On March 17, Pope Francis met with participants at an annual course on the internal forum, organised by the Apostolic Penitentiary. In his words to the group, the Pope spoke about the formation of good confessors, focusing on three characteristics which should guide their work.
First, the “good confessor” is, first of all, a true friend of Jesus the Good Shepherd. Without this friendship, it will be difficult to develop that fatherliness so necessary in the ministry of Reconciliation.
Second, the good confessor is a man of the Spirit, a man of discernment.
Third, the confessional is also a true place of evangelisation. Indeed, there is no evangelisation more authentic than the encounter with the God of mercy, with the God Who is Mercy. Encountering mercy means encountering the true face of God, just as the Lord Jesus revealed Him to us.
Certainly, no sensible confessor could take exception to the wise counsel and guidance provided by the Holy Father.
Sadly (a word I find I am using more and more often in describing certain trends within the Church), here are the disturbing facts regarding the Sacrament of Reconciliation not admitted or affirmed by the Holy Father.
According to the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate, a survey in 2005 showed that 42 percent of Catholic adults, when asked how often they went to confession, answered “Never”. In that same survey, 32% said they confess their sins to a priest less than once a year.
Even practicing Catholics, not just lapsed or lukewarm Catholics, avoid the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Younger Catholics find little or no meaning in the Sacrament.
What happened?
Just in the span of my lifetime, the lines of penitents one could expect to find outside confessionals on a typical Saturday afternoon have all but disappeared. When I was in active ministry, I would often lament that when I stepped into the confessional I became the “loneliest man in town”.
Why?
Here’s what I think and I know there will be many who will disagree with and perhaps even scorn my reasons. There are many factors which have contributed to the downfall of Confession, but I will focus upon the three which I believe have been the most influential.
The first blow to the Sacrament of Penance came when the Church rescinded its ancient prescription against eating meat on Friday!
I realize that this may be a shocking revelation to some, but I do believe that no one could have anticipated the effect such a change in discipline would have upon the faithful’s confidence in the moral authority of the Church. What had been for centuries one of the cardinal precepts which gave identity to Catholicism was all but completely abrogated.
Previously, any Catholic who dared eat meat on Friday was considered to be automatically and ultimately condemned to eternal damnation. Wasn’t eating meat on Friday the stuff of mortal sin? Grave matter? Full consent of will? Weren't we taught this from the time we magically matured and attained "the age of reason".
Were not moral manuals written and treatises authored which agonized over whether or not a morsel of meal in soup or whether or not an fragment of animal flesh under an ounce constituted a mortal sin if consumed on a Friday? Whether or not a person who forgot it was Friday could eat a hamburger which he or she purchased while dining away from home?
I can remember discussing such topics not in elementary school, but in my third year of college seminary formation!
If what once so clearly prescribed by the Church could change so instantly and drastically, then what else could change? What really constituted grave matter and sinfulness, judgment and condemnation?
The fact is that many of the Catholic faithful came to the conclusion quite quickly that much of what had been taught as essential to living the moral life was really just the idealized piety of those who had abused their authority by inflicting their particular brand of piety (and in many cases, their moral neuroses) on others.
Sin, like beauty, was to be determined in the eye of the beholder. And the laity eagerly decided to become masters of their own morality, not beholding to the teachings of Popes and Bishops whose “opinions” of right or wrong differed from their own.
The second reason for the rapid demise of the Sacrament of Reconciliation was the profound shift in the prevailing social and secular attitudes about human sexuality, the wide-spread use of recreational drugs, and the breakdown of the very fabric of the family due to the availability of easy no-fault divorces -- all in the name of a so-called “liberating tolerance”.
What was and remains characteristic of this pervasive point of view is that it calls for “tolerance” (in reality a code word for “acceptance”) of any thought, word, or deed imaginable. This would become the embryonic conceptual cell of what would later be the fundamental social trait of society today: “political correctness”, the first and only commandment of moral life.
Morality today does not consist of objective truths either Divinely revealed or gleaned from the immutable truths imbedded in the natural order. Now, morality is defined by any effect which one person’s thought, speech or action has upon another’s viewpoint or behavior. In the context of this new morality, the Confessional is meaningless.
We don’t ask forgiveness of God, only of each other. And the forgiveness we ask carries with it the burden of a promise never again to question or impugn another’s way of thinking or acting.
And, the final reason for the practical death of the Sacrament of Reconciliation?
In a way that had never happened before and on a scale never before witnessed, the Papal Encyclical Humanae Vitae of Pope Paul VI caused many Catholics to re-evaluate their notion and acceptance of episcopal authority.
Humanae Vitae certainly remains controversial in the teaching it proclaimed about the immorality of artificial contraception. Yet, it was the reaction of Priests and theologians which perhaps had the greatest influence on the minds of the faithful.
The very public rejection of the encyclical by Catholic clergy, theologians, professors created a seed of doubt in the minds of average Catholics who began to question (and seriously so) the binding force of Papal authority in matters of morals (and eventually in matters pertaining to the Faith itself). In the open rebellion against the encyclical which was touted in both the secular and religious media, people began to simply decide for themselves whether or not the regulation of birth by natural or artificial means was right or wrong. Overnight, this moral subjectivity would replace both the moral precepts Divinely revealed or proclaimed by Church hierarchy.
These three interwoven and dynamic moments in recent history would be the death kneel of Confession and the need to seek sacramental absolution for sin.
So, while I laud Pope Francis who calls upon confessors to be fatherly, empathetic and evangelistic, I believe he has failed to recognize and appreciate the reality that a new morality has replaced the traditional morality which made Confession understandable and necessary.
And, as I look out toward the horizon of this new moral landscape, little appears that gives me any sense of security or certainty that the Sacrament of Reconciliation will ever again be valued and practiced for the great treasure it once was in the lives of weak and frail human beings
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