Abstract
From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, the practice of private confession to a priest was a mainstay of Catholic parish life in the United States. By the 1970s, Catholics had largely abandoned the practice of private confession. One dominant narrative among Catholic theologians and clergy, identified chiefly with the papacy of John Paul II, attributes the decline in confession to the loss of healthy guilt that took place during the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. In conversation with the work of psychologist and philosopher Antoine Vergote, the present article challenges this narrative, arguing that a collective and unhealthy Catholic guilt existed among American Catholics well before the 1960s and in fact characterized the period in which private confession was practiced most frequently. I contend that obedience to moral prescriptions was not, for ordinary Catholics, part of an ethical program of self-reform but the condition for belonging to a church body that emphasized obedience. Finally, examining the relationship between weekly reception of communion and confession, I suggest that private confession emerged to support frequent communion, persisting only until the latter became standard practice among Catholics in the United States.
Highlights
In a 1953 address to an international meeting of psychotherapists and psychologists, Pope Pius XII warned that curing a patient’s guilt feelings does not necessarily remove the moral fault that produced them
Examining the relationship between weekly reception of communion and confession, I suggest that private confession emerged to support frequent communion, persisting only until the latter became standard practice among Catholics in the United States
The pontiff allowed for a distinction between a “healthy guilt,” a person’s sensitive awareness of having violated what is known to be a law given by God for our own good, and what he describes as “an irrational and even morbid sense of guilt” (Pius XII 1953, nos. 34–37)
Summary
Pathological forms of moral awareness subsumed the proper role of an authentic and legitimate sense of guilt, in part due to the rise of modern psychology, and to deficiencies within educational systems, family life, and the mass media This massive cultural decline, said the pope, had precipitated a crisis in confession by attacking the sense of sin that had motivated Catholics to frequent the confessional for generations. Priest and theologian David Coffey more soberly attributes the crisis in confession to a pedagogical failure on the part of the church to communicate a coherent understanding of sin in light of changes in moral theological thinking (Coffey 2001) What these otherwise diverging theological evaluations of sacrament penance all share is a conviction that. As the reception of communion emerged as a constitutive aspect of weekly parish life, frequent confession offered the laity a way to negotiate the tension between their sense of unworthiness and their desire to receive the eucharist by allowing the ritual manifestation of obedience to substitute for purity
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