Confessions
by:
Frederica Mathewes-Green
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Here is a review of two Roman Catholic books on the sacrament of
Confession, published in the current Books & Culture.
Does being a Christian mean always having to say you're sorry? When
outsiders look at the Roman Catholic rite of confession (now more often
termed "reconciliation"), they suspect it is driven by feelings of
masochistic self-hatred, and sustained by claims of sacerdotal magic.
Why should we have to spend this life groveling over sins, if Jesus
already paid for them on the Cross? Why should we speak sins out loud to
another person, when it could remain between us and the bedpost? And why
should we believe that a priest stands between us and God, forgiving or
retaining our debts as he chooses?
Two new books from Roman Catholic authors attempt to make the case for
regular sacramental confession. Scott Hahn, one of the best-known
contemporary evangelical converts to Catholicism, builds "Lord Have
Mercy: The Healing Power of Confession" (Doubleday) on a
foundation of Scripture and Tradition. It's a work of firm and orderly
persuasion, calling Catholics back to a sacrament that has become
astonishingly neglected. In my own Catholic girlhood, once every couple
of weeks was the norm; now, Hahn tells us, parishes of several thousand
worshippers offer only a half-hour of posted times a week. Even priests
themselves don't go to confession: "almost half of our priests avail
*themselves* of the sacrament only 'once or twice a year,' 'rarely,' or
'never.'"
Ann M. S. LeBlanc's book, on the other hand, is really not much more
than a booklet, at a mere 60 pages. It is saddled with an unwieldy
title: "Or Anytime by Appointment: How to Go to Confession When You
Don't Know How" (St. Anthony Messenger Press). The title is the
only unwieldy thing about it, however, because the prose is lively and
inviting, often funny, and on occasion quite beautiful.
LeBlanc has in mind a select audience: Catholics who want something more
personal than what is expected during that posted half-hour, and who
make an appointment with a priest for a private confession. She is
addressing Catholics who haven't done this before and "don't know how,"
and maybe aren't sure they want to.
She once put herself in that category. She recounts the following
conversation with her priest, Father John:
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"I'm not going to do it."
"You don't have to, A. M."
"No way I'm going to do it."
"You don't have to, A. M."
"No *!%*!& way I'm going to do it."
"No one can make you, A. M."
"It's not going to happen, so you can forget it!"
"Will you *listen* to yourself?"
A.M. does it, of course, and through the rest of the book speaks frankly
about what to expect. She doesn't lecture or shove, and her casual tone
makes the content go down easy. LeBlanc knows that many of her readers
had childhood experience with sacramental confession that inclines them
to run the other way. "Everyone has some version of 'The Priest Who Fell
Asleep,' 'The Priest Who Talked Real Loud,' 'How to Get the Priest Who
Gave Easy Penances'…Popular among boys is the 'The Time the Priest Got
Really Mad at Me.'"
As these children entered teen years, they tried to discover "How to Say
'Masturbation' without Really Saying It," and "[n]ew stories included
'The Priest Who Asked a Lot of Questions' and 'The Priest Who Asked a
*Real* Lot of Questions.'"
If this book were merely a collection of light-hearted passages it would
still useful, but LeBlanc does better than that. Immediately on the
heels of this passage comes, "[But] some [stories] were genuinely awful
memories of hurt and bewilderment. These were never recounted in detail
and didn't lend themselves to funny titles. These were the stories of
being shamed and berated in the confessional…[T]hese allusions came with
the spoken or unspoken message, 'That will never happen to me again.'"
It is this frankness about the pains encompassed by sin and sacrament
that makes LeBlanc such an excellent guide. Sin is not a list of broken
rules but "a heart condition," she says; when Jesus calls us to abandon
ourselves wholly to his service, counting up the times you yelled at
your kids "starts to seem like it might miss the point." In conversation
with a trusted priest you can explore patterns of selfishness, and gain
insight into ways to resist them. This is nothing like therapy, she
insists: "Nowhere in therapy do you step into the arms of God."
It is a sacrament because ultimately God is at work, not you. LeBlanc
lives in Maine, and likens it to the process of ice breaking up in
spring. After false starts and reverses, "[o]ne day we suddenly find the
river rushing heedlessly for the ocean, with huge gouts of slush and big
chunks of ice, dirty and packed with gravel underneath, full of sticks,
old fishing gear, and the ragged pelts and bones of small animals. We
didn't cause it, we didn't even know when it started, we just watched
and waited, knowing that it absolutely was going to happen. We turn, and
find the water coursing through the river, and through our hearts, wild,
unimpeded, and full of air."
Well, when you put it that way, it sounds pretty good. Her description
of this sacrament resonated with my own experience as an Orthodox
Christian; I go regularly to talk with my friend Fr. George, a heroic
and joyous man who decades ago endured torture in Romanian communist
prisons. Like LeBlanc, I am grateful to have such a wise and good
friend, and welcome his advice, and especially his prayers. The risky
act of speaking sins aloud, and being greeted with open forgiveness, has
an impact you can't get in dialogue with a bedpost. That's the healing
power of confession.
Scott Hahn's book is subtitled "The Healing Power of Confession," but it
focuses less on the experience of healing than on establishing the
Church's authority in sacramental confession. When Jesus breathed on the
apostles, "those first clergymen," they were explicitly given his power
to bind and loose sins, Hahn says. "He was establishing them as priests,
to administer a sacrament, but also as judges, to pronounce judgment
upon the actions of believers." The rabbis of Israel had similar
authority to exclude individuals from the life and worship of the
community, but Jesus now expands it. "No longer would the authorities
pass a sentence that was merely earthly. Since the Church shared the
power of God incarnate, her power would extend as far as the power of
God."
A situation with such anxiety-provoking potential requires clear rules.
"Sin is any action-any thought, word, deed, or omission-that offends
God, violates His law, or dishonors the order of creation." Further,
sins may be categorized as venial or mortal. Venial sins damage us
spiritually, but mortal sins kill us. Mortal sins meet "three
conditions: grave matter, full knowledge, and deliberate consent." It is
not necessary to confess venial sins, but mortal sins must be confessed
or the person will be eternally lost.
How do you know if you confessed correctly? There are three conditions.
First, you must be sorry for your sins, a state called "contrition." If
sorrow is mixed with lesser emotions, such as fear or shame, it is
called "attrition." "It will suffice for a valid confession, though we
should always strive for a more perfect penance."
Secondly, you must confess them aloud to a priest. "[C]learly state the
types of mortal sin we've committed and the number of times we've
committed them. If we hold back, we have not made a valid confession."
Deliberately withholding a mortal sin is a mortal sin.
Already we seem to be in a different universe than LeBlanc's, where the
interior work of sacramental healing is displaced by a description of
external actions, qualifications, and concerns about technical validity.
But it is the third requirement that will trouble Protestants most: you
must "complete the work of penance or restitution."
Hahn finds a biblical foreshadowing of this in Old Testament sacrifices:
the sinner was required to personally offer God something costly and
difficult in satisfaction for his sins. While our offenses against God
are so great that we could never actually pay for them-Hahn says it's
like the difference between punching your neighbor and punching the
president--we are obligated to offer whatever sacrifice we can.
This is not the only way Hahn presents confession; he also speaks of it
as healing and reconciliation, and devotes a chapter to the parable of
the Prodigal Son. Yet he does not address the difference between Jesus'
parable and the Catholic approach. The forgiving father didn't demand
restitution from the erring son; he just welcomed him home. The father
didn't stand on his status as a wealthy landowner; he didn't behave as
if the son had punched the president rather than a mere neighbor. He
just embraced him.
Hahn argues that God cannot do this. Our offense is so gross, and God's
dignity so immense, that the debt must be paid and not merely forgiven.
To the objection that "Jesus paid it all" Hahn responds that Christ was
our "legal representative" in the Atonement, but could not be our "penal
substitute." "Economically, the substitutionary theory works; but in
criminal law, it does not. For an innocent man to be punished in our
place would itself be a kind of injustice."
Hahn knits together four aspects of the atonement-economic, military,
liturgical, and legal-under one heading, that of covenant. Only from the
perspective of covenant, he says, can we understand the full mystery of
reconciliation.
This choice of covenant analogy distills for me the point where Hahn's
presentation fails. It is so relentlessly *external*. A covenant is what
enables everyone to get along peaceably, without meddling or
disturbance. It is concerned only with outward acts, and calls for only
external self-control. In this view sins are separate and discrete
actions, caused by fleshly hungers, and the cure is to set the mind in
firmer control of the body.
The Gospel reality is more intimate and challenging than mere orderly
covenant, however. If "the kingdom of God is within you," if we are in
Christ and he in us, we are more than good neighbors. If sins come "out
of the treasure of the heart," then merely correcting external actions
isn't enough. We can't trust the mind to rule the body; fallen human
reason can drive sin as readily as the body does. Thoughts are
frequently the door to actions; there's a reason "rational" and
"rationalize" have the same root.
As a Catholic girl I had a Sunday School book that showed the soul
before and after confession. Before confession it looked like a milk
bottle blotchy with mold; after confession it was sparkling clean. If
confession is just a matter of getting the debt zeroed out, getting
square with the covenant community, that makes sense. But what if it is
a "heart condition" as LeBlanc says? Then it will be a lifelong process
of healing, in which continual gratitude for forgiveness spurs us to be
ever more honest about the ways in which we need it. We recognize our
sins long after God does, and long after the Cross made possible their
forgiveness. Yet we don't get free of their tyranny until we name and
reject them, often fumbling and falling but continuing to try.
This is a subtle distinction, between taking on self-disciplines to grow
in strength to resist future sins, and performing acts of self-denial in
order to contribute payment toward past ones. It is the difference
between LeBlanc's and Hahn's books, and I believe that Hahn more
accurately reflects classic Catholic theology. Again, he does not omit
consideration of sin as sickness, but it is overshadowed by the view of
sin as infraction, and the two views are not well integrated.
In reading this book I was regularly surprised by unexpected depths.
Hahn is wiser than he seems because he strives to write at a simple and
popular level. For example, the book opens with the story of how he, as
a young teen in Pittsburgh, stole records from a store. He was caught
and made up a story about being coerced by older boys to steal and then
drop the records by a stump in the woods. Scott got away with it, but
his success at deceiving his dad made him miserable.
In commenting on this, Hahn makes the valuable point that when we tell
ourselves self-excusing stories, we cut ourselves dangerously loose from
reality. "We begin to lose the narrative thread of our lives. Things no
longer make sense to us. Relationships grow cold. We lose our sense of
purpose and sense of ourselves." We all do this all the time, and it
takes great effort to resist it and practice honesty, but we must
realize that we are in God's all-seeing presence all the time anyway. We
must grow to tolerate that light, because it is the only light there is;
all else is confusion and darkness.
A thought-provoking passage, but it is marred by being divided up every
few pages with headings that employ chummy, clumsy puns: "Pittsburgh
Stealer," "Scott-Free," "Forest Clump," "Setting the Records Straight."
These groaners detract from the seriousness of his message. He is a
better writer than this.
Hahn's book is well-organized and documented, and will serve as an
excellent guide to anyone seeking to understand the classic Roman
Catholic theology of sacramental confession. LeBlanc's book is more of a
riff, a flowing exploration of the experience of that sacrament. It's
the one I would choose if I wanted someone to understand, not just the
rationale for confession, but its healing power
Go to
Archive
of Frederica Mathewes-Green articles
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Frederica Mathewes-Green
www.frederica.com
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