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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. James O'Toole about his book titled For I Have Sinned, The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America, published by Harvard University Press in 2025. As the subtitle of the book suggests, this book investigates the really interesting fact
American Catholics went to confession. Really, we're going to talk about some of these numbers here, but it is a prevalent thing in the American Catholic community for a long time. Going to confession. Saying what you've done wrong, accepting God's forgiveness through this particular ritual was an embedded practice until suddenly it wasn't. Starting in around about the 1970s, we're going to talk about that. Confessions stopped being.
such a big deal. In fact, kind of, in some ways, feels like I dropped off a cliff having read the book. So this is obviously a very interesting transformation to understand. Jim, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to tell us about it. Thanks, Miranda. It's a pleasure to be here. Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
made the focus of my study the history of religion in America. America has been and still is in many ways a very religious place, and I've always found lots of interesting things to study in America. I used to tell my students, people do... different things on the basis of their religion, things they wouldn't do otherwise. And I wanted to explore that. In particular, within that, I focused on the American Catholic community.
Catholics were probably the largest single denomination in the United States by the time of the Civil War. If you put all Protestants together, there would be more of them. But the largest single denomination was Catholics, and Catholics have retained that position since then. So there seemed to be a lot to work with. That's definitely helpful context to understand in the framing of religion in the United States. Thinking then within the American Catholic community.
How did confession become such a big part of American Catholic life? I mean, you talk about in the book, this goes all the way back to the revolutionary period. Is that right? That's right. The Catholic population in America is small at the time of the American Revolution and scattered around the countryside.
And most Catholics saw a priest only occasionally when he rode into town. When he did, he would hear the confessions of the assembled Catholics who hadn't had the chance to go to confession. many months in some cases. He'd hear their confessions, he'd baptize the children, he'd say mass for them, and then he'd ride off to another town and folks there might not see him again for another six months or so.
As the Catholic population grew, and especially as it concentrated in cities, by the time of the Civil War, there was enough of a Catholic infrastructure that confession and the other sacraments of the church could become more regular. Catholics, I think, wanted to be able to go to confession and mass and do all the other things that were characteristic of their faith. But until the time of the Civil War...
They just didn't have the opportunity. There weren't enough parishes. There weren't enough priests. From that time on and certainly into the 20th century, the Catholic infrastructure across the landscape is full. And as a result, Catholics really, for the first time in America, can become a regular church-going people. And church-going meant...
Mass on Sundays, but it also meant confession. And they could then internalize the regularity of confession that their priests encouraged them to practice. Okay, this is helpful to understand how this starts. By the time we get to the 20th century, what does this practice of confession look like for American confessions, for American Catholics? Is it...
You'd say every Sunday. So how many are we talking a priest would hear? And was it only on Sunday? Was it always related to other Catholic practices? Yeah, Catholic priests... encourage their parishioners to go to confession regularly. if not every week, maybe twice a month or at least once a month. And that frequency was enjoined on Catholics by their priests. And for the most part, Catholics... And so I think in many ways, if we think of Sunday Mass as being a marker for Catholic identity.
Going to confession, usually on Saturdays before Sunday Mass, going to confession was a marker as well. I think in local parish churches, the parish schedule focused as much on Saturday as it did on Sunday. because parishes would regularly set aside hours when there might be two or three priests in a local church hearing confessions to accommodate the people who came in. And the numbers for that period, late 19th, early first half of the 20th century, the numbers are really staggering.
And the level of expectation that those numbers set is interesting as well. I found the diary of one priest in New York. in the 1890s and early 1900s. He was a regular diarist describing what he was doing in the parish and so on, but he also kept count of the number of confessions that he was hearing. on a regular basis. I assume he was making a marker on a hash mark on a sheet of paper to keep...
count. He added up his totals every month. He was kind of like an accountant. He brought them forward into a half year and year long total and so on. And the numbers were really impressive. He would say things in the diary like, today was a slack day, a slow day, only 88. Another time he heard 107 confessions at a single sitting. on a Saturday, and he counted that number as few.
those kinds of entries in his diary are evidence not only for the numbers of confessions that he was hearing but also his expectations he was kind of disappointed that he heard only eighty-eight and not more. Disappointed that he heard only 107 and not more. That gives a sense of the scale at which this was practiced.
Yeah, and that scale is pretty wild. I mean, feeling like 107 at once is not many. That alone is really quite striking. But if we get into the content then of those, for example, 107 in one sitting. What sorts of sins were people confessing? How did they understand different ideas of sin and how their behaviors fit into those categories?
Yeah, of course, sin is at the heart of all of this. The expectation for confession was that individuals would go into the confessional and talk privately with the priest and would itemize. various sins, the things they had done wrong that they shouldn't have done, the things they should have done but didn't do, and so on. The Catholic Church had a very elaborated... classification system for sins that parishioners could use in...
making their confessions. There were mortal sins and venial sins, mortal sins the most serious of all. The understanding was that... unforgiven mortal sin on your soul when you died sent you straight to hell. No questions asked. Venial sins were lesser offenses that were wrong, and you recognize they were wrong, and you were sorry you did them, and you promised that you would try not to do them again. you know, the consequences weren't as dire. Mortal sins, for example, would be murder.
You know, bank robbery, that sort of thing. Venial sins, especially for children, might be I pushed my sister. or I disobeyed my parents. So the church gave ordinary Catholics these categories to think in. And it gave them a moral sense that it forced them to scrutinize their own behavior and to try to do better. There were other kinds of categories. with regard to sins as well. There was something called occasions of sin, not sins themselves, but circumstances that might lead a person into sin.
Catholics should think about that in the confessional as well. That lay people were not... They were not theologians themselves, but the church presented Catholics with these categories. ways of thinking. In a way, it gave them a language to talk about their moral behavior so that there was, among other things, something to say in confession. Okay, that's definitely helpful to understand. It would be really quite strange to think of these numbers being people who are educated as theologians.
What then can you tell us about kind of the practice of this? What were the sort of stages or steps of confession? What was sort of supposed to happen? And to what extent? did this sort of theoretical model actually play out in practice the same sort of way? Right. From a very young age, the church asked Catholics to go to confession. By the 20th century... Seven years old was the first time.
a young Catholic would go to confessions. And I think that's another thing to keep in mind here. This very elaborate moral system for understanding good and bad behavior and so on, it's one thing to ask adults. to master and use that system. But the church really assumed that... Children could do that too. Children could think in these categories. How successful that was is another matter, but the system was designed to promote that. Confession itself.
was understood as having three distinct parts or successive stages. The first was called contrition. in which the person going to confession known as the penitent, the penitent was asked to review their behavior, identify their sins, identify the things they had done wrong. And to the phrase was excite contrition. They should feel sorry for what they had done because they recognized it as sinful, as wrong.
So they should feel sorry for having offended God, essentially. And it was also, they were also told it was important to feel sorry for the wrong, for the right reason. The wrong reason for feeling sorry might be, oh well, if I committed this sin, I'll go to hell. That was not entirely absent here, but it was more important to feel sorry for the right reason, that sin had offended God. who deserved more from his creatures than that. So there was...
those stages to the contrition process as such. Once a person had done this review of the sins they had committed, and a part of that was how many times... According to their best recollection, they had committed each of those offenses. The second stage of the sacrament was what was confession prompter. They told those sins to the priest sitting on the other side of the screen in the confessional box. There was a formula that they used to begin.
their confession as they talked to the priest. The first thing they would say was, bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been so many weeks since my last confession, and these are my sins. And then they would... list their catalog, the product of this reflective stage of contrition that had gone on before. When they listed all their sins, and again, the number of times that they had done each of them, they would conclude by saying, I am sorry for these and all the sins of my past life.
At that point in the proper confession stage, the priest might ask a question or two. penitent hadn't made clear exactly what the sins were. You know, there might be some embarrassment involved, even in an anonymous process, and the penitent might have you know, use some euphemisms for his sins. If it wasn't clear to the priest what the specific sins were, he was supposed to ask a question or two.
Not surprisingly, perhaps especially with young people and adolescents, not surprisingly, this often happened when the subject was sex and sexual sins of one kind or another. In particular, the priest had to know, be able to tell whether these were mortal sins or venial sins. Were they the really serious kinds, deserving more attention than venial?
But once that had happened, the priest might then say a word of encouragement to the penitentiary. Oh, well, now try harder this next week not to, I don't know, push your sister. if you were a kid. And then the priest would impart the absolution. The understanding was that the priest was, in a sense, acting in the place of God.
The penitent was speaking to the priest, but it wasn't the priest himself who did the forgiving. It was God who did the forgiving. And the priest was just, you might say, the agent for that. And then concluding this second stage of the process. The priest would assign a penance, usually in the form of prayers. He would say to the penitent, well, in light of the sins you have confessed and that God is now forgiving.
say the prayers of the rosary, or say seven our fathers, or other prayers. He would assign that as a penance, and then the priest would pronounce the words of absolution over the penitent. This prayer until the 1960s was in Latin. So, of course, most priests, most people didn't know what he was actually saying, but they knew that that was the formula for forgiveness.
With that, the person left the box, and the third stage of confession then took place, which was the person actually said the prayers that the priest had assigned. Once that was done, the penitent could go home forgiven, knowing that he or she had been forgiven. So it was a very elaborate process. It was a very...
highly articulated process that, of course, had developed over the centuries. But both priests and people were sure that... something real had just happened to them, that this wasn't just an empty ritual, that God had actually forgiven them of their sins, that the guilt of those sins had been removed. And again, these people going to confession are not theologians, but they have that understanding that.
this just happened and that it was real. If they died on the spot, leaving the confessional, their way to heaven was virtually guaranteed. This is a very intense sounding process. What was it actually like for people to experience? Can we see any sorts of patterns or trends of what this was like for people? Yeah, it was an intense experience. And I think the intensity is masked in a way because...
Yes. You know, they think they're everybody thinks this is a very serious business. And but the fact that it was done so regularly and so often, you know, it could. sometimes devolve into, you know, just kind of going through the motions. So I don't think we should expect every person leaving the box had an intense religious experience or change of attitude because it was routine. But even so.
They did it because, again, it was real. Their souls, you might say, had been stained with sin when they entered the confessional, and they weren't anymore when they left. And there was an acceptance of that. and a happiness, really, that it had happened. Now, within the Catholic community, I tried in the book to look at different kinds of parishioners, different kinds of Catholics going to confession and to see if the experiences were
how they were the same and how they were different. I look, for example, at the differences between the confessions of men and the confessions of women. priests usually thought that women were the more naturally religious sector of the population. And so they... were less concerned, in a way, about the confessions of women. Women, for their part, even as they're going through the motions of confession,
they sometimes had some dissatisfactions or uncomfortableness with it. You know, priests are all men, of course, in the Catholic tradition. And so when a woman went to confession, she was always talking to someone of the opposite sex. And the gender dynamics that were involved there could vary considerably from time to time. And as time went on, especially as modern feminism...
took hold, the ideas of modern feminism, I think women in particular started to think there's something odd about this, there's something that shouldn't be. The Confession of Men was a great concern for parish priests. Priests thought that men needed more urging, more encouragement to come to confession on a regular basis. For the most part, I'd say that that worked. There were parish societies for men that built into their regular activities going to confession.
and mass and communion on a given weekend every month, say. And one of the purposes of those societies was to get its members into the habit of, oh, our meeting is this week, so I have to go to confession. communion this week. So there were those kinds of efforts. And it's in that way that we see the differences of men and women. I looked at the confessions of children. As I said, kids learn to do this at about age seven. And, you know, you might well say.
What kind of serious sins is a seven-year-old capable of? Setting that aside, the idea was to accustom kids. to go to confession at an early age. As time went on, however, adults and priests too noticed adults were... Just repeating the same confessions they had made when they were kids and that there was a, you know, the habits that were formed by seven and eight year olds meant that.
Even adults were confessing trivial sins. I found one priest who noted that once in the confessional, he had heard a grown man as a part of his confession say that he had committed the sin of... hawking in church. That was something that obviously might mean something in the case of a seven-year-old, but not a 47-year-old. So the habits of childhood got instilled early and continued thereafter. Among the experience of different groups of Catholics, a key factor was language.
with non-English speaking ethnic groups who made up substantial portions of the Catholic population, immigrants from Italy and Germany and other places whose first language wasn't English. This was important in confession because confession was the only sacrament, the only rite of the church that was...
primarily conducted in the vernacular language, not in Latin. Latin, of course, being a foreign language to everybody. So it was important in confession for priests and people to understand each other. The priest had to know, well, what are the sins that this non-English speaking immigrant in front of me on the other side of the grill, what's he saying? Are these serious sins or not serious sins?
So the church had to try to devise ways to get over this language problem. One way to do it was to organize parishes according to ethnic group so that, you know, an Italian speaker. could confess to an Italian-speaking priest and so on. With time, as one generation succeeded another, and... English became the common language of children and grandchildren of immigrants. This problem disappeared over time. But while while language was a problem, it was.
difficult thing. I found a couple of little guidebooks that priests could use. when encountering a non-English speaking penitent. And there was one that had the formulas and common questions for confession that a priest could use. It had them in 11 different languages. And I think the theory of this was, you know, the priest could...
flip to whatever section of the book was necessary. Oh, here's a Polish person confessing. I don't speak Polish. I'll just flip to the Polish section of the book, and that will get us through. It's a testament to the... seriousness with which they wanted people to approach confession and they wanted confession to be a success. It's a testament to that that books like that were produced in the first place. I have to think that in most cases they were not particularly useful.
that they're kind of like tourist phrase books, better ideas in theory than in actual practice. But it was a way of getting over the language barrier that could impede. confession. And lastly, I looked at a sort of special, what you might call special populations of penitents, the most obvious of which were penitents who were hard of hearing. Confession was an oral process. It depended on speaking and listening. What if the penitent had trouble hearing?
What special provisions should be made? In some cases, they said... said, well, priests would say, we won't do the confessions in the confessional box. We'll do it in a private room in the rectory where the... Two parties can speak loudly enough to be understood. There were also technological. solutions to this problem over time. And by the 1950s and 60s, it's possible to get essentially closed circuit telephone systems installed in confessional books that would amplify the sound.
So that's one special population that I looked at on their experience of confession. And lastly, in this category, I think I'd say maybe the most dramatic kinds of confessions were those of soldiers in war. You know, they're going into battle. If a chaplain is there, he will try to hear as many confessions as possible of the soldiers against the possibility that they might not survive, that this would be a chance.
to clear their slate, so to speak, before facing death in battle. So there was the general... sense of confession and the general practice of confession in local parish churches, but there were these special issues as well that I tried to explore. And it really shows the sort of complexity and nuance of the different experiences and the ways that people engaged with confession.
Can we, however, complicate it further by adding in some more people to this discussion? Because, of course, there are all the people who are looking at American Catholics going off and confessing things, but who are not Catholic, right? The outsiders. This could be neighbours. This could also be courts. This could be popular media. How were they reacting to these practices of confession that sound really intense and how some really obvious secrecy things built into them? That's right.
I think because confession was conducted in private. You know, churches had confessional boxes in which the penitents would go in behind a screen. The priest would be in the center compartment of a confessional box, and there'd be a barrier between the... the penitent and the priest. So the very fact that confession was conducted in this private setting, at the very least for non-Catholics, It aroused curiosity. So...
Just what is going on in there? Who is saying what to whom? Is there something sinister going on here under the cover of forgiving sin? What if some thought, what if the priest in confession is sort of giving people to... commit sins in the first, giving his permission for them to commit sins in the first place. OK, I'll forgive you of robbing the bank this week. And, you know, if you come back next week, I'll forgive it again after you've robbed another bank.
That didn't happen, I don't think. But because it was a secret process, it gave rise to those kinds of concerns. But the secrecy was from the church's point of view. central to the whole business. A person didn't have to stand up in public and say the things they had done wrong. They didn't have to look the priest in the eye or have him look them in the eye as they were confessing because they were
were in separated compartments. And from the church's perspective, all this required and depended on what was known as the seal of the confession. Anything that the penitent said to the priest, the priest could not repeat. under any circumstances once the confession was over. Privacy was essential to the practice. Among other things, they feared if the priest can talk about sins after people have gone to... confession. Who will go to confession?
OK, I'm going to tell him my sins this week, but, you know, he's going to then blab them once once we're done. So the seal was was emphasized as as absolutely essential. And in the United States, there's an important this has important legal ramifications. There is a court case in New York in 1813 in which. some stolen property is returned to its rightful owner. And as the police investigate, they discover that the...
person responsible for the actual return of the stolen property was a priest who had heard the confession of the thieves. And as a condition of Forgiving the thieves, the priest had required them to give back the property they had stolen. And the priest himself took possession of the property and then gave it to the rightful owner. When the thieves are brought into court as part of the...
trial, the prosecutors asked the priest, well, so who told you about this stolen property? Who did you get it back from? And the priest, whose name was Anthony Coleman, Alsatian Jesuit in the United States said, well, I can't tell you. how I learned about the crime, how I took possession from the thief and gave it back to the rightful owner. I can't tell you any of that because I learned about it in confession and confession is governed by the seal.
There's a trial of Father Coleman and the state court. all Protestants on the court and on the jury say, no, this is right. The privacy of confession is essential to the Catholic religion, and we can't violate that to force the priest to... what he had learned in confession, essentially violates his right, his constitutional right, to the free exercise of his religion. And that established the seal of the confessional in American law.
subsequently put it into explicit statute. But that court case established the seal as essential. That didn't, however, then... didn't fully assuage the non-Catholics who were curious about what's going on in there. There are, in the 19th century, there are a number of basically lurid novels supposedly exposing what was really going on in the confessional. There was some worry in particular, what kind of advice are priests giving to young women or married women?
Are priests undermining the authority of their fathers and husbands, for example? There were thoughts, well, maybe there's sexual shenanigans going on with the priest and unmarried women. Those were usually fueled by anti-Catholic hysteria, anti-immigrant hysteria. But the... That's a measure of the wonderment, the speculation on the part of non-Catholics as to what was going on.
And that showed up in popular culture eventually as well. There's a wonderful Alfred Hitchcock movie from 1953 called I Confess. And in the movie, the rectory handyman commits a murder while disguised in a priest's cassock. He returns to the rectory, confesses to the priest, to a priest. who is subsequently suspected of the crime himself. But he can't say anything because he learned who the true murderer was in confession. And the movie is about how that plays out.
I won't give away the end. It's a wonderful movie that people should track down if they can. That definitely shows just how pervasive this intrigue is of confession, not just within the Catholic community, but... very clearly beyond it as well. Right. Well, confession was something that Catholics did that other Christian denominations didn't do. So it stood out in that way.
Until, of course, Catholics stopped going to confession in the same sorts of embedded ways we've been discussing. So if we start to unpack the factors that are explaining that decline, I wonder if we can talk about... the familiarity with psychological ideas. We, I think, probably take for granted now that we're all familiar with at least some of the language of around therapy and why you might behave in a certain way. But of course, this was at one point...
knew and became a mass understanding that people had. Is this something we can link to the decline of engagement with Catholic confession? I think it very definitely is. In working on the book, I knew that the rise of the acceptance of psychological concepts in the population at large. I knew that that was going to be a factor in all of this. And as I worked on the book, I became more and more convinced that it was a really important factor. initially on the part of Catholic leaders.
at least, this great skepticism about modern psychology as it came to be understood. Freud, oh, well, that's all just about sex, isn't it? That's not what is really going on. But as those concepts spread, I think it had an impact on confession. Initially, many Catholic writers thought... Well, why talk to a psychologist? Why visit a psychiatrist and talk about your problems and you have to pay them for this? Why do that?
You've got somebody sitting in the confessional in the church down the street every Saturday afternoon and evening, and you can go in and do that same kind of thing for free. Why wouldn't you do that? Confession was seen as sort of the real thing in addressing the problems I might have or the problems I might want to address. But as the notions of...
psychology, questions of motivation just became more complicated. In the traditional Catholic approach to confession, I think the sense was, well, you know, there's things... things are either right or wrong. And it's clear which ones are right and which ones are wrong. And if you stop and seriously think about it, you can recognize that. You can work all of this out. gray areas at all um psychology at first seemed to undercut that well people started to think you know human motivation is
a more complicated thing. It's not that I, you know, rationally figure out this is the good thing to do. This is the bad thing to do and then act or can act accordingly. So I think that the spread of psychology in the population at large, the acceptance that, yeah, psychology has something to offer in human behavior, in human relations. I think that had the effect of undermining the clarity that confession depended on and really then set the stage.
for what would be a very dramatic decline in the numbers of people going to confession. And this is something that happens mostly in the period right after the Second World War. Okay, this is helpful to understand how these things are overlapping and also the time period of it too. If we continue moving forward in time, besides the rise of psychology, what are some of the other factors that we need to understand as contributing to the decline of engagement with confession?
Yeah, I think these all came together starting in the 1950s and 60s. And I've identified several that I think were important. Going back, even as Catholics were confessing in the large numbers that we've been talking about, they were accumulating a number of dissatisfactions with confession. First of all, most confessions didn't take very long.
I've been able to compute, again, with the help of priest diaries, I've been able to compute that the average confession in a parish church lasted about two minutes. Now, to the person doing the confessing, that might seem like a long time. But, you know, two minutes is really pretty quick start to finish for the procedure that we've talked about. Certainly many people, maybe even most people.
liked the fact that it was brief. Even with its anonymity, there was a certain amount of embarrassment on the part of the person going to confession. You know, having to state right out loud to another person, even if... I couldn't see him. What I had done wrong, a little embarrassing there. So the fact that it might only last two minutes was a positive. At the same time, other people said, Well, look, the church is asking me to make all these serious moral judgments about what I've done.
And I'm kind of being rushed in and out. There's one woman who in the 1950s who expressed her dissatisfaction with going to confession. She said the priest was like a supermarket checker. You know, just running the goods through the cash register as quickly as possible. So that kind of dissatisfaction started to grow. People started to notice. that was going on.
I've already mentioned the gender dynamics. As I said, women were always talking to a member of the opposite sex, and that became increasingly to seem odd. Some men rather thought so as well. I found one man in the 1960s who said, if we're going to continue to have. private confession like this, please let women be ordained so I could talk to a more sensitive person. That's a man speaking. I think there were those kinds of dissatisfactions that grew.
Certainly one issue that kept coming up again and again as an example of this kind of dissatisfaction was the church's teaching on contraception. on banning all use of so-called artificial methods of birth control. which the church reaffirmed as being sinful, as being very sinful, in fact. Society's attitudes just changed on that, and more and more married couples started to think, I don't think that's sinful. And therefore, I don't think I should go into confession.
and confess as sinful something that I don't think is sinful. And so I think the dissatisfaction around contraception was a very important factor in the decline as well. The Second Vatican Council of the 1960s which changed so much about Catholic practice and even Catholic theology. I think in the end, even though the Council itself said almost nothing about confession as such,
I think the council gave lay people the permission, in a way, to act on their dissatisfactions. Why should I continue to do this ritual that doesn't mean anything to me anymore, that I have to put up with? some might say, these things. And I think that really was the tipping point for the decline of confession. Very helpful to understand this sort of. You can see that, by the way, in various surveys that, you know, journalists and social scientists took at the time.
There's one in particular I remember from the 1990s. So this is, you know, 30, 40 years down from these changes that I'm talking about. There was one survey that focused particularly on what they called core Catholics. Catholics who were... regular in their practice. You know, they went to mass every week. They sent their kids to Catholic schools of all kind. They were active in the parish societies. They worked in the food bank for the parish and so on. This survey in the 1990s.
focused on these core Catholics. And it found that something like only 6% of them went to confession on a regular basis. 35% said they never went at all. They still were Catholics. They still considered themselves Catholics. They still were active in the church, but they just didn't go to confession at all. Confession had become... you know, not necessary for their identity of the Catholics. That's the kind of stark data that we see of this collapse in the last third of the 20th century.
And this is, as you said, a very, very noticeable collapse. How did the church, how did members of the clergy in a parish or the institutions of the church respond to these very stark differences? Well, the church certainly knew that this was going on, and you could see it in... large ways and small ways. One of the things I charted throughout the period of the book, I looked at the hours that regular parish churches set aside regularly for confession. on Saturdays in particular.
And, you know, in the first half of the 20th century, on a Saturday, priests would be hearing confessions, would be available to hear confessions for five or six hours, you know, some hours in the afternoon, followed by hours in the evening. By the... time we get to the end of the 20th century, as the collapse is underway, you see parishes cutting back on the amount of time that priests will be available to hear confession. In most parishes in the states today,
I think an hour is set aside. One hour is a long time for for a parish to offer. In some places, it's less than an hour, half an hour, three quarters of an hour. My theory here is that, in a sense, confessions supply. priests available to hear confession. Confession supply says something about priest demand, about parishioner demand, rather. If in 1920, priests are sitting in their confessional boxes for six hours.
hours at a time, that's because people are coming. They're not sitting there doing nothing. Now, I think with the decline, you can see through those times, through those numbers, the decline. There were some efforts, however, that the church tried to get the numbers back up again. Some of it was not. particularly effective at all. And in a lot of places, it seems to me that the church's attitude is, well, we'll just tell Catholics again that they really should be doing this.
Well, okay, that had no effect. So as a strategy, I'm not sure it was very successful. There were two possibilities that I think might have, if not... forestall this decline at least have helped slow it down a little bit. One was, and this was attempted in the 1970s, one was to raise the age at which
children went to confession for the first time. I think there was a recognition that adults carried into adulthood with them the bad habits of confession that they had experienced when they were seven, you know, and that they were talking about. childish, trivial things. The thought was, well, if we raise the age, if kids are doing it not when they're in the second grade, but maybe in the fourth or fifth grade, you know, kids are just more developed.
at that point, their sense of things is better than it was before, that that would help. Rome very strongly disapproved of this idea, and parishes gave it up and kept the age very low. If that had happened, I think it would have... removed some of the dissatisfactions that people had with confession as adults. And the second one, also from the middle 1970s, was an experiment in what was called general absolution.
This was a system in which the priest might impart a general forgiveness of sins to all participating in a service. even without individual confessions on their part. The understanding was, well, if you have really serious sins on your soul, you should go to an individual confession, but we'll give a general absolution. to all who were present out of service. This had often been done in wartime.
You know, again, soldiers going into battle. The priest might hear as many individual confessions as he could. But if he couldn't get to everybody before the trumpet sounded, he'd impart a general absolution. to all present. So that possibility was always there. And there were efforts. One bishop in the United States had held a...
general absolution service in a local basketball arena in Memphis, Tennessee. 12,000 people gave and received this general absolution. Rome disapproved of this as well. thinking that it would undercut individual confession. And so it was stopped. I think those, in a way, are two roads not taken about confession in the... 1970s and 1980s that, again, wouldn't have stopped the decline, but might have slowed it or changed the dynamic. Obviously, today, if we're looking at
public reactions to the Catholic Church within and without the Catholic faith. Obviously, concerns and revelations of abuse by clergy and the culpability of the church as an institution within that is a huge part of how everyone is engaging with Catholicism now. Was that at all part of this story in the 1970s around the decline in confession? My conclusion is that this is obviously a very important topic and a very...
difficult and sad topic to consider. But my conclusion was that the revelations of clergy sexual abuse, because of when the revelations came. not because of the abuse itself, but when the revelations came, they didn't contribute to the collapse. That was already well established. That was already well underway. In the United States, the flood of revelations of... older abuse really began right after the turn of the century in 2002. I think that's when the public at large...
Catholic and non-Catholic became aware of this. So again, the collapse of confession had already happened in a way. It had been happening for the previous 30 or 40 years. So the revelations of... abuse didn't contribute to the collapse. But I think what they had done is virtually guarantee that having collapsed, confession in that form won't be coming back. You know? Especially with regard to children, I think parents say, well, I don't know, I want to...
subject my children to the possibility that the priest hearing their confession might be an abuser. We know that some of the abusers, which is about 5% of the American Catholic clergy, according to most studies in the second half of the century. Most priests were not abusers, but we know that those who were often used confession as a grooming device, identifying potential. victims, potential targets of their abuse. We know further that some abusers
used the act of confession itself as a time, as an occasion to commit the abuse. Ironically, that became possible. with what had earlier seemed a reform of the practice of confession, namely that a person could go to confession face to face with the priest if they wanted. The idea here was, well, this will be more like a normal conversation. with a trusted friend, or even a conversation with a psychologist. And it was good to offer people that possibility.
abusers found they could use that to actually engage in the abuse as a part of confession. There's no longer necessarily a barrier between the... priest and the penitent and touching and abuse could flow from it. So I think, as I say, the impact of the abuse, it seems to me, is that it means, you know, just... urging people to come back to the sacrament is not working and probably won't. How that will all play out in the future, we'll see. But again, it seems to me that...
Just encouraging people to forget all that and come back to confession is not an effective strategy. Definitely not. But we'll see kind of what happens from that. These are questions for the future that, you know, historians can't answer. Yeah, exactly. Given, of course, that you are a historian, and we are now very much in the realm of the future, what might you be working on now that this book is done?
Well, I've been interested in this topic for a long time. I was intrigued by, because of its very secrecy. I was intrigued by the possibility of, well, is it even going to be possible to research this subject? And I was happy to find lots of circumstantial evidence that permitted the sketching in of the themes that I've talked about. Confession is an oral process. It leaves no records in the normal course of events. So is it possible to do?
this at all. And I was happy to find that sources really are, sources unlikely, like the hours that Parrish has set aside for hearing confessions, for example, that we could learn something from that. I have thought over time that it might be possible to look at some of the other Catholic sacraments in this same sort of way. What did people think baptism was about? What practices were there of American Catholics with regard to baptizing their children?
In the 19th and early 20th century, children are baptized almost immediately after birth, usually in the early years without the mother being present. The father or the godparents would whisk the child off to the... church to be baptized, sometimes the very same day. Obviously, concerns about infant mortality and so on were involved in something like that. So I have thought that one could look at these other central religious practices of American Catholics.
in this same kind of way. I don't have any specific plans at the moment, but if I were to go forward, it might be to explore that kind of thing. And if I don't do it, I hope some other historian will. Yes, there's always interesting things to look at. So best of luck with whichever direction you choose to go in. And of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled For I Have Sinned, The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America, published by Harvard.
university press in 2025 jim thank you so much for speaking with me on the podcast thanks miranda it's been a pleasure