It was a \u201cslack day\u201d in the confessional, with \u201conly 88\u201d parishioners receiving the sacrament of penance, a New York City priest recorded in his diary for 1899. <\/p>\n\n
Another day was even slower, when he heard a \u201cfew\u201d confessions \u2014 71 at one sitting. <\/p>\n\n
Several generations later, National Opinion Research Center surveys in 1965 and 1975 found that monthly confession among American Catholics fell from 38 to 17 percent during that interval, while those who never or almost never went rose from 18 to 38 percent. A decade later, noted historian James O\u2019Toole, a University of Notre Dame study found that 26 percent of active, \u201ccore Catholics\u201d never went to confession and another 35 percent went once a year. <\/p>\n\n
Today, a typical parish priest may hear a dozen confessions a week. <\/p>\n\n
\u201cCatholics just don\u2019t want to do this anymore,\u201d said O\u2019Toole, who teaches at Boston College. \u201cThey go to communion week after week and they simply don\u2019t go to confession. They no longer see a connection. \u2026 Some people think that everything would change if the priests got tough again and started talking about sin and confession and hell. The reality is more complex than that.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
This is Lent, when Catholics should be lining up to say their confessions before receiving Communion on Easter, which is April 15th. Even though this ancient tradition remains in effect, \u201cI have never heard a priest point out this duty in Mass, not even in the days before Holy Week,\u201d said O\u2019Toole. \u201cThis canonical standard \u2026 seems to have vanished.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
What happened? Writing in Commonweal, O\u2019Toole noted that some women don\u2019t want to confess to males. Many Catholics now prefer to discuss institutional and societal sins, rather than personal ones. Some believe the Vatican II reforms undercut the need for private confession. And who believes in hell, anyway? <\/p>\n\n
But while confession has faded, there has been a sharp rise among lay people in a practice called \u201cspiritual direction.\u201d For centuries, priests, monks and nuns have met regularly with individual spiritual directors to receive spiritual guidance. This can include confession, but now the emphasis is on advice and mentoring. <\/p>\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to talk about this without psychoanalyzing it a bit,\u201d said O\u2019Toole. \u201cThe key is that a spiritual director is supposed to help you, quote, \u2018work on the spiritual issues in your life,\u2019 unquote. There are elements of the patient-counselor relationship in this. This is what people are going in for, these days.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
Traditionally, spiritual directors have been monks and priests. In a convent, a sister would take spiritual direction from a mother abbess, then go to a priest to confess. Now, more nuns and lay people are assuming the role of spiritual directors and O\u2019Toole said the students enrolled in seminary programs teaching this skill are overwhelmingly female. For many, counseling from a layperson has replaced confession to a priest. <\/p>\n\n
Nevertheless, \u201cworking on your spiritual issues\u201d is not the same thing as \u201cconfessing your sins,\u201d said O\u2019Toole. Part of the problem is that, for generations, Catholics were expected to come to the confessional with lists of specific sins to confess as quickly and efficiently as possible. The emphasis was on the kinds of sins that could be counted on one\u2019s fingers. \u201cSin\u201d was a highly legal, technical concept. <\/p>\n\n
\u201cConfessing your sins meant saying, \u2018I was angry with my kids five times. I kicked the cat three times,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cToday, Catholics are telling their spiritual directors, \u2018I\u2019ve been angry and I don\u2019t know what\u2019s causing me to be so angry. Can you help?\u2019 \u2026 The bottom line is that sin \u2014 especially those embarrassing, specific sins \u2014 just don\u2019t come up very often in what most people call \u2018spiritual direction.\u2019 \u201d <\/p>\n\n
So repentance is out and sympathy is in. People want spiritual advice, rather than penance. Once, confession was one of the rites of life that separated Catholics from Protestants. Now everybody goes to counseling. <\/p>\n\n
\u201cPeople want help,\u201d said O\u2019Toole. \u201cBut what people are not doing is going to a priest and saying, \u2018I committed this sin and I know that I need to be forgiven.\u2019 That\u2019s not how they think, anymore. \u2026 At some point, American Catholics stopped seeing the world that way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was a \u201cslack day\u201d in the confessional, with \u201conly 88\u201d parishioners receiving the sacrament of penance, a New York City priest recorded in his diary for 1899. Another day was even slower, when he heard a \u201cfew\u201d confessions \u2014 71 at one sitting. Several generations later, National Opinion Research Center surveys in 1965 and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n