EMPTY CONFESSIONALS: Examination of conscience
Steinfels, Peter
Long before I became a Catholic, my Jesuit-educated husband, born into and faithful to the church, told me that if I ever entered it, I wouldn't be eligible for confession. He explained that...
...REV...
...He explained that I was scrupulous—I imagined that I had sinned when I had not—and that therefore pastoral counseling was the thing for me...
...One wonders in what spatial reality their authors live...
...The rejection has been even more drastic and far-reaching than O'Toole has space to suggest...
...I was confirmed then, too, and received Communion...
...Oh well...
...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...
...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...
...at worst, they too get caught in the tow of pop confessionalism and easy forgiveness, mainly of the self...
...Might not the church, building on certain precedents, retain the necessity of personal confession but, if so desired, allow it to be made not to a priest but another Christian, a spouse, friend, or adviser...
...24...
...Then, as James O'Toole writes, the system collapsed...
...E. BRIAN CARSTEN Angola, Ind...
...Even the penitential service at Mass, typically rushed and more reassuring than challenging, seldom escapes the cultural norm and threatens to be embarrassing on the rare occasions when it does...
...But nothing will revive the sacrament if we dismiss as simply superficial or misguided the intuitions that made Catholics shun it, or if we are unwilling to consider major modifications in the way it is celebrated...
...O'Toole is right to speak of a "gap...
...Though I'm much older and calmer than I was when my husband made his serious joke about pastoral counseling, part of the reason I haven't confessed is connected with his analysis...
...So do we simply accept the reduction of seven sacraments to six...
...There is little of genuine moral scrutiny, repentance, the opening of the heart to God's grace...
...The future of this sacrament, in short, depends on whether Catholics, from I'm-OK-you're-OK congregants in the pew to the authorities in Rome, are willing to undertake a real examination of conscience...
...Questions about the church's attitude toward the body and the indignities of sexual disclosures to a stranger claiming authority should not be exempt from that discussion...
...Is anybody listening to them...
...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...
...Numerous strands in that web have become for many Catholics utterly untenable, as unacceptable, even reprehensible, on moral grounds as belief in a seven-day creation is on scientific grounds...
...I haven't been...
...peter steinfels 14 (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...
...Still others, especially at the highest levels of church leadership, issue heartfelt and poignant appeals for a return to the sacrament, appeals that enjoy just enough success in pockets here and there to encourage a strategy of sheer repetition...
...Keep 13 For centuries, confession or penance (as it was alternatively called) was the linchpin of the Catholic sacramental economy...
...Vail, Colo...
...Others have put their hopes on changing the label, redesigning the furniture, inviting a bigger crowd, altering the mood, and, cautiously, the theology—all to the better, no doubt, but with only marginal effects on Catholics' stubborn indifference...
...Both of these Commonweal articles are priceless and full of wisdom from men who have actually "been there and done that...
...Priestly absolution would follow only on inquiring whether such a confession was properly understood and made, and ascertaining the penitenf s sorrow...
...That may be a weak example, meant only to raise the question whether the future of this sacrament depends on retaining a clerical power that is already lost in practice or on something more basic to the Christian life...
...Maybe that's why there is such massive apostacy among young people of marrying age, as well as so many who are married...
...It is true mat frequent confession was hardly ever the norm throughout church history...
...Abandoning the confessional was on no one's agenda at Vatican n. Catholics just voted with their feet...
...GEORGE R. FITZGERALD, C.S.P...
...MOST REV...
...That leaves confession...
...I'm a eucharistic minister), and I was married in a Catholic ceremony, so I've got four sacraments down...
...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...
...ANDREW GALLIGAN Tracy, Calif...
...For the almost thirty years of my marriage, I've been a Catholic fellow-traveler, but it was only this past Easter that I was baptized...
...Have they ever had any firsthand, practical experience with marriage...
...What collapsed, of course, was not simply a particular practice but a whole web of beliefs and attitudes—about sin, damnation, and hell, about fear, shame, guilt, and the ultimate ecclesiastical control exercised by the power of absolution...
...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...
...The documents issuing from Rome and diocesan offices come across as totally abstract and divorced from real life...
...sometimes I find it hard to separate the psychological from the spiritual...
...Their abstention was so swift, massive, and spontaneous that it apparently stunned most commentators into silence...
...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...
...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...
...I continue to receive Communion (and give it...
...Rather, it is about the church learning from the lived wisdom of her members and having the courage to (here is that word...
...Many aware of that history have been tempted to shrug off the recent boycott as simply one more mutation that will, somehow, turn out for the best...
...In my congregation there is a man who left his position as an active priest in the wake of Paul VI's Humanae vitae...
...incorporate it...
...I don't know what I'd say, exactly...
...At best, middleclass Catholics rely on a medicine chest of therapies to cope with inner scars, everyday conflicts, and chronic failings...
...indeed, the whole form and function of what is now called the sacrament of reconciliation underwent enormous changes over time...
...The debate over genera] absolution versus particular confession is a sideshow...
...It's exciting to read something like Johnson's refreshing insights...
...To be sure, Luke Timothy Johnson will not be joining Avery Dulles at the next consistory...
...The Eucharist might be exalted as a miraculous source of sanctifying grace but it was confession that got one over the threshold, so to speak—that could make the difference between eternal happiness or torture...
...Most of them have long ago put aside church teaching on birth control...
...Holy orders are out as far as I'm concerned, and so far I haven't needed the sacrament of the sick...
...The writer is Metropolitan Archbishop of the Orthodox Catholic Church of America...
...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...
Vol. 128 • February 2001 • No. 4
