The Rise and Fall of Confession—and What It Reveals

One of the more interesting books to appear last year was James M. O’Toole’s For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America. It traces the development and diminishment of the sacrament of penance in the Catholic Church, expressed in the act of regular confession and embodied in confessional booths inside many church buildings. The book provides a fascinating look at what became one of the most identifiably Catholic practices in America in the middle of the last century, and then the freefall that followed—such a stunning numerical decline that it makes the cultural ethos of confession’s heyday seem like news from a foreign land.

O’Toole offers a few explanations for this precipitous decline, and contrary to the expectations of readers, he does not pinpoint the problem on the sexual abuse revelations of the early 2000s. (Those were just the final nails in the coffin.) The collapse began much earlier, due more to a loss of confidence in the church’s objective categories of sin and the embrace of therapeutic assumptions flowing from Freudian psychology, as well as the resistance of Catholic congregants to official Church teaching on contraception.

>In a review for First Things, John Wilson, a Protestant, notes a similar trend among evangelicals—not in terms of Catholic penitential rites, but in a shifting view of sin, as all Americans now live in a world marked by what Philip Rieff deemed “the triumph of the therapeutic.” We no longer conceive of sin and righteousness in the older categories of obligation and duty (so that “talking in church” or “being late to prayer meeting” would even register as sins to confess); we’re more inclined to think of sin in subjective categories based on whatever harms or detracts from our personal spirituality. Because that subjectivity is so pervasive, Ross Douthat believes the Catholic rite has a future. Young people “may not have a rite like confession integrated into their lives in the routinized weekly or monthly pattern that once prevailed in American Catholicism, but they don’t regard such things as obsolete or unimportant, and they want sacramental possibilities to be there when they really need them.”

(As a side note, I’d love to see more books that track the rise and fall of specific spiritual practices in various denominations. For example, in the last quarter of the last century, most Baptist churches held Sunday night worship services, often in between other kinds of training events and fellowships. These services were replaced by Sunday night “activities,” and what followed as a gradual drop-off of Sunday night participation altogether. I’d love to see how and why these changes took place, and how potlucks and training meetings and worship services reinforced and shaped ecclesial identity. But that’s for another day. Back to confession…)

When Penance Becomes Punishment

A couple of elements jumped out at me when reading O’Toole’s account, both heightened by my classically Protestant—particularly Neo-Calvinist—understanding of sin. To be clear: the Protestant Reformers did not uniformly oppose private confession. Confessing sins to a pastor could be valuable for the sake of assurance. But the Reformation framework stands in contrast with how the Roman Catholic practice developed and functioned in the 20th-century.

First, the one-to-one relationship between individual sins and acts of penance rests on the logic of making restitution after an infraction. To make things right, the penitent must submit to something “contrary to his own ease and pleasure to compensate for satisfying his own ease and pleasure” in violating God’s laws. For example, O’Toole writes, “the obligation to abstain from meat on Friday was a requirement, and so telling a sinner not to eat meat on an additional day of the week would be a proper penance for any confessed mortal sin.” Another example: if you sinned gravely in some way, you must attend Mass on a day in addition to Sunday.

This mindset reaches back to the medieval era that brought about precise sentences (often called “tariffs”), based on the idea of a heavenly “treasury of merit.” In debt and in need of forgiveness, the sinner could borrow merit from Jesus or Mary or the saints, by following instructions to reduce time in purgatory and have the slate wiped clean. At the height of confession in 20th-century America, these penitential requirements had been largely reduced to prayers (Hail Mary’s, the Lord’s Prayer, the Rosary), seen as “a good medicine for any moral evil.” O’Toole writes:

For the normal run of sins, priests assigned a simple penance that was easy for most parishioners to accomplish. In a matter of a few minutes, they could say the required prayers either at the church’s altar rail or in any unoccupied pew, and then they would be ready to leave for home or the day’s other occupations.

What strikes me about these penitential prescriptions, despite the well-intentioned medicine analogy, is how they cast prayer or church attendance as punishment—or at least something unpleasant that must be endured in order to make restitution for one’s sins. I find this counterproductive. Prayer may be medicinal, but it should not taste like cough syrup. Communion with God and fellowship with his people are meant to be enjoyed and savored; they are not merely external rites we must undergo if we want to be free of guilt.

Mark Galli, an evangelical convert to Catholicism, has not made peace with this aspect of confession even now. He writes:

In my experience, I’ve not been impressed with priests’ attention to the value of penance. Especially after I confess something that I find deeply shameful… I’ve been told to pray a handful of Hail Marys (not even the complete Rosary, as if I couldn’t bear such a penance) or to read a Psalm. I’m sorry to say that this does not cut it if one is interested in growing in Christ. If I have any criticism of contemporary Catholicism as I’ve experienced it, it’s that it believes too casually in the grace of God.

Galli locates the problem in a faulty view of grace. But that leads me to what I think is the deeper issue: a superficial grasp of sin.

Not Just Sins, but Sin

The confessional practices of last century, with acts of restitution corresponding to acts of sin, sought to increase a believer’s sensitivity to sin with a corresponding impulse to confess. But the result can be, ironically, a diminishment of sin’s seriousness and pervasiveness.

This problem isn’t confined to Catholicism. I remember a fierce disagreement I once had with a pastor at a pizzeria in northwestern Romania when he told me there were whole days he went without sinning. I was incredulous. We do not know ourselves well enough to uncover our deepest motivations, which are shot through with selfishness or self-righteousness even when prompting ostensibly good deeds. King David, the man after God’s heart, pleaded for deliverance even from secret and hidden sins—the wrongdoing he may have been unaware of. To my pastor-friend, who was sure he could go days without sinning in thought, word, and deed, I responded simply: you do not know yourself.

The crux of the Reformation lies in the first of Luther’s 95 Theses, where the Reformer declares Christ’s call for all of life to be marked by repentance. The flipside of that vision is the recognition that all of life, apart from Christ, is marked by sin. The corruption runs deep. Which is why, even after conversion, Augustine acknowledges how the light of Christ reveals continual caverns of sin and temptation. “I will confess then what I know of myself, I will confess also what I know not of myself. And that because what I do know of myself, I know by Thy shining upon me; and what I know not of myself, so long know I not it, until my darkness be made as the noon-day in Thy countenance.”

The problem we face, even after conversion, is the lingering presence of sin—not just sins. Sin is far greater than a temporary lapse; it’s a chronic disease. It goes beyond a one-time mistake or occasional slip; it’s a pervasive condition that affects every aspect of our being, showing up in our thoughts, desires, and actions, and leading to brokenness and dysfunction in our relationships with God, others, and ourselves.

In his classic work on this subject, Cornelius Plantinga defines a sin as “any act—any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed—or its particular absence, that displeases God and deserves blame.” But immediately following that comes sin in general as “the disposition to commit sins,” which also displeases God and deserves blame. Sin as a power corrupts human thought, word, and deed.

So, when I confess, I’m confessing more than particular acts; I’m throwing myself on the mercy of God because of my disposition, the poison of sin that pervades my inner self. Daily repentance, then, means more than confessing my sins. It means confessing my sin. It goes deeper than accounting for sinful acts; it acknowledges my sinfulness.

Seeing sin in this light means our proclivities are impossible to fully define and our particular sins impossible to count. “Lord, if you kept an account of iniquities, Lord, who could stand?” the psalmist marvels (Psalm 130:3). Our iniquity runs deeper than we can tally. A higher view of God’s holiness and a deeper view of our sinfulness should lead us to see, with Paul, our wretchedness—wondering, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”—before exclaiming, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” as we fall on his mercy.

Beyond Sin Management

One of the perennial temptations for all Christians, Catholic or Protestant, is to foster and reinforce a life of sin-management. The result is an impoverished imagination and a superficial reckoning with sin, where our good deeds cancel out our bad deeds. Perhaps this is why, often when I speak with Catholic friends—and yes, too often when I speak with nominal Bible-Belt evangelicals—I find salvation described in terms of a heavenly spreadsheet where good deeds must outweigh the bad. The sin lists may vary, but the result is the same: sin reduced to outward actions—drinking or smoking or dancing or lusting—when what the gospel actually calls for is a life-altering repentance that trusts the word of the grace of God in Christ.

A life of repentance is far more encompassing than a life of penance. In The Gospel Way Catechism, Thomas West and I define repentance as “not merely regret over sin’s consequences or our failure to live up to our standards. Repentance is turning away from evil—seeing sin in light of God’s holiness and experiencing conviction in response to his kindness.”

The collapse of confession in Catholic America may seem like a story about Rome, but it reveals something true about us all. We are always looking for ways to manage our behaviors rather than to confess our condition. Whether it’s the previous generation’s one-to-one relationship of sin and penitence, or the current self-focused shrinking of sin to whatever diminishes our self-defined spirituality, we often settle for quick and easy remedies instead of the deeper work of repentance. We reach for techniques to avoid transformation.

But the gospel does not hand us a system for balancing moral accounts. Neither does it give us a stairstep to more satisfying personal spirituality. The gospel offers mercy for sinners who know they are bankrupt and who know their self-assessment is always tainted by self-deception. Unless we learn from well-intentioned but mistaken practices, both past and present, we will keep settling for penance instead of repentance, balancing the ledger instead of basking in grace.