NEWS FEATURE: Catholic Church unable to reverse trend of fewer confessions

c. 1997 Religion News Service UNDATED _ The Rev. Herbert Tillyer, a Roman Catholic priest for nearly three decades, can remember the days when people lined up on Saturdays outside the confessional booth. These days, 15 to 25 people show up from among the 2,200 families who attend the large Catholic church in Parsippany-Troy Hills, […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The Rev. Herbert Tillyer, a Roman Catholic priest for nearly three decades, can remember the days when people lined up on Saturdays outside the confessional booth.

These days, 15 to 25 people show up from among the 2,200 families who attend the large Catholic church in Parsippany-Troy Hills, N.J., where Tillyer is pastor. His experience is not unique.


Demand to make confession is so weak in some churches priests have dispensed with a confession schedule, instead asking congregants to call for an appointment.

The disappearance of the confessional, one of the most recognizable symbols of the Catholic Church, signifies a profound change in how American Catholics observe their faith.

In some parishes, the confessional has been supplanted by “reconciliation rooms.” Some parishioners say they don’t need an intermediary in talking to God about their failings.

“It used to be that people went to confession before Mass, but they didn’t necessarily take communion; now it’s almost the opposite _ everybody goes down for communion, but nobody goes to confession,” says William Dinges, a professor of religion at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.. “Clearly, it (confession) has fallen into disuse.”

Before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, convened in 1962, Catholics were told it was wrong to accept communion before confessing their sins. This has gradually been amended to include only the most serious sins, such as purposeful violations of the Ten Commandments.

In recent decades, priests have tended to put less emphasis on sin, stressing God’s mercy over the notion that sinners are punished in Hell.”I think before people had too much of a sense of guilt,”said the Rev. Thomas Iwanowski, associate director of the worship office in the Archdiocese of Newark, N.J.”We’ve come to realize that God’s forgiveness is not limited to the confessional box. God’s forgiveness can come through individual acts of penance, acts of kindness and charity.”

In fact, most Catholics now refer to confession as the Sacrament of Reconciliation, although it is also still referred to in the church catechism as the Sacrament of Penance.


Regardless of changing attitudes, there has been some official hand-wringing among U.S. bishops over the disinterest many Catholics have about confession.

“I find it very disturbing,” said Newark Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, who issued a pastoral letter two years ago reminding his priests about the importance of receiving confession.

The U.S. hierarchy was concerned enough to order a national survey on confession. The 1990 survey found that among Catholics who attend Mass frequently, 55 percent go to confession just once or twice a year and 19 percent never go.

“It will surprise no one that the frequency of the reception of the Sacrament of Penance has declined significantly over the course of the last 25 years,” the bishops’ Committee for Pastoral Research and Practices wrote in a preface to its survey report. “Understanding the reasons for this phenomenon, however, presents a difficult challenge.”

The survey found that bishops and the laity have diametrically opposed opinions about why fewer Catholics are confessing. While bishops listed a “less pervasive sense of sin” as the No. 1 culprit, laity dismissed this reasoning. Instead, those surveyed said they were experiencing reconciliation with God by unspecified “other means.”

Agnes Gottlieb, 43, of West Orange, N.J., said she went to confession twice a month when she was growing up. As an adult, however, she stopped going for 17 years, returning only after her children were born and then only once a year.


“I think a lot of people have trouble with the fact that you’re telling someone else what you’ve done wrong,” said Gottlieb, a lector at her church and the mother of two altar servers. “It can be a humiliating experience that stops people cold.”

Follow-up surveys have confirmed the declining interest in confession, even among active members of the church. A survey this year by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, for example, found 27 percent of Catholic parents never or rarely confess and another 19 percent confess less than once a year.

In another survey, Catholic University Professor Dinges found the overwhelming majority of one large, middle class parish believed confession to be important but rarely went themselves. Asked why, a majority said they reconciled wrongdoing with God themselves or the aggrieved party, a decidedly non-Catholic notion.

“That is a very American, very Protestant response,” Dinges said. “It is highly individualized and implies there is no need for an intermediary.”

While traditionalists point to flagging interest in confession as more evidence of a church in decline, not everyone thinks it’s such a bad thing.

“Maybe they don’t go as frequently, but they are more serious about what they are doing,” said Sister Catherine Dooley, an associate professor of liturgy and religious education at Catholic University, who has studied the declining interest in confession.


Before, she said, “people confessed and went on with their lives. The new rite says this action of confession has to take place within a life of reconciliation.”

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