Catholic Church Sees Attack on the Secrecy of Confession. Play With Political Fire, Bishops: Get Burned
Lawmakers in Washington state are directly attacking one of the central sacraments of the nation’s largest church. According to First Liberty, which represents Catholic leaders in that state:
The Catholic bishops of Washington state and a group of priests were in federal court [July 14] asking the court to block a new state law that forces priests to face jail time unless they break the sacred seal of confession. The law at issue in Etienne v. Ferguson, set to take effect on July 27, requires clergy to report abuse if shared within the sacred confines of the confessional. …
The Catholic Church already requires priests to report abuse and neglect to law enforcement and other state authorities. The only exception would be if the information is learned during the sacrament of confession. The new law singles out this specific privilege for religious activities but allows protections to remain in place in secular settings.
For hundreds of years, the Catholic Church has upheld the belief that confession is holy and must stay private. During the sacrament of confession, the priest acts as the mediator between God and the penitent, which requires complete confidentiality from the priest so people feel comfortable repenting their sins. This absolute secrecy is known as the seal of confession, which is so vital to the Catholic faith that any priest who violates it faces automatic excommunication. Over the centuries, priests have been imprisoned, tortured, and even killed for upholding the seal. Penitents today need the same assurance that their participation in a holy sacrament will remain free from government interference. …
“Washington wants to force Catholic priests into an impossible choice between betraying their ancient faith practices or facing jail time,” said Mark Rienzi, president and CEO of Becket. “In a free nation like ours, no one should have to make that choice. We’re hopeful the court will block this draconian law and protect the sacredness of confession.”
The Catholic bishops of Washington are absolutely in the right, morally and constitutionally. The secrecy which medical and psychiatric patients, along with believers of many traditions, have come to take for granted when confiding their intimate issues traces back to Catholic and Orthodox clergy insisting on absolute confidentiality for the last 1,500 years.
Human Rights Come from God, Not the State
In case you’re not from one of those traditions, this is how absolute the “seal of the Confessional” is meant to be: If a person in confession admits that he’s planning to kill the priest to whom he’s speaking, that priest may do or say nothing based on that information — not even to protect himself. What a sinner says in confession is meant to go into oblivion, since the priest doesn’t represent himself but stands in for Jesus Christ. There are priests we name as saints for dying rather than spilling the secrets (for instance) of queens whose husbands suspected them of adultery.
The high respect the West (uniquely) has for individual rights as inalienable, granted by God and not the state, emerged from this context: churches which held up sacraments as not subject to human law, and the sacred relationship between a pastor and a sinner as divinely guaranteed, whatever lawmakers might claim.
But If Man’s Just a Precocious Primate …
Of course, as the Christian worldview gives way to a post-Darwinian picture of man as just another primate — one whose brain grew too big for his own good — such sacred spaces and divine guarantees are under attack. If you view humanity as a collection of sad-sack mammals doomed to oblivion in 70 years or so, you might well see your mission as reducing human suffering by any means necessary. Then you’ll listen to elites about how to accomplish that, and ride roughshod with them over “antiquated” notions of human dignity, the sanctity of life, or religious liberty.
That’s why 4% of Canadians now die via euthanasia. It’s why 100% of babies diagnosed with Down Syndrome in Iceland get aborted. It’s also why states like California now threaten Christian therapists with legal penalties for counseling patients who don’t like their own same-sex attraction or want to recover from gender dysphoria (rather than carving up their bodies). And it’s why Washington state legislators feel they can get away with reaching their dirty fingers into the most intimate, sacred spaces. In their estimation, there’s nothing sacred, nothing holy, except the latest moral panic whipped by our elites — such as the “right” to demand we affirm transgender people’s dysphoria.
Catholic Bishops Have Brought This Upon Themselves … and Upon Us
The Catholic bishops of Washington ought to win this case in a slam-dunk. But I must say there are other reasons, beyond the grim godlessness that pervades our ruling classes, why the church is under attack. To some degree, the Catholic bishops of the U.S. have brought such attacks upon themselves.
In 1950, no state in the Union — not even in the Deep South, where anti-Catholicism was strongest — would have considered meddling with sacraments. What changed?
Too many church leaders abused their sacred status and prostituted their authority out of naked self-interest and the hunger for power. Let’s consider self-interest first. The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic church was never fully resolved. Bishops who covered up abuse, callously reassigned abusers, and squeezed nondisclosure agreements out of victims and their parents have never been punished. When their dioceses went bankrupt thanks to righteous litigation, no bishops missed any meals. Only one or two even lost their jobs — and went on to comfortable retirements, like the ones Cardinal Bernard Law and credibly accused child molester Theodore McCarrick enjoyed.
Here’s the worst case, and the one most directly relevant to what’s happening in Washington. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, former Archbishop of Los Angeles, was one of the worst culprits in covering up and indirectly enabling sex abuse in the church. Barraged with lawsuits over priests whom he or his staff knew to be abusers, who weren’t removed and reported but reassigned, Mahony cynically abused the concept of priestly confidentiality — trying to extend it to cover not just the contents of sacramental confessions, but the files and records held by seminaries recording sexual misconduct. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 2004:
To keep the files secret, Mahony’s legal team is pushing a novel argument in both criminal and civil courts — a claim of what his chief lawyer, J. Michael Hennigan, has called a “formation privilege” between a bishop and his priests.
The archdiocese asserts that the privilege stems from a bishop’s ecclesiastical duty to provide a lifetime of formative spiritual guidance to his priests. As claimed by the archdiocese, the privilege would require that sensitive communication between a bishop and his priests involving counseling — including documents relating to sexual abuse of minors — be kept confidential.
Any action by the state to breach that privilege would violate both state law, which shields communications between a priest and a penitent, and the state and federal constitutions’ guarantee of religious freedom, the archdiocese’s lawyers argue.
“I cannot and will not jeopardize those privileged communications,” the cardinal wrote in a Feb. 28 letter to Los Angeles priests and other church leaders. The files could include items such as notes by the cardinal or church investigators on their conversations with victims, witnesses and accused priests; psychological evaluations of alleged abusers ordered by the church; letters about priests’ conduct; and assessments by supervisors.
Using the privilege claim, Mahony’s lawyers have effectively employed the secrecy of grand jury proceedings as a shield against public disclosure, not only of the disputed files, but of the church’s legal arguments as well.
Some church lay leaders and canon law experts — as well as victims’ advocates and prosecutors — have expressed reservations and, in some cases, outrage about the cardinal’s stance.
Marci Hamilton, a law professor and church-state scholar who has advised lawyers suing the archdiocese, summed up her description of the formation privilege this way: “It just doesn’t exist.”
Dragging the Church into Immigration Politics
Mahony wasn’t just the public face of sex abuse cover-up; he was also a local powerbroker, commanding vast crowds of supporters at public rallies denouncing any effort to control illegal immigration. The Stream has reported before how U.S. bishops collected some $3 billion in 15 years from the federal government by “resettling” immigrants (many illegal). We are barraged every week with reports of bishops intervening directly to frustrate law enforcement trying to repatriate illegals — abusing their religious authority to help foreigners flout our just, democratically passed laws.
None of this flows from the Gospel, or even the particular teachings of the Catholic Church, whose Catechism specifically allows governments to control immigration and demands that migrants obey local laws. It flows from the bishops’ hunger for federal money, their panic over losing 40% of native-born Catholics to apostasy, and their hunger for political power and relevance.
If you play with fire, you might get burned.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.