to avail themselves of it will do.

For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America
by James M. O’Toole
Harvard University Press, 336 pp., $35

Nicholas Tomaino is the Wall Street Journal’s letters editor.

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