CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Confession-The
First Step in Mental Enslavement
Some
of the reasons for this remarkable phenomenon have been outlined-venial sins,
penal laws and the Churches unnatural and futile handling of sex.
Another
significant explanation for much of Roman Catholic lawlessness lies in the
structure of Catholicism. Its code
of behavior is built upon ritual and superstition rather than upon true
religion, reasoned ethics, self-education and self-control. -
The
most important ritual for the control and rehabilitation of the behavior of
Roman Catholics is the ceremony of Confession, also called the Sacrament of
Penance. It is the epitome of
superstition in the Church's centuries-old bag of magic tricks and amulets.
For
the ritual of confession is a superstition, a word that Webster defines as
follows:
It
is unfortunate for devout Catholics that this definition applies so exactly to
what all of us were taught to be a sacrament established by Christ Himself for
the complete cleansing of souls fouled by sin and their restoration to a
"state of grace."
The
first confession, followed by the first communion, is one of the most awesome
and most sacred events in the growth of a Roman Catholic child, second only to
baptism and administration of last rites. Children
"make" their first communion-the "receiving" of Christ in
the Eucharist under the form of bread-usually in the second grade, at about the
age of seven. This is a festive
event. The little girls wear
beautiful dresses and flowing veils. The
little boys have white trousers, white shirts and new shoes.
For days before, they practice genuflection, walking in precision to the
altar, putting out their tongues to receive the holy wafer, and returning to
their pews with folded hands and downcast eyes that proclaim their innocent
sanctity.
On
the Friday afternoon before our first communion, the black-veiled nuns marched
us two by two into the church and herded us into the pews nearest the
confessionals.
The
building itself was awesomely big to a little child.
The architectural style, if any, was German-American Romanesque.
Heavily darkened stained-glass windows transformed
Our
Mother Mary was in a window, too, and was also standing on a post in the church
holding the baby Jesus.
The
ceiling was some forty feet high and the central altar seemed miles away, even
though it was only a quarter of a block. When
we knelt we could hardly see over the tops of the pews.
As
we waited our turn, the nuns behind us made us continue to examine our
consciences by rapping the knuckles of any of us who became restless or
mischievous.
When
my turn came, I pushed aside the heavy red velvet curtain and stepped inside the
blackness. It was so dark I had to
feel for the kneeling bench. Petrified,
I waited for the sound of the priest's little sliding door and began the form,
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This
is my first confession . . ." I confessed the peccadilloes of a
seven-year-old and thought myself a great sinner.
The priest gave me an admonition always to be a good boy and a penance to
perform (a few Hail Mary’s) and I felt much relieved.
I
cannot recall whether my fear produced any physical reaction on that occasion.
But later, as a priest hearing youngsters' first confessions, I can
recall many occasions when the babes were so frightened by the size of the
church, the darkness of the confessional and their own sinfulness that they
became incontinent. Then I would
step outside, and signal the nearest nun, who rebuked the child and called
someone to clean up the confessional.
We
went to confession every month on the Thursday before the first Friday.
This is done in practically every Catholic school in
The
familiarity of going to confession at least once a month did not lessen my fear
of it. The priest was supposed to
question me regarding sins I might have omitted and then admonish me to try
never to do such things again. The
most frequent questions were, "Did you do anything nasty or have any bad
thoughts or actions since your last confession?" and "Have you missed
Mass on Sunday?"
I
had been raised in a strict Catholic home, so these questions of the priest were
very confusing. I knew what lying
and stealing were, but the priest never asked about them.
Furthermore, my lying was generally to my mother and my stealing
concerned food, particularly fruit from neighbors' trees, although our backyard
trees bore fruit equally good. But
since such sins were merely venial, I did not have to confess them.
But
"nastiness" and "adultery" and "sex' were very
mysterious. I knew that they were
wrong, but I didn't know what they were. For
the first three or four years that priests in the confessional asked me if I had
had bad thoughts or done "nasty" things, I had no concept whatever of
the functions of sex and only the vaguest notions of the physical differences
between men and women. I knew
absolutely nothing of the origin of human babies.
I thought that adultery was looking at my own body, wanting to see the
body of a little girl, or urinating where I should not.
Through years of association with Catholics and years of hearing
confessions, I learned that my confused ignorance was shared by many others.
When
priests know their penitents are married, they are supposed to ask if they
practice birth control-and threaten to withhold absolution from those who do not
promise to give up this most evil vice. If
there is a hint of adultery or other sexual aberration, they are supposed to ask
about the frequency and details that might compound the sin or make it a
sacrilege.
Whatever
the cause, the classroom's teaching on the filthiness, nastiness and sinfulness
of everything sexual is re-emphasized where it is much more effective-in the
sacred and secret darkness of the confessional.
In
lecturing across the country I have found non-Catholics extremely interested in
the ceremony of confession. They
want to know if Catholics really tell all, if Catholics really believe that a
priest can forgive sins, and if the priest sincerely believes that he has the
power to forgive them.
It
rarely occurs to them, however, nor to most Catholics, that this ceremony is not
merely a soul-washing ritual but is an adjunct of the parochial school system.
It is so much a part of that system that the confessional might well be
called another classroom-the private classroom for individual instruction.
The
Catholic priests in their function of hearing confessions might be called the
police force of the hierarchy. They
are watching at the "grass roots" over the morals of the faithful.
The weakness of the Catholic position regarding stealing, lying and
regard for civil law rests not only in theological classrooms.
A "celibate" priest, when hearing confessions, does not think
them nearly as important nor as interesting as masturbation, fornication or
adultery.
The
bulk of Catholic priests, regardless of any divine or ecclesiastical authority
conferred upon them, are psychologically unequipped to cope with many of the
personal problems they meet in the confessional.
Most of these problems pertain to sex, because the clergy in the
confessional usually does not focus attention on anything besides sex, except
attendance at Mass on Sunday.
An
ex-Catholic psychiatrist sent me this observation: "Confessional.
Healthy young people submitting their problems to men who are trying hard
themselves to remain psychologically emasculate.
These
same priests on a busy Saturday evening will "hear" a hundred
confessions or more of people far more sick of soul than the others of body, and
shunt them out with less true benefit than the doctor holds in his syringe.
I
know-I did it for fifteen years.
The
priest, in learning how to hear confessions, studies the guilt of sin rather
than the cause and cure of human misbehavior.
His primary function is to compute the degree of sin and its complexities
so that he can determine an appropriate punishment and then forgive the sin.
I-le makes the sinner promise to amend his life in the Act of Contrition
which is routinely recited while absolution is given.
He makes some penitents cease their sins by refusing to give them
absolution unless (in some dioceses) they pull their children out of public
schools, or sever an illicit sexual relationship or quit the practice of birth
control. My experience has been that
in the face of these ultimatums, the penitent usually stops going to confession.
Priests
are not taught, for instance, how to advise married couples to cope with the
frustrations of physical or psychic sexual maladjustments which can so easily
wreck marriages or make them a foretaste of bell.
They know only to say, "What God hath joined together let no man put
asunder." Hence, the couple must stay together because the Catholic Church
prohibits divorce.
Priests
who in the pulpit or in the confessional expound so learnedly of marriage know
nothing of the subject.
Equally
important in the plan of Roman Catholic control of men's intimate personal lives
is the opportunity the confessional gives of having the priest ask, "Have
you missed Mass on Sunday?" If so, the priest instills the concept that
missing Mass even once is a mortal sin, as punishable by hellfire as adultery or
murder. There are unknown thousands,
perhaps millions of Catholics who, because of this constant nagging in the
confessional while they were younger, will attend Mass regularly, even though
they are routinely drunk, enjoying a sexual affair or practicing birth control
regularly. The attendance at Mass
with as generous a donation as they can afford is their expiation for the sins
of their nature.
Once
they are at Mass, however, the indoctrination machine can work on them.
They hear the sermons. They
see the multitudinous Catholic pamphlets. They
buy the local diocesan weekly journal and perhaps that most biased, divisive and
anti-Protestant paper, Our Sunday Visitor. Among
the young and their elders, through the help of the confessional, Roman Catholic
"education" goes on.
Those
who go to confession are usually sincere (albeit sometimes frightened) Catholics
who want their sins forgiven and the average priest thinks he has the formula
for doing so. There are kindly and
mellowed priests whose advice can help people in many problems that they can
understand from their own adolescence and adult lives.
Some
of the Catholic psychiatrists, I queried pointed to the confessional as the poor
man s psychiatric couch. This can be
true, but only in the sense that any experienced sympathetic counselor, be he
doctor, minister or priest, can sometimes untangle the scrambled web of earnest
people's lives, when the problems are not too complex.
The
first indictment of the confessional is that it is a man-made fraud and
superstition.
The
following historical details are taken principally from the writings of Henry
Charles Lea, particularly from
the
very heavily documented three-volume work, A History
of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church.
Before forming a final opinion, before condemning my viewpoint or falling
back on a routine of refutation by denunciation, one should go to a public
library and look up the works of Henry Charles Lea.'
Every
shocking statement is annotated, and the overwhelming numbers of references are
to the original sources. Very many
are in the original Latin, so that any average priest should be able to read
them. The authors Lea quotes are
familiar to every priest-Origen, Clement of Alexandria,
Private
confession to a priest and the claim of the priestly power to forgive sin were not
required in the early Church. Public
confession as in the "Confiteor" of the Mass or as conducted in many
Protestant churches was usual.
That
up to the early portion of the third century, hearing the confessions of
penitents formed no recognized part of sacerdotal functions is clearly shown by
the Canons of Hippolytus, in which the duties of all orders of the clergy are
minutely detailed and the only allusion to confession is to that made by the
catechumen to the bishop before baptism....
We
have already seen that Origen ridiculed the idea that the power of the keys had
been transmitted from St. Peter, and we have further evidence that this private
consultation with a physician of the soul had in it nothing capable of remitting
sin or of obtaining absolution, but that it was merely a wholesome practice
recommended by preachers and that the only confession as yet recognized by the
Church was in public before the congregation.'
The
practice of the famous
Auricular
personal private confession became a law of the Church by the Lateran council in
1216.' The council of
Apparently
Aquinas was the first who boldly declared confession to be of divine law; as he
has no gospel text to quote he argues
that it cannot be of human law because it is a matter of faith; faith and the
sacraments are beyond human reason and therefore they must be of divine law,
which is virtually to assume that, as we cannot understand it, it must be of
divine command though no such divine command is recorded.
The authority, if not the reasoning, of Aquinas gave a standing in the
schools to this view and we find it accepted by many succeeding writers.
The Scotists reached the same conclusion by a somewhat different line of
argument: the Church, they said, would not have imposed so heavy a burden on her
children except by divine command and that as there is no trace of any canon
prescribing it, prior to the Lateran council of 1216, it could not have been a
mere human precept. Chancellor
Gerson makes no pretence that it is of divine origin save that the Decalogue
commands us to honor our parents and as
It
was reserved for Innocent III to give legality to the custom.
The subject was somewhat delicate, for the demand of payment for the
sacraments was undoubted simony, and yet without compulsion these so-called
voluntary payments were liable to be not forthcoming.
Innocent, however, accomplished the feat of facing both ways in a decree
reciting that frequent complaints reach the Holy See that money is exacted for
the sacraments and that fictitious difficulties are raised if the priestly greed
is not satisfied, while, on the other hand, there are laymen inspired with
heretical views who seek under the guise of scruples to infringe on the laudable
custom which the piety of the faithful has introduced.
Therefore depraved exactions are prohibited and pious customs are to be
observed; the sacraments must be freely conferred, but the bishops shall coerce
those who endeavor to change a laudable CUStOM.12
Historically,
it can be seen, the foundation upon which a great part of Roman Catholic
morality is built is one of weakness. Sociologically,
an aspect of this problem that demands investigation is that, with a large
segment of the faithful, the ritual of confession makes sin,
not more. difficult, but much more easy.
If
the authors of the False Decretals, Pope Innocent III in the Lateran council and
the bishops in the council of Trent, invented and made a sacrament out of
confession for the purpose of deterring the faithful from sin, their scheme
certainly backfired.
There
are some Catholics who derive the strangest solace from confession.
One doctor wrote to me about a Catholic woman who felt close to God while
pregnant -no matter by whom. She had
five illegitimate children and constant miscarriages.
Confession always adjusted her back to God and erased any guilt of
promiscuity. The most acute
sufferers in her case were her parents.
The
psychiatric clinical director of one of the nation's largest city health
departments wrote:
They
ridicule the Hindus who in repeated holy years again and again wash themselves
in the
But
Roman Catholics are just as superstitious and do the identical thing.
Catholic children and adults are for many years taught that the mere
absolution of a priest forgives crime or sin, and in time they actually believe
it. This method of mental indoctrination is the forerunner
of
Hitler's "big lie" and the Communist slogan of "the people's
democracy" that hides a dictatorial regime.
The
secrecy, the darkness and the anonymity of the confessional and the repetition
of the ceremony over-come the shame and make repetition of the crime easier.
One
sentence by Lea summarizes the role of the confessional: