FOLLOWING on from last week, and in musing on many of the letters and comments made in response to my last column, I think people’s desire to end the seal of confession is for the majority motivated firstly by a loving desire to protect children, and secondly a desire to see pedophiles and their protectors punished out of a disgust for pedophilia. These are both very good desires that I hold myself. Yet, breaking the seal of confession would not achieve either and would actually be counter-productive.
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You’ll notice the Royal Commission’s Final Report Recommendations did not include a recommendation to abolish the seal of confession. It did however recommend in Rec. 16.26 that if a person confesses pedophilia, absolution should be withheld until they report themselves, which I think is a good recommendation and what I think almost all priests would do anyway, and does not break the seal. What is almost always ignored in this debate is the fact that confession is hearsay (often even “double-hearsay”) and so inadmissible in any just legal system.
Much of the push to break the seal of confession has been based on misinformation and thus counterintuitive. If pedophilia is being revealed in confession, society is far more likely to illicit a conviction of a pedophile with the seal of confession than without it. Parents, friends, police, doctors, councillors, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and many other relationships are all tribunals that have no “seal of confession” and yet, are still apparently not reporting or catching the more illusive pedophiles as victims are too ashamed to report and pedophiles are not remorseful enough to report themselves. The assurance of the seal of confession offers an extra and unique opportunity for victims and perpetrators to “tell/confess” when otherwise they wouldn’t. The priest is given the opportunity to help convince the person to report the abuse; an opportunity that will be lost forever if the seal was broken, even once.
If the Pope was to allow the seal of confession to be broken, even once by only one priest, the seal of confession would be destroyed forever. No second pedophile would ever trust a priest’s seal of confession again, no second child would either. Neither would any of us. If the Amazon Rainforest really is the lungs of the entire world, would you burn down the entire Amazon to catch one single pedophile? Because that’s what’s at stake here. After almost 17 years in the priesthood I have come to realise that confession is the spiritual Amazon of not only Catholics but non-Catholics and even atheists.
When people say they want priests to break the seal of confession to save a child, how do they logistically intend this to happen? They’re asking a priest to break the seal of confession by telling the truth to a human court by lying to his vows to his God, about what he may have been told by a child molester and therefore almost certainly a liar, whom he never physically saw (confession is usually from behind a grill) and therefore may be someone completely different, to tell the truth about something that could even be a lie, and could even be an astute pedophile pretending to be someone else. Such “evidence” would be inadmissible. But it’s worth it to save even one child and catch even one pedophile, right? You couldn’t even be sure you caught the right man (woman), but you could be sure you would have destroyed the spiritual Amazon for billions of others, especially children, and for the rest of history.
