In a chapter in a soon-to-be-published book on the sacrament of reconciliation, I begin by pondering why my experience of celebrating this sacrament as a priest is not as positive as my experience of celebrating all the other sacraments. Challenges to the contemporary practice of sacramental confession include differing understandings of mortal sin, insufficient catechesis and implementation of the new rites, and severe restrictions on the use of general absolution, which could help people to reflect more deeply upon the social dimensions of sin and the ecclesial dimensions of reconciliation. Entering this somewhat confused and frustrated world of sin and reconciliation is the historian Patrick W. Carey, who has written a truly excellent summary of thought on this topic, enabling historians, theologians, liturgists, and clergy to understand why we are where we are today. Although his book did not relieve the unease I feel with this sacrament, it gives the historical and cultural context that makes sense of this unease. His text deals specifically with the confession of sin among American Catholics from the time of the Council of Trent to the present, but his scholarship necessarily includes studies of early church practices; Catholic papal, conciliar, synodic, and curial influences; and Protestant thought and practice in America. His notes and bibliography are impressive; it is a “must read.”
Carey's study contains nine chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the Tridentine doctrine of penance—a doctrine that shaped the preaching, teaching, catechesis, theology, and canonical legislation in American Catholicism for centuries—and describes the Catholic colonial penitential practices of prayer, fasting, and abstinence, as well as the infrequent practice of confessing sins. Chapter 2 examines an early-nineteenth-century New York court case that upheld the seal of confession, influencing many subsequent judicial decisions, while becoming the occasion for the first major American Catholic statement explaining the Catholic doctrine of sacramental confession. Chapter 3 takes up the various nineteenth-century American Protestant charges—which articulated the biblical, doctrinal, and theological grounds—against the Catholic understanding of penance, while also opposing the legalism of the Lateran requirement of annual confession to a priest. Chapter 4 outlines the four major nineteenth-century Catholic apologetic responses to these charges, emphasizing the biblical-doctrinal grounds of sacramental confession, its social-political benefits, its natural psychological benefits, and the historical evidence for its practice. Chapter 5 deals with the evolution and development of the practice of sacramental confession in the context of nineteenth-century Catholic piety, which included canonical legislation, preaching, teaching, catechesis, and revival-type parish missions.
Chapter 6 covers the early-twentieth-century Catholic attempts to respond to the rise of a new scientific approach to the history of confession that called into question much of the post-Tridentine understanding and practice of penance, and how these efforts were cut short by Pope Pius X's antimodernist campaign. The chapter also deals with the developments that led to Catholic piety, which emphasized frequent sacramental confession before communion. Chapter 7 outlines the American-style ressourcement movement in liturgical, biblical, catechetical, and historical studies that anticipated to some degree the changes that would take place during Vatican II. Chapter 8 addresses challenges from empirical psychology and psychiatry that called into question some of the inherited conceptions of sin and guilt. Chapter 9 delineates the rapid and dramatic decline between 1960 and 2015 in the practice of sacramental penance and other penitential practices. This chapter indicates the effects of the American cultural revolution of the 1960s and the paradigmatic shift in theology at Vatican II on sacramental confession. The final part of the chapter focuses on the reforms, conflicts, and recurring attempts by popes and bishops to promote, without much statistical success, a renewed sense of sin and the practice of penance.
A key insight from the last chapter is Carey's assertion that internal American church decisions influenced the practice of sacramental confession. In particular, he points to the American bishops’ 1966 decision: “The bishops argued, correctly, that fasting and abstinence regulations in the church were changeable, and they encouraged Catholics to decide for themselves their own kinds of penitential practices. By emphasizing individual freedom, though, they undermined the social character of the common penitential practices and, unintentionally, contributed in some degree to the decline of confession” (229). Here, Carey correctly understands that sacramental confession stands within a wider framework of penitential practices. With this in mind, he recommends that nonsacramental penitential services be implemented—perhaps once a year, analogous to the Day of Atonement—to bring large segments in the Catholic community back to the penitential tradition as members of a community who seek forgiveness for intentional personal sins and for the inadvertent wrongs that harm all. This, he argues, would be a small step to help implement the post–Vatican II approaches to penance and reconciliation.
