Patrick W. Carey. Confession

For generations, Roman Catholics in America lined up in their local parish churches to confess their sins anonymously to their pastors, believing that they received divine forgiveness through them. The crowds could be impressive. One priest in New York in the 1890s (who liked to count) reported hearing about 175 confessions during his regular sittings every Saturday afternoon and evening; one time, when he heard what he described as “only 88,” he was disappointed and told his diary that the pace was “slack.” How confession, formally known as the sacrament of penance, became an essential marker of Catholic identity and then, virtually overnight in the 1960s and shortly after, how the practice all but disappeared are the subjects of Patrick W. Carey’s useful new study Confession: Catholics, Repentance, and Forgiveness in America. Private confession traced its origins to medieval times, replacing earlier systems of public penance. Reformation-era Protestant objections only redoubled the Catholic commitment to it, generating a substantial body of polemical literature from both sides. Those polemics took on new life in the United States, Carey shows in detail, as the Catholic population began to grow in the early years of the nineteenth century. Theologically serious Protestants objected that they could find no biblical warrant for it, concluding that auricular (literally, into the ear of the priest) confession was a wholly human invention. More suspicious and more excitable pamphleteers wondered just exactly what went on in those darkened boxes in “popish” churches. In particular, what were celibate priests saying to young women, likely undermining their proper subservience to fathers or husbands? Catholic leaders rose to the defense of their sacrament with equal gusto, and they eventually succeeded in instilling habits of regularity in their congregations. By the twentieth century, monthly confession had become the pious standard for many laypeople. Often, these were so-called devotional confessions: the penitent had not done anything seriously wrong, but went anyway. Catholics also managed to gain recognition of the seal (i.e., secrecy) of confession in American civil law. Carey provides an excellent chapter on the 1813 New York case that established the right of priests to refuse to testify about what they had learned from penitents in confession.

Anabaptists · Apostasy · Confession (law) · Forgiveness · Political science · Protestantism · Repentance · Theology · Warrant · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies