Confession: Catholics, Repentance, & Forgiveness in America by Patrick W. Carey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Confession: Catholics, Repentance, & Forgiveness in America by Patrick W. Carey Leslie Woodcock Tentler Confession: Catholics, Repentance, & Forgiveness in America. By Patrick W. Carey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 392 pp. $34.95. Few practices, at least until recently, have been more central to Catholic experience and identity than going to confession. Even lapsed Catholics, it was frequently claimed, feared to die without confessing to a priest—and if the evidence in this regard is anecdotal, it generally comes from sources in a position to know. But scholarly histories of confession, especially for recent centuries, are still few in number. The reason is obvious: how to write the history of a sacramental encounter that was resolutely private? Patrick Carey, the first to offer a narrative history of confession in the United States from the colonial period to the present, has addressed the problem by focusing primarily on how confession was talked about, both by theologians and Catholic apologists. The results are both enlightening [End Page 91] and a tad bit frustrating. One learns an enormous amount from this book, which will be essential reading for scholars of American Catholicism. But it leaves a residual sadness at how much of this history—to wit, its emotional dimension—can probably never be recovered. During the colonial period and for much of the nineteenth century, most American Catholics confessed only once or twice a year. Theirs was nonetheless a religion with a strong penitential flavor. Fasting and abstinence during Lent and on Ember Days signaled the need for repentance, as did abstinence on Fridays and the vigils of certain feasts. Few Catholics would have received the Eucharist without confessing first, which also reminded the faithful of the dangers of sin and the need to repent. The various catechisms stressed human weakness, the ubiquity of temptation, and the hazards of dying in a sinful state. Even the less-than-devout, moreover, were aware that confession was "a major part of the religious and secular polemic against Catholicism in the United States" (45). This distinctively Catholic mode of repentance thus became for even the lukewarm a perverse point of pride and a badge of tribal membership. Many priests by the mid-nineteenth century were urging the laity to confess more frequently than once or twice a year. Toward the end of the century, growing numbers of Catholics began to do so. The parish mission appears to have played a key role in this regard. The success of a mission was invariably measured by the number of confessions that resulted, and mission preachers pulled out the stops to ensure that the numbers would be large. Mission sermons, while not neglecting the infinite mercy of God, nearly always trafficked in fear. As Carey notes, "The sermons threatened eternal damnation for those who died unrepentant, called attention to the embarrassment of having unconfessed sin revealed at the last and general judgement, and emphasized the eternal duration of the tortures of mind and body for the reprobate in the everlasting fires of hell" (124). The same fear-inducing themes continued as standard mission fare into the 1950s, by which time many American Catholics were confessing at least once a month. More frequent reception of the Eucharist, a trend that accelerated mightily during and after the pontificate of Pius X (r. 1903–1914), helped to account for the change. So did an increasingly heavy emphasis on what were called "confessions of devotion," where the penitent had only minor sins to confess but for whom confessing was essentially an act of worship. This was the world that produced Catholics like my late brother-in-law, who once announced that he hoped to die backing out of the confessional. [End Page 92] In certain significant respects, confessors were urged to change with the times and many presumably did so. Carey provides an especially fascinating account of the sometimes contentious dialogue between advocates of confession and experts in the psychological sciences. By the later 1950s, an up-to-date priest was expected to have sufficient psychological knowledge to distinguish between sinful behavior and behavior rooted in mental disturbance. (In the case of the latter, a priest should be ready to refer...