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In this episode, Trent reviews a priest who can no longer offer confession because he supports breaking the confessional seal and shows how priests are like another profession that is sworn to secrecy.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist, Trent Horn. Last month, the Diocese of Wilmington and Delaware voiced opposition to a bill that would require Catholic priests to break the seal of the confessional if someone were to confess child abuse to a priest within the confessional. And just a few weeks later, the Diocese of Milwaukee sanctioned a priest for supporting a law like this. So I want to talk to you about this. There was a priest in Milwaukee, he lost his faculties to hear confessions. The bishop stripped him of those faculties after he published an editorial supporting a Minnesota law requiring priests to break the seal of the confessional. But I also want to give you some arguments you can use when people say priests are being given unfair special treatment when other people have to report the abuse of children.
And here’s how it was reported in an article in the Pillar. So, “Milwaukee priest loses confession faculties after confession column. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee announced Wednesday that a priest has lost the faculty to hear confessions validly after he published an op-ed supporting a bill that would remove legal protections for the confessional seal.” And this is him, Father James Connell, “Archbishop Jerome Listecki announced March 22nd that he had immediately removed the canonical faculties of Father James Connell to validly celebrate the sacrament to confession and to offer absolution here in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and thereby also in the Catholic Church around the world. Priests are required to have faculties from a diocesan bishop to validly hear confessions and confer sacramental absolution. Listecki’s withdrawal of Connell’s faculties renders the priest unable to hear confession in any cases, unless a particular penitent is in immediate danger of death.”
And this makes sense, why the bishop would remove his faculties, because he’s publicly demonstrated that he does not have a regard for the seal of the confessional being inviolable. He believes if you have a good reason to break it, then you should so he can’t be trusted with the sacrament anymore, except in a case of immediate danger of death for somebody, they’re on death’s doorstep, need to hear a confession, then there’s a reason then to allow it then. But otherwise, it’s a no-go. “Father Connell, age 80, is retired from active ministry in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee after a priestly career which included stints as both a diocesan curial official and a parish pastor. The priest, who is a canon lawyer, has been a longtime advocate for the victims of clerical sexual abuse. On March 12th, he published an op-ed in the Delaware News Journal which voiced support for a bill on the Delaware legislature that would strip legal protection from the confessional seal requiring priests to report knowledge or suspicion of child abuse and neglect, which they had gleaned from the confessional.”
So I guess maybe this wasn’t about a law in Minnesota, but he supported the law in Delaware, which shows his stance towards the seal of the confession. Here’s what he wrote in the op-ed. He said, “No institution in our society, not even a recognized religion, has a significant advantage over government’s compelling interest and responsibility to protect its children from harm by abuse or neglect. Thus, no valid freedom of religion argument rooted in the absence of truth can provide a moral justification for sheltering perpetrators of abuse or neglect of children from their deserved punishment, while also endangering potential victims,” what he wrote. So you have freedom of religion, but we can override it when we deem fit. “Government should intervene such that while perhaps frustrating the free exercise of religion for some people, the greater good of protecting children from abuse and neglect would be enhanced for the common good of all people.”
Except as I’ll show here soon, most people would agree that there are some things that could promote the greater good that we still should not do. Identifying himself as a priest, Connell urged that all people in Delaware should support HB 74 that would repeal the Delaware clergy penitent privilege statute. For most Catholics, this issue is pretty cut and dry. It’s summarized in the code of canon law. It says the sacramental seal is inviolable, therefore, it is absolutely forbidden for a confessor to betray in any way a penitent in words or in any manner and for any reason, Canon Law 983.1. Catholics like Father Connell should know better, but many of them operate with secular assumptions about the role of religion. So in this episode, I want to give you a secular argument to show that exempting priests from mandatory reporting laws, only if dealing with the sacrament of confession by the way, that it’s not unreasonable.
We can expect priests, of course, to report things that they hear in ordinary aspects of their ministry or when people talk to them outside of the confessional. But there is a secular argument that can be made that in this specific case of the confessional itself, priests should not be required to report what is said to them there. Before I do that though, I want to point out that this kind of law, it seems that its main purpose is to target Catholics instead of being something that will noticeably reduce child abuse. I mean, what is a priest supposed to do if someone comes into the confessional anonymously and confesses that they abused a child? Is he going to jump out of the confessional in front of the crowd of people waiting for their turn, take the guy’s picture, send it to the police, chase him down into the parking lot? What is he supposed to do?
So just at first blush, this seems more like virtue signaling than doing something productive to help children. I also want to share with you an article from the Homiletic & Pastoral Review from 2021. It’s by Father Matthew Schneider. I’ve had him on the show before. He’s a good moral theologian, very insightful. And the article is called Deferring Absolution in Clerical Abuse Cases. And so it deals a lot with the topic of what does a priest do if someone comes into the confessional and has confessed to the sin of abusing someone, whether it’s an adult or a child. And so Father Schneider is very concerned about the objection that confession can be a means to assuage someone’s conscience so they just keep going to confession when they feel bad about abusing someone, and it perpetuates a cycle of abuse.
And so Father Schneider in this article, citing Aquinas and other sources, says that in order to be absolved of the sin of something like abuse, you have to be contrite, you have to be truly sorry. And in order to be truly sorry, and the priest has to have a sense to know that you’re truly sorry, that you’re contrite, you have to demonstrate that you never want to commit the sin again, that you have made a firm resolution to not commit this sin again. He writes, “Several things are within a professor’s purview to try to get the penitent to reform. First, he can suggest turning oneself in, attending therapy, or being part of a support group. If the penitent rejects these, it is important to ask why as a rejection may indicate a lack of purpose of amendment and thus a time to defer absolution.” He does go on to say that the seal confession says that you can’t require for absolution, that a person publicly reveal their sin but this can be a helpful way to see if a person is truly contrite, that if they’re expressing contrition.
And he goes on to talk about how if an abuser targets a certain type of person, the confessor can ask him to change those circumstances. He puts forward a lot of points to show that a priest who hears abuse as a sin within the seal of the confessional can do things to show the person is contrite and to encourage them to stop abusing in the future and to definitely make sure that if they are contrite, they’re truly sorrowful, then they will make affirm amends to never do this again. But beyond that, let’s take a look at the argument being made and one response to it that I consider to be helpful. The argument among non-Catholics against the seal of the confessional, it usually goes something like this.
They’ll say, “Sure, communication between a priest and a penitent is privileged, but so is communication between a doctor and a patient. But in most states, the law mandates that doctors report any suspicion of child abuse. And this also applies to other professionals like teachers, therapists, and law enforcement. Why should priests be treated differently than everyone else just because of their religious profession?” That would be the argument I think a secular person would make, or a Catholic who has a secular mindset. And now it’s certainly true that we should act in any reasonable way to protect children from child abuse. But I can think of many things the government should not do, even if it could reduce incidents of child abuse. For example, the government should not secretly make audio recordings in our homes, even if that could reduce child abuse because that act does not justify losing the good of our privacy and many other evils that could come from that.
Government could do even more things to help prevent child abuse. It could take away an accused person’s right to face their accuser. It could remove the restrictions on double jeopardy, conduct searches without a warrant. You could do anything but saying that people should have these liberties and these rights does not mean that you are pro child abuse. It just means that you believe that society requires the protection of fundamental rights. And these should not be taken away, even for the good goal of preventing something like child abuse. Even if doctors and teachers are required to report child abuse, there may be some groups who should not be required to report it because the harms of requiring them to report abuse would be too great and certain fundamental rights would be violated. And in fact, there is one group this would apply to besides priests that shows this isn’t an arbitrary distinction on priests, that it’s not unheard of.
That would be defense attorneys. As far as I know, no state law requires a defense attorney to report suspected child abuse if he learns about such abuse from his client. Of the nearly 50 kinds of people required to report suspected abuse in California, for example, none of them are defense attorneys. One 2006 article from the New Mexico Law Review even says that this kind of mandatory reporting would hurt domestic violence victims. Of course, an attorney is free to not work with a client that he suspects may have abused a child, but he can’t divulge what the client told him about this past crime to anyone else. This is part of a confidentiality privilege that’s existed for a long time in the law called attorney-client privilege.
According to scholar Jeffrey C. Hazard, he says, “The attorney-client privilege may well be the pivotal element of the modern American lawyer’s professional functions. It is considered indispensable to the lawyer’s function as advocate on the theory that the advocate can adequately prepare a case only if the client is free to disclose everything, bad as well as good. The privilege is also considered necessary to the lawyer’s function as confidential counselor in law on the similar theory that the legal counselor can properly advise the client what to do only if the client is free to make full disclosure.” Now, there are exceptions to attorney-client privilege. One exception includes communication that involves both the client and the attorney planning to commit a crime together, like if they had plans to destroy evidence to cover up a past crime. Another exception would be if the client tells his attorney he plans to commit a future crime that will cause serious harm. In that case, the attorney must then report the threats of the future crime to the authorities.
But in general, communication about a past crime to an attorney is privileged and it must remain confidential. But why? Isn’t reporting child abuse more important than helping criminals and their sleazy defense attorneys? Stopping abuse is important, but it’s not worth overturning one of the fundamental components of our justice system. It’s not worth losing the role of an advocate who will provide someone accused of a crime, be he guilty or innocent, the best possible defense in a court of law. So how does this relate to priests being forced to reveal what they learned in the sacrament of confession? Well, just as forcing defense attorneys to report suspected child abuse would’ve a chilling effect, it would discourage those accused of abuse, including innocent people, it would discourage them from seeking legal counsel to help them stay out of jail, forcing priests to report suspected child abuse that they learn about in the confessional would also have a chilling effect.
They would discourage those who have committed these crimes from seeking absolution that can help them stay out of hell. It is vitally important to stop child abuse, it is a grave evil, but we can’t accomplish that goal through the deprivation of our fundamental rights. Just as I said earlier, we wouldn’t want government surveillance in all of our homes even if it prevented an evil like child abuse. For Catholics, this includes the fundamental right to see a priest and through him have God forgive us of our sins. And while the seal of confession is inviolable in a way that attorney-client privilege is not, the seal has no exceptions whatsoever, attorney-client privilege does have exceptions, will this make sense? Because the stakes are infinitely higher. Confession exists so that anyone, if he genuinely repents, can be forgiven of his sins no matter how grave they may be.
If the church is accused of hiding abusers because of this narrow confidentiality privilege, well, then we can say law firms are guilty of hiding abusers when they don’t turn in every client suspected of past abuse who confides to his attorney. As Catholics, we’re not asking for a sweeping exemption so that everything ever said to a priest is off the record. We’re just asking for a wall to separate the church and the state from one another. This wall would be made up of the dark enamel of the confessional that lets us make personal decisions between ourselves, our priests, and God without government interference. So let me be clear. As Catholics, we should not make excuses for the past misconduct in the church’s hierarchy. It is awful and terrible, and we should firmly say we support measures like safe environment and other protocols that have worked in the past 20 years to dramatically reduce incidents of sexual abuse.
And we should encourage other churches and sports and communal organizations to adopt these same protocols to protect children. And we should pray for priests who are under a constant source of temptation to fall from grace. But I hope that from what I’ve shared today, you can tell people that as a society, if we see that it’s good to grant secrecy with legal counsel so that a man can protect his freedom, then that same man should be granted secrecy with his religious counsel so that he can protect his very soul. It’s not a false dilemma. We can protect children and protect people’s souls. We don’t have to pick either/or. That’s why the law should not require priests to violate the seal of the confessional. And as I said before, practically speaking, it wouldn’t do very much good. It would simply inhibit our ability to practice our Catholic faith. So thank you guys very much. I hope this was helpful for all of you, and I hope that you have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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