How Confession Enabled Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church

Having been raised Catholic I am well acquainted to the bizarre idiosyncrasies of Catholicism and confession which supposedly washes one's sins away.  This later aspect of confession bears a prominent place in the enabling of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.  Predators could confess their "sins" and get a fresh start and bishops and cardinals could thereafter pretend nothing had happened.  Or at least that is the premise of John Cornwell, a Catholic writer and veteran church-watcher, in a new book, The Dark Box.  A piece in ABC News (Australia) - the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal is continuing to explode in Australia - looks at this premise.  Here are highlights:

[I]n a new book, The Dark Box, Catholic writer and veteran church-watcher John Cornwell argues that confession in its modern form is the root cause of many of the church's ills, from paedophile priests to dwindling congregations.

Prior to the Counter-Reformation in the 16th century, confession had been an intimate experience in which penitents held hands or even embraced priests. The modern confession box, which separates priests from penitents, was invented to put a halt to the rampant sexual abuse of women in the confessional that resulted.

The problem, according to Cornwell, began at the start of the 20th century, when Pope Pius X instituted confession, which had previously began during young-adulthood, for children as young as seven. 

'My book stresses the really quite dramatic changes this made, not only to confession itself but also the whole of the Catholic Church,' says Cornwell . . . . 'It was quite a dramatic, traumatic experience for many small children.'

'We were taught that any kind of sin of impurity would be a mortal sin and would have to be confessed. So that was a serious matter for us children, but what on earth was an impure thought or act to a child?'

'I think that this was the big problem of my childhood because you were taught a sense of shame for the body at a very early age and I think this ended up with guilt ridden generations of Catholic children.'

More disturbingly, the introduction of confession for children brought them into one-on-one contact with priests who, according to Cornwell were increasingly socially maladjusted after Pius X's introduction of harsh discipline in seminaries.

'There was also that significant minority of priests who, by tendency or aptitude were likely to abuse, who had a paedophile tendency within them,' says Cornwell. 'These sorts of priests now had access to children in a circumstance of extraordinary intimacy and secrecy.' . . . . Cornwell himself was propositioned by a priest in his locked room while he was studying at a junior seminary.

[T]he focus in Australia has been on how confession was used to absolve paedophile priests and keep the church's problems out of the public eye. While many have called for the breaking of the seal of confession, clergy have staunchly defended the confidentiality of what happens in the dark box.

'It has become evident that many of the priests who were offending were squaring their moral and pastoral lives and their offending lives by going to confession,' says Cornwell. 'Several years ago an ex-priest admitted in court under oath that he had confessed to sexual abuse 1400 times to 32 different priests.'

'There's something very profoundly wrong about this. It should be incumbent on a confessor who is faced with a priest who is making these confessions to say that he will not give absolution unless the priest actually goes to the police and admits what he has done.'