Writer Andrew Santella, in a column slyly titled "The Sin Box," wants to know where all the sinners have gone. Why aren’t they lining up outside the confessional the way they did years ago, especially in a tell-all day-and-age when some people tell their sins to anyone who will listen.
"A generation ago, you’d see a lot of us lined up inside Catholic churches on Saturday afternoons, waiting to take our turn in one of the confessionals. We’d recite the familiar phrases (‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned’), list our transgressions and the number of times we’d committed them, maybe endure a priestly lecture, and emerge to recite a few Hail Marys as an act of penance. … Yet in most parishes, the lines for the confessionals have pretty much disappeared. Confession — or the sacrament of reconciliation, as it’s officially known — has become the one sacrament casual Catholics feel free to skip. We’ll get married in church, we’ll be buried from church, and we’ll take Communion at Mass. But regularly confessing one’s sins to God and the parish priest seems to be a part of fewer and fewer Catholic lives. Where have all the sinners gone?
[…]
"[I]t’s strange that so many lay Catholics should have abandoned the confessional even while secular culture is increasingly awash in confession, apology, and acts of contrition of every sort. Parents own up to pedophilia on Jerry Springer. Authors reveal their fetishes and infidelities in self-lacerating memoirs. On Web sites like Daily Confession and Not Proud, the anonymous poster can unburden his conscience electronically. The confessions on these sites are displayed in categories borrowed from Sunday school lessons: the Ten Commandments or the seven deadly sins. At least one posting I read was framed in the language of the Catholic confessional. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ it began before going on to catalog a series of mostly mundane misdeeds. (Others are simply odd: ‘I eat ants but only the little red ones. They’re sweet as hell and I just can’t get enough.’)"
(Nod to the reader who sent the link.)
The article is filled with confusions (e.g., "Dying with unconfessed mortal sin on your soul meant eternal torment"; uhm, no, that’s an unrepented mortal sin) and "witty" asides (e.g., "I know one [Catholic woman] who says she’ll go back to confession when she can confide in a female priest"), but the question asked is a serious one: Where have all the sinners gone?
They’re still around, of course, but as G. K. Chesterton once pointed out, they’ve traded the confessional for the psychoanalyst’s couch — or the talk show diva’s couch — and now have a form of "confession" far less satisfying and infinitely less healing. That’s because "the sin box" does not have as its purpose to wallow in sin but to dispense grace.
There’s the opposite problem too… availability of the “box”/chapel/what have you.
Our parish moved reconciliation from Saturday afternoon to Saturday morning and with two little ones the morning option doesn’t always work for our family. But we were up visiting my in-laws and their parish had reconciliation at 4pm. So I go, examine my conscience, head to the confessional and there’s no one there. No priest, no penitent, no nuttin’
I waited 15 minutes before I gave up… maybe I should have watied longer.
Of course, at my home parish I go to mass before reconciliation and once I make my way back to the reconciliation chapel there’s a line and it’ll be 30 minutes to an hour before I can get in there.
I just need to find a happy medium! 🙂
YBIC,
Derek
I agree with Derek. I think a lot of it has to do with the declining availability of priests. We have two in our parish, and one is essentially assigned to the Mexican population. So Reconciliation is only available on Saturdays at 4:00, and it is *never, ever* mentioned in the homily. The latter point is the big one, I think: our priests are not encouraging us to go to confession since they really don’t have the time, so we don’t go. It *should* be available, as it was when I was a kid, before every blessed Mass, but you really need two priests available at all times (one for confession, one for the Mass) for that to work, and probably four, so they could alternate better.
The local parish has four priests, granted two are retired, but still active enough to say Mass and be seen otherwise around the church and school. In other words, not infirmed. This parish has on average 500-700 people at each Mass, it is a huge church! And yet, confessions are offered once a week. Granted, the priest does not set an ending time and will stay as long as there are people in line. We have even been able to do a split shift confession where one of us gets there early to be first in line while the other stays at home with the babies. Then we swap. Only once has the second person arrived to find that Father had left. Whle I think they are certainly doing more than the parish that offers confessions once a week for 45 minutes only, I still think they could offer more. Why not twice a week for those who have commitments on Wednesday. Heck, with 4 priests, you could offer it 3 times a week and rotate it so that everyone gets a week off every month.
I heard a fantastic priest very dedicated to the sacrament of confession respond to a fellow priest’s complaints that nobody goes to confession like they used to by saying, “Priests just aren’t in the confessional like they used to be!” This padre offers confessions every day and during Lent spends over 30 hours a week in the confessional. Even when no one is confessing, he his praying and studying and earning graces for his parishioners!
P.S. This local parish would be considered by many in our diocese to be a fairly orthodox parish struggling within a previously liberal diocese. The priests are rock solid followers of Rome who had to tip toe around the liberal former bishop. We have new one now and we are expecting good things!
cw,
Your priest is indeed fantastic – very “Cure’ d’Ars” of him to be in the confessional, even though his parishoners aren’t.
My mother used to yell at the priest at her parish in New Smyrna Beach, FL, because she would go to the church for confession (from 4:00p to 4:45p, just before the Sat. vigil Mass), and she would get there around 4:15 or so and wait over a half hour until the priest finally arrived, just in time to change into his vestments for Mass. She often brought teenagers from the local community who hadn’t been to confession in months/years, and ended up yelling at the priest for daring to be frustrated that he couldn’t start Mass on time because he had to hear a few confessions.
Please pray for Fr. Bergen’s soul, for he passed away over a year ago. I can’t imagine the effect that an ambivalent shepherd has on sheep who are trying to return to the fold.
FWIW, our pastor talks about confession ALL THE TIME from the pulpit…. and the confession lines are around the block. He hears hours and hours of confessions every week, Saturday and Sunday.
I have been suspicious that priests do not encourage confession because they know they will be making more work for themselves.
Sad, if true.
I’ve had the same problem as Derek in my home parish – I go to Confession and there’s nobody there. Once I went over to the parish office to find out who was supposed to be on duty – nobody seemed to know, but the priest who happened to be there heard my confession in his office, so that was OK. Other times I’ve just left because there wasn’t time to go hunting for someone.
This doesn’t happen every time, but often enough to make Confession a crapshoot. Very frustrating.
We are lucky in our diocese to have confessions at many different times. I am a student now and at our Newman Center we have confessions every day two times a day for a half hour before Mass. We also have Sat and Sun. There are many times we have quite the line up. It is awesome thinking about so many college students taking part in this sacrement and yet we are praying for the return of many more.
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