EMPTY CONFESSIONALS: Do I know this guy?
Donnelly, Daria
When I was twelve, a priest assigned me 300 Hail Marys and 300 Our Fathers for reciting the new Act of Contrition. He didn't like it. My mother reduced the sentence to 3, reasoning that I must...
...The documents issuing from Rome and diocesan offices come across as totally abstract and divorced from real life...
...Vail, Colo...
...Is it for good or ill that individual confession, in its very structure, tells me I cannot escape myself, my tendency to self-invention and self-forgiving...
...E. BRIAN CARSTEN Angola, Ind...
...Most of them have long ago put aside church teaching on birth control...
...Both of these Commonweal articles are priceless and full of wisdom from men who have actually "been there and done that...
...Can sacramental confession accommodate that cultural shift...
...The experience at twelve left me not just with a good story but with an abiding anxiety about the confessor's ability to divorce his prejudices from his judgments...
...Each time we gather at the Lord's table, I see in his eyes, lo these many years later, the struggling wisdom that is so evident in Johnson's words...
...As an adult, trimming has taken the form of omissions that stem from a genuine reticence before the priest, especially in his male identity...
...As a child I always ended my litany of sins with "I lied...
...It certainly discomforts...
...No red hat Luke Timothy Johnson's incisive critique of John Paul II's pronouncements on love, sex, and pleasure should be studied and openly discussed in every Catholi college and Newman Club in the nation—together with Paul Baumann's humorous reflections on George Weigel's biography of our pope ("Crossing the Threshold," December 3, 1999...
...That covered any confessional hyperbole resulting from my desire to be an appropriately scrupulous penitent...
...I remain, many years later, a wary and ambivalent penitent...
...I also admit my tendency to omission stems from unease about how a priesf s personal allegiances might color his function as a penance designer...
...The writer is Metropolitan Archbishop of the Orthodox Catholic Church of America...
...MOST REV...
...One thing I am often doing is trimming...
...Have they ever had any firsthand, practical experience with marriage...
...Still, despite their intense, self-effacing work, their humanity looms large in the mind of the penitent...
...incorporate it...
...Is anybody listening to them...
...Should it...
...Rather, what daunts me is the socially and spiritually unique experience of addressing God in the presence of a single witness (an instrument of God's mercy, true, but also a human being...
...Of course, both will be decried by those who believe Catholics should all walk in lock step with any current papal teaching, especially in matters of sexual ethics...
...Increasingly, people are accustomed to confessing to people to whom they are bound by affection...
...daria donnelly 13 (Continued from page 4) Lived wisdom Luke Timothy Johnson's persuasive article on John Paul II's theology of the body is perhaps the finest article of its kind I have read in forty years...
...My mother reduced the sentence to 3, reasoning that I must have misheard, and in any case God knew that I had made a proper Act...
...But, alas, people like him who try to introduce fresh ways of looking at such questions, while preserving the deep values of our faith, often find the welcome mat snatched out from under 23 them...
...This latter, partly the result of the rise of therapy and the women's movement, naturally means that fewer people feel the pressure to tell which swelled nineteenthand early-twentieth-century confessionals...
...How long can we afford to lose this critically important segment of the Catholic church in favor of a moral theology of sexuality that appears so rigid and static...
...One wonders in what spatial reality their authors live...
...Rather, it is about the church learning from the lived wisdom of her members and having the courage to (here is that word...
...I must admit, sadly, that in my thirty-six years as a priest, most married persons—and those to be married—with whom I have spoken feel that the church doesn't really address the complex problems couples face today...
...Take the very opening, the old formulaic "Bless me, Father...
...I don't find dredging up sin, or even the speed of oldstyle confession, particularly humiliating...
...No one could feel constrained pouring out one's failings in silence to God...
...Oh well...
...Indeed, despite any Catholic's wish, there seems to be more likeness between confession and the weirder expressions of our candid culture (such as the talk shows to which James O'Toole refers), than there is between confession and the candor that animates friendship and marriage...
...But the confessional situation is not just uncomfortable...
...It's exciting to read something like Johnson's refreshing insights...
...GEORGE R. FITZGERALD, C.S.P...
...Maybe that's why there is such massive apostacy among young people of marrying age, as well as so many who are married...
...Feminist resentment, which I swear I don't experience in any other sacramental context, bristles: Is God being invoked to shore up the institutional structure...
...REV...
...The entire issue of human sexuality and the gospel tradition is, it seems to me, not so much a matter of church versus individual conscience...
...To which Father am I talking...
...In my congregation there is a man who left his position as an active priest in the wake of Paul VI's Humanae vitae...
...It is also confusing and even galling...
...So too there is freedom from self-consciousness and self-invention in communal reconciliation services, where we forge the I-Thou relationship with God and also collectively craft an image of a repentant Catholic community...
...I think this reaction is fairly common among women my age...
...But what are we doing when we address God in the presence of a priest alone...
...On different planets Luke Timothy Johnson's critique of Pope John Paul II's reflections on sexuality was the most theologically cogent and pastorally persuasive commentary I've read in years about Catholic sexual teaching...
...I frankly admire the serious labor that priests devote to realizing their role as mediators in confession...
...the oddity now is testifying to a relative stranger...
...24...
...To be sure, Luke Timothy Johnson will not be joining Avery Dulles at the next consistory...
...ANDREW GALLIGAN Tracy, Calif...
Vol. 128 • February 2001 • No. 4
