"Catholic confession’s steep price"

From the Boston Globe:

Collapse is not too strong a word. Fifty years ago, the great majority of
Catholics in this country confessed their sins regularly to a priest.
Confession, after all, is one of the seven Catholic sacraments. But now
only 2 percent of Catholics go regularly to confession, according to the
Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a nonprofit organization
affiliated with Georgetown University—and three-quarters of them never
go, or go less than once a year. In many parishes, the sacrament is
currently available only by appointment, and in Europe it has declined
to such a degree that groups who study Catholic practice there have
stopped even asking about it on their questionnaires. Visit a Catholic
church today, John Cornwell writes in “The Dark Box: A Secret History of
Confession,” and you’re likely to find that church janitors have
transformed the box into “a storage closet for vacuum cleaners, brooms,
and cleaning products.”

To traditionalists, this might seem like yet another sign of decline
in the post–Vatican II era, but Cornwell shows that this isn’t the first
time Catholics have largely abandoned confession. The practice, it
turns out, has evolved dramatically over the centuries, from a rare
communal event to a regular private one, and at a number of points in
this evolution has broken down specifically because of concerns about
sexual abuse. The box itself is a relatively late innovation, designed
in the 16th century to keep priests and women apart.

Cornwell thinks it’s time to reform confession again, in large part
because he sees it as a key—and underappreciated—enabler of the recent
sex-abuse scandals that have rocked the church.  A former seminarian who
has written extensively on the papacy and is perhaps best known for his
1999 bestseller “Hitler’s Pope,” Cornwell knows his subject well: He was
raised Catholic, went to confession every week from the age of 7 to the
age of 21, and was himself propositioned by a priest in the
confessional. He ended up leaving the Church for decades, but has
returned into the fold late in life, with some ambivalence.

Cornwell’s book moves briskly through the many phases of the history of confession: from its earliest manifestations, in the first centuries of Christianity,
when it was a rare communal event; through the late Middle Ages, when it
became a private act that profoundly affected, as he puts it, “the
development of Western ethics, law, and perceptions of the self”; and
into the 20th century, when, he argues, Pope Pius X’s momentous decision
to lower of the age of confession, in 1910, opened the way to the
sexual abuse of children.

Today, Cornwell believes, confession could still be of great value, but only if church leaders are willing to reimagine its role.

Cornwell spoke to Ideas from his home in England.

IDEAS: What are the origins of confession?

CORNWELL: In the first centuries of Christianity, there
was no such thing as confession. There was just “reconciliation” with
your congregation or your Christian community, if you’d committed a huge
crime like murder or idolatry or adultery. The presiding bishop or
clergyman would say, “Do we allow this person back in?,” and it was
either thumbs up or thumbs down. It was very communal. That broke down
with the breakup of the Roman Empire, but then something new starts to
take place within monastic communities in Ireland and Wales and places
like that. An abbess or an abbot would have private conversation with
somebody, give spiritual direction, and so forth. Confession grew out of
that. But it wasn’t until 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, that all
Christians in the Latin Church were bound under mortal sin to go to
confession once a year, and it had to be private, and you had to tell
all of your sins.

IDEAS: So that’s where the story of confession as we know it starts?

CORNWELL: Yes. I see three great enthusiasms for
confession after that. The first runs through the Middle Ages and
collapses very largely through the sexual abuse of women in the
confessional.

IDEAS: You describe confession in those days as a very
personal experience, with penitents sitting at the feet of confessors,
and touching—holding hands, even embracing—as part of the encounter.


CORNWELL: That’s right. The dark box was only invented
in the 16th century, during the Counter-Reformation, and it was
specifically to keep penitents separate from their confessors, and to
preclude the seduction that this kind of touching made possible. But now
a new kind of seduction becomes possible. You have these women in the
dark, whispering into the priests’ ears. It paved the way for abuse, and
by the 19th century, the practice had again largely broken down because
of that.

IDEAS: But not, as you say in the book, before helping to fundamentally change Western notions of ethics, law, and even the self.

CORNWELL: Yes. Confession in the box had an amazing
shaping effect on the way that people thought about themselves. It
helped foster a very private, and very modern, sense of interiority and
guilt, and even new ways of articulating ideas about the body and
sexuality. There’s a new focus on the idea of intention, too....You go
into the dark box, deep into your disembodied soul, and consider the
degrees of intentionality in your actions. The emphasis is on the
private rather than the public nature of sin.

IDEAS: What’s the third period of enthusiasm?

CORNWELL: It starts with Pius X, who came in in 1903
and died on the eve of the First World War....He was a great pessimist.
He observed the great rise of materialism and communism that was taking
place, and believed that the church within itself was suffering from a
kind of decay. In response, with the best of intentions, he launched an
antimodernist campaign, and reformed the seminaries so they were much
more austere and cut off from the world. But then you have this killer
fact: He lowered the age of confession and made it something that had to
be done weekly. This was a real game-changer. It redefined the church
in the 20th century. It’s the narrative center of my story, and it ends
with the abuse of not women but children.

IDEAS: How so?

CORNWELL: After confession was made a sacrament, in the
13th century, you didn’t make your confession until puberty or
afterwards, at age 12, 13, or 14. And you went maybe once a year. Pius
changed that in one fell swoop, by introducing weekly confession and
insisting that it start at the age of 7. This made children of that age
group suddenly accessible to priests on a routine and frequent basis,
which had never happened before.

IDEAS: You make a direct link in the book between confession and the sex-abuse scandal.

CORNWELL: Many priests in the wake of the scandal have
admitted to using it as a way of grooming and testing children for their
vulnerability. This is something that the great John Jay Report, on
pedophile priests, which was done in the US in the early part of the
last decade, missed out on. They didn’t see the importance of
confession. That’s why I think my book is important in an investigatory
sense. I’m bringing that out. The statistics in the report show that a
third of all of the crimes of abuse occurred in a confessional
setting....The interesting thing is that from the late 1950s, when all
of this started to rise, to the mid 1980s—this was the period in which
priests were going outside the box. So you get confession as something
that takes place in the privacy of a priest’s room, or in the sacristy,
or in his car. But something else happens that is very important: Many
priests squared the circle of their offending lives and their pastoral
lives by going to confession themselves. There you have the morally weak
aspect of confession: this belief that you can commit terrible sins and
then go and get them washed away....There was a case in Australia not
so long ago when a priest on trial admitted that he had confessed to
sexually attacking children 1,500 times. He’d confessed it 1,500 times!

IDEAS: Does confession still have a future?

CORNWELL: Perhaps. I’m hoping that this book will
encourage people high up in the church to rethink the whole theology of
confession, to accept that it’s been trivialized, and to do some work to
bring it back. I think confession should offer reconciliation to people
who have gone through something big, a great trial in their life, and
have lapsed. It should be there to allow them to share that with a
priest, and it shouldn’t be downgraded to a 7-year-old’s perception of
sin.

IDEAS: Can you imagine a revival of confession, maybe again as public act?

CORNWELL: That’s the big question. Hundreds of people
wrote to me while I was writing the book to say that they favor a return
to general absolution [the public and communal absolution of sin
without private confession to a priest, an ancient practice revived in
the 1970s, under Paul VI]. But John Paul II put a stop to that. If
Francis were to make a change there, I think you’d find a lot of people
coming back to Church. It could happen—but people have got to ask for
it.


Toby Lester, a contributing editor to The Atlantic, is the author of
“Da Vinci’s Ghost” (2012) and “The Fourth Part of the World” (2009).

"'Catholic' confession is good for the soul - says Archbishop of Canterbury"

In the Telegraph.   Things are happening! 

The Most Rev Justin Welby advised churchgoers that it could be an “enormously
powerful” experience to unburden themselves to a confessor, even if it was
not always a “bunch of laughs”.

His comments came as he addressed the heads of other churches – including the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England Wales, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols – about divisions between Christians.

Although Archbishop Welby comes from the evangelical wing of Anglicanism, his personal spiritual director is a Swiss Roman Catholic priest, Fr Nicolas Buttet, and he is a strong advocate of Catholic worship styles.

He spoke of being part of a wider “catholic tradition”, adding: “I’ve learnt over the last 10 years about the great sacrament of reconciliation: confession.

“It is enormously powerful and hideously painful when it’s done properly … it’s really horrible when you go to see your confessor – I doubt you wake up in the morning and think, this is going to be a bunch of laughs.

“It’s really uncomfortable. But through it God releases forgiveness and absolution and a sense of cleansing.”

He acknowledged that he had his own personal struggles, remarking: “I’m an Archbishop; I know about the absence of humility. I struggle with it.”

Although more commonly associated with Catholicism, the Church of England has long offered a form of confession to worshippers, on request.

Anglican priests meet parishioners to hear confession face to face, often in their own home, without such trappings as confessional booths, and offer absolution for sins.

Speaking at a meeting at Lambeth Palace, organised by the group “Churches Together in England”, he also urged Christians to recognise the Church’s racist past.

“I often think about the fact that in the 1960s when Afro-Caribbean people first came to this country they were not made welcome in our churches,” he said.

“It’s the reality; it was a sin, a very bad sin.”

"The practice of self-discovery"

Here's another very interesting citation from Wonderfully Created, Wonderfully Restored:

 “Our only available starting point for the practice of self-discovery is our wants and desires as we actually experience them. Therefore, Thomas [Aquinas] says, we ought to pray for what we think we want regardless. For prayer is in a certain manner a hermeneutic of the human will, so that by way of placing our desires as we experience them before God we are asking also that those desires be unfolded, explicated, thereby to release their real significance, the real want that is wrapped up in, implicated in all their opacity in their form as experienced. Therefore, says Thomas, we ought to pray, as Jesus did in the garden of Gethsemane, in response to our animal desire (secundum sensualitatem). For when we pray as Jesus did then, out of animal need and desire—for Jesus was scared of death, as naturally any animal is—we are placing that animal need and desire within the interpretative power of the divine will itself, wherein alone we will discover our own real will.”

- Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait

It's an interesting approach - one that does, in fact, weave self-examination and prayer tightly together as joint practice.  That's a good thing, from my point of view - and from A.A.'s point of view, too.  Here's what Step 11 has to say about this:

There is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation, and prayer. Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit. But when they are logically related and interwoven, the result is an unshakable foundation for life. Now and then we may be granted a glimpse of that ultimate reality which is God's kingdom. And we will be comforted and assured that our own destiny in that realm will be secure for so long as we try, however falteringly, to find and do the will of our own Creator.

I don't agree, though, that this is "our only available starting point"!   Another very effective starting point is the one A.A. uses:  confession - and, in fact, something even more striking:  public confession.  That's what A.A. meetings are all about; a recovering alcoholic stands in front of the assembled group and tells his or her own story of living:   addiction, decline, fall, recovery.   The story includes both  facts and, importantly, feelings; these stories are sometimes called "qualifications" - a word which comes from a long time ago, I suspect, and which means to suggest that the person telling their story actually qualifies to speak about alcoholism first-hand!

The reason for doing this is twofold, as far as I can see:  first, it reminds the person speaking about the facts of the case.  It helps us keep in mind "What we were like, what happened, and what we are like now."   This is a terrific help in staying sober, a day at a time; it reminds us that no matter how hard life may seem, it is, simply, infinitely better than it used to be.  It's straightforwardly a statement of facts - in particular facts about the past that have become impossible to deny, much as we might wish to (continue to) deny them.

The second reason is the social reason, and it rests on the fact that the story of addiction is always the same:  "the progressive deterioration of the human personality."   This means that a story told this way - openly and without shame or fear (and often with great humor) - can help people new to the program identify with what's being said.  This helps cut through the denial that's a central feature of alcoholism and addiction; alcoholics make an art form of refusing to acknowledge the facts of our own lives.  Everything gets shoveled under mounds of self-justification and/or baldfaced denial of reality, in order to avoid having to deal with the out-of-control mess we've actually made of our lives. 

(This is also what the "Personal Stories" section in the book Alcoholics Anonymous is about; the book was created expressly - before the internet! - so that it could reach alcoholics with the message and help with the process of identification.)

Now, I may be wrong.  Perhaps alcoholics are uniquely gifted in our abilities and talents in the areas of self-justification and self-deception.   Perhaps we are singularly dishonest with ourselves and others; it's very true that we're experts in this area.  But unique?  I don't think so, simply on the basis of observation.  I think most people are completely capable of pulling the wool over their own eyes any time they especially need to.  (Rowan Williams refers to this as the colosaal degree of human self-delusion.)

In other words:  in (I suspect) a rather large number of cases self-justification and self-preservation will do everything possible to cover over and try to disguise "our wants and desires as we actually experience them"!

There is something else, too:  it's hard doing this by yourself.  It's hard to admit to certain feelings (and failings); it's hard to recognize motives your ego doesn't want to recognize; it's hard to understand your own feelings sometimes.  It's just plain damn hard - and often frightening - to try to face all this by yourself; we need the help of others who've been through it themselves.  In other words:  we need identification coming back at us, too - and we need to be able to laugh with somebody else about the absurdity that is human life on earth, and about our own absurdity.

This, I think, is another reason - though hardly explored at all - that faith is a social phenomenon.   We really can't do these things alone; we really do "have to bring somebody else into it":

Though we may at first be startled to realize that God knows all about us, we are apt to get used to that quite quickly. Somehow, being alone with God doesn't seem as embarrassing as facing up to another person. Until we actually sit down and talk aloud about what we have so long hidden, our willingness to clean house is still largely theoretical. When we are honest with another person, it confirms that we have been honest with ourselves and with God.

The second difficulty is this: what comes to us alone may be garbled by our own rationalization and wishful thinking. The benefit of talking to another person is that we can get his direct comment and counsel on our situation, and there can be no doubt in our minds what that advice is. Going it alone in spiritual matters is dangerous. How many times have we heard well-intentioned people claim the guidance of God when it was all too plain that they were sorely mistaken. Lacking both practice and humility, they had deluded themselves and were able to justify the most arrant nonsense on the ground that this was what God had told them. It is worth noting that people of very high spiritual development almost always insist on checking with friends or spiritual advisers the guidance they feel they have received from God. Surely, then, a novice ought not lay himself open to the chance of making foolish, perhaps tragic, blunders in this fashion. While the comment or advice of others may be by no means infallible, it is likely to be far more specific than any direct guidance we may receive while we are still so inexperienced in establishing contact with a Power greater than ourselves.

Perhaps what's needed is some process of Christian qualification.  We do have plenty of "conversion" stories; there are many such stories in the Book of Acts and in the Epistles.  We also hear them in the lives of the saints:  St. Monica, St. Augustine, St. Martin of Tours, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius of Loyola, etc.   (And here is another reason to ask questions about HWHM; some of the people chosen simply cannot qualify. That is, they don't permit us to identify in any way that helps us in our spiritual formation.)  But there isn't much in detail in many of these - or is it that it's difficult to understand or identify with the facts of living in long-ago eras?   In any case, there's not much discussion of the process, either.  And of course, this leaves out people who weren't adult converts, but whose faith is no less deep.

I think really we need to talk about what good literature talks about:  the human condition itself, and the human experience of living.  Perhaps righteousness talk ought to be put to one side; it doesn't seem to help much.  I think maybe using a list like the "Seven Deadly Sins" was a better system; it's a way to name  character defects precisely and to be consistent about it.   Things like this also take into account the human experience in living; the Seven Deadly Sins aren't theoretical, after all - and why throw out wisdom and experience of this sort?

Think, too, about Greek tragedies - and about the notion of the "fatal flaw."  That's something that can bring a person to ruin - and isn't that exactly what we're concerned with here?   If we really believe - and I do - that Christ redeems us, then we need to talk about "before and after":  our own defects - and the redemption of those defects, and what that entails.  That means getting specific - and learning from other peoples' experiences.  We need to talk about How It Works, just as A.A. does. 

And we maybe need to talk more publicly about what sorts of character defects our faith actually addresses in ourselves.  The church honestly hasn't been very good at this, always seeming to prefer the "you" form (AKA "scolding") to the "I" form ("reportage," that is).....

"Confession: It puts you straight with everyone"

From Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, from 2011, at the USCCB Blog: 

Penance, aka confession, is the sacrament of the forgiveness of sin. You can’t beat it for convenience. It’s available practically whenever. Tell a priest you want to go to confession and you’ll get his attention. One bishop I know was cornered on an airplane. Another passenger figured out what was going on and asked if he could confess too. It must have been an interesting game of musical seats. An interesting question for priests might be: Where was the strangest place you ever administered the sacrament of penance? The answers I’ve gathered include “in a sports bar, at a graduation party” and “on the golf course, walking up the fairway.”

Confession has benefits. Here are ten:

1. Confidentiality guaranteed. There’s nothing like confessing your sins to someone guaranteed not to tell anyone else. Sometimes you need to talk in absolute confidence. Even under subpoena, a priest can’t tell anyone what’s said to him in confession. He can’t even hint at it. Now that’s confidentiality.

2. Housekeeping for the soul. It feels good to be able to start a clean life all over again. Like going into a sparkling living room in your home, it’s nice when clutter is removed – even if it’s your own.

3. A balm for the desire for revenge. When you have been forgiven you can forgive others. If the perfect Jesus forgives me, who am I to want to avenge the slights in my life. Think: “Why did they promote him over me?’ or “Mom played favorites!”

4. Low cost therapy. It’s free, which makes it cheaper than a psychiatrist for dealing with guilt.

5. Forced time to think. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. To examine our lives and acknowledge failings marks the first step of making things right with God, others and ourselves. Life can be more worth living when you ponder the meaning of your own life.

6. Contribution toward world peace. Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, said that the imbalances in the world that lead to war and tensions “are linked with that more basic imbalance which is rooted in the heart of man.” Peace of soul leads to peace of heart leads to peace beyond oneself.

7. A better neighborhood. Confession leaves you feling good about yourself, thereby cutting back the inclination to road rage and aggressive shopping cart driving. With the grace of the sacrament you’re energized to, as Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery, “go and sin no more.”

8. Realistic self-perception. Confession helps overcome arrogance when you have to admit you’re as much of a sinner as anyone else. It helps build tolerance for others’ perceived shortcomings.

9. One more benefit of being Catholic. There are lots of benefits, including a sense of community, liturgical rites to help us encounter God in prayer, and the wonderful sense of humanity exemplified in the saints, from Mary, the loving Mother of God, to Augustine, the exasperating son of Monica. The sacrament that leads us to inner peace is among the greatest boons.

10. Closeness to God. Confession helps you realize that you have a close connection to God and receive his grace through the sacraments. What can be better than knowing God’s on your team, or, to be less arrogant about it, that you are on God’s. 

(cf Step 5, "Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.":

When your mission is carefully explained, and it is seen by the recipient of your confidence how helpful he can really be, the conversation will start easily and will soon become eager. Before long, your listener may well tell a story or two about himself which will place you even more at ease. Provided you hold back nothing, your sense of relief will mount from minute to minute. The dammed-up emotions of years break out of their confinement, and miraculously vanish as soon as they are exposed. As the pain subsides, a healing tranquillity takes its place. And when humility and serenity are so combined, something else of great moment is apt to occur. Many an A.A., once agnostic or atheistic, tells us that it was during this stage of Step Five that he first actually felt the presence of God. And even those who had faith already often become conscious of God as they never were before.

This feeling of being at one with God and man, this emerging from isolation through the open and honest sharing of our terrible burden of guilt, brings us to a resting place where we may prepare ourselves for the following Steps toward a full and meaningful sobriety.)

Confession and grace

More from A Member's-Eye View of Alcoholics Anonymous (my bolding):

It may also appear to some of you that in the Fourth and Fifth of its Twelve Steps, A.A. might very well be accused of talking out of both sides of its mouth at once. If you will recall, these Steps are:

“4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
“5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

Here, it would appear, is an organization that on the one hand claims there is no moral culpability involved in the disease of alcoholism, and on the other suggests to its members that recovery entails a searching and fearless accounting of this culpability to God and to another human being. I personally feel that this apparent paradox results from the empirical knowledge gained by the founders of A.A. I believe they found, as we all have since, that no matter what you tell the newcomer about the disease of alcoholism, he still feels guilty. He cannot blind himself to the moral consequences of his drinking: the blight he has visited upon those around him and the shame and degradation he has inflicted on himself. This load of conventional guilt – and I use the word “conventional” advisedly – as well as the alcoholic’s stubborn and perverse wish to cling to it, is the oldest of his “old ideas.” It is the oldest because it started first, and in most cases it will be the last to go. But go it must if the alcoholic’s attitude toward himself and hence the world around him is to undergo any basic change. That’s why I believe the founders of A.A. learned in their own experimentation that the alcoholic must be given a conventional means of unloading this burden of conventional guilt. Hence the Fourth and Fifth Steps.

"The purgative way"

Here's an excerpt from Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America. There are four chapters in this book, covering Prayer, Marian Devotion, Confession, and the Eucharist; this excerpt is from the chapter titled "In the Court of Conscience: American Catholics and Confession 1900-1975," by James O'Toole.  I added the bolding.

For many, the familiar phrases of sermons they had heard on the subject [of Confession] rang true, and they described in glowing terms the sense of relief and joy that followed a visit to the confessional.  Dorothy Day - not, to be sure, an "ordinary Catholic" in any sense of the term, but a woman who, by her own account, had had some considerable experience with sin - remembered affectionately the "warm, dimly lit vastness" of the church as she waited her turn and the welcoming, "patient" attitude of her confessor.  Another mid-twentieth-century penitent said that he genuinely enjoyed going to confession because he found it an "individualized" procedure, in which the priest was "less interested in the guilt of the penitent than he is in helping the latter to avoid sin in the future."  Still another enthused over priests who "give you the impression that they have all the time in the world, that the only thing that matters is for you to  ... unburden your heart."  A woman who mentioned that there was a long line waiting behind her got a soothing response.  "At this precise moment," the kindly priest replied, "you are the only person in this church who matters."  Experiences of this sort could have a powerful emotional impact.   A character in a 1950 short story about a long-delayed confession left the box so moved by the feeling of "complete forgiveness and gentleness" that "his throat was choked and he felt close to tears."

The anonymity of the transaction appealed to most penitents and enhanced its potency.  In fact, parishioners probably worried more than they had to about the possibility of being recognized in the confessional.  Individual traits were masked by the darkness and by the whispering tones in which the sacrament was usually conducted.  Even more effective in obscuring the identity of penitents was the sheer number of confessions priests heard.  A confessor could not possibly remember particular people, a diocesan liturgical commission newsletter pointed out in 1966, "when he is faced with one hundred or more confessions" at once.  "you don't have much capacity for remembering the sins of any individual," another priest said frankly; "all the stories blur together" and all the voices "are like the one great voice of humanity."  A lay woman from Louisiana in the 1970s found all this "a great comfort," since she knew that she could say anything without fear of embarrassment.  A woman in Maine agreed:  "I feel shy and uncomfortable discussing my faults face to face with a fellow human being," she said, even a priest, and the darkness of the confessional was thus very welcome.  The clergy were no less glad to be spared having to see their penitents.  "It is much easier to avoid embarrassment in dealing with people outside of confession," said Gerald Kelly in his advice to "good" confessors, "when we have no confessional knowledge of them."

The salutary impact of confession may also have derived in part from the very fact that it was a difficult and serious business.  "Confession gives you that little rush," one appreciative lay man said, "that bit of fear that keeps you on your toes."  Fear had its uses, and many found in the sacrament echoes of familiar devotional themes.  The "purgative way" in the American Catholic spirituality, which Joseph Chinnici has described, stressed the benefits of doing things that were difficult, and many thought confession worthwhile for just that reason.  The priest who had encouraged the men of his parish to "do the manly thing" by going to confession was tailoring his message particularly for them, but priests often stressed the value of "heroic virtue" of penitents of any gender or age.  "Get the habit of doing things because they are hard," a counselor to teenagers said in 1949; "it will be difficult at first, but they will become easy as time goes on." .... The language of jails and trials proved remarkably resilient, and this reinforced both the sense of dread a penitent might feel before entering the box and the feeling of relief on leaving it.  The force of such imagery might even be missed if an individual abandoned the sacrament.  The narrator of John R. Power's Last Catholic in America gave up going to confession, but he was nonetheless wistful whenever he recalled the last time he had done so:  "I was never again to feel ... the exhilaration of rising from the spiritually dead.  Never again to be free from sin, free from sin, free from sin."

Perhaps because of its inherent difficulties, confession served as a badge of honor for American Catholics, one that stood out in sharp relief from non-Catholic alternatives.  In particular, it offered a striking contrast to Protestant and other "peace of mind" movements in the middle of the twentieth century.  For years, Catholic writers continued to trumpet remarks by Harry Emerson Fosdick in 1927 that Protestants should consider reviving a form of confession, not as a sacrament but rather as a system of counseling in which "the confession of sin and spiritual misery is met with sympathetic and intelligent treatment."  Catholics had no need of such a revival, since they were sure they already had it a purer and better form.  Other writers pressed the same point.  Without mentioning Norman Vincent Peale by name, the Paulist John Sheerin took on the best-selling author in 1951 and scoffed at those who thought that they could find a "rosy way of the Cross." Peale's techniques for self-realization and harmony with the divine were "religious in tone," Sheerin said dismissively, "but how soft and namby-pamby."  Others agreed that there was no getting around the "brutal and humbling" fact of human nature that confession underlined:  sometimes, it was necessary simply to admit "I have sinned" and to take the consequences.  Confession was "not a pleasing prospect; but then, the sacraments are not devices for making us pleasing to ourselves.  They make us pleasing to God."

Metanoia in A.A.: "Huge emotional displacements and rearrangements...."

To look again at "Repentance and Confession" from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America; my bolding:

Repentance is not to be confused with mere remorse, with a self-regarding feeling of being sorry for a wrong done. It is not a state but a stage, a beginning. Rather, it is an invitation to new life, an opening up of new horizons, the gaining of a new vision. Christianity testifies that the past can be undone. It knows the mystery of obliterating or rather renewing memory, of forgiveness and regenera­tion, eschewing the fixed division between the "good" and the "wicked," the pious and the rebellious, the believers and the unbelievers. Indeed, "the last" can be "the first," the sin­ner can reach out to holiness. Passions are conquered by stronger passions; love is overcome by more abundant love. One repents not because one is virtuous, but because human nature can change, because what is impossible for man is possible for God. The motive for repentance is at all times humility, unself-sufficiency - not a means of justification for oneself, or of realizing some abstract idea of goodness, or of receiving a reward in some future life. Just as the strength of God is revealed in the extreme vulnerability of His Son on the Cross, so also the greatest strength of man is to embrace his weakness: "for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I render glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me" (2 Corinthians 12.9). To be flawed is the illogical, perhaps supernatural characteristic of humanity in which one en­counters God.

The Greek term for repentance, metanoia, denotes a change of mind, a reorientation, a fundamental transforma­tion of outlook, of man's vision of the world and of himself, and a new way of loving others and God. In the words of a second-century text, The Shepherd of Hermas, it implies "great understanding,"1 discernment. It involves, that is, not mere regret of past evil but a recognition by man of a dar­kened vision of his own condition, in which sin, by sepa­rating him from God, has reduced him to a divided, auto­nomous existence, depriving him of both his natural glory and freedom. "Repentance," says Basil the Great, "is salva­tion, but lack of understanding is the death of repentance." [2]

It is clear that what is at stake here is not particular acts of contrition, but an attitude, a state of mind. "For this life," states John Chrysostom, "is in truth wholly devoted to repen­tance, penthos and wailing. This is why it is necessary to re­pent, not merely for one or two days, but throughout one's whole life."[3]

Any division within oneself or distinction between the "time to repent" and the "rest of one's time" is, in the lan­guage of the Church, attributed to the demons. The role of these demons is extortionate, offensive - "diavallo," the root of the word "devil," means to tear asunder.[4] We cannot be deprived of true repentance or diverted from its path by the deception of demons. Yet the demons can work through virtue, working to produce a kind of spurious repentance. By nature we are destined to advance and ascend spiri­tually, but the demons divert the course by simulating ad­vance in the form of a fitful movement, a wobbling from side to side, like crabs. One can test the quality of repen­tance by ascertaining whether it is fleeting or fluttering. In­constancy and inconsistency are a danger signal; lastingness is auspicious. One is being tempted by the demons when one is caused "at times to laugh, and at other times to weep."[5]

I find this all  to correspond very closely with the description of an incident that appears in the 1935 book, Alcoholics Anonymous; the incident itself appears in Chapter 2, "There is a solution," with a reference to the Appendix.  My bold.

A certain American business man had ability, good sense, and high character. For years he had floundered from one sanitarium to another. He had consulted the best known American psychiatrists. Then he had gone to Europe, placing himself in the care of a celebrated physician (the psychiatrist, Dr. Jung) who prescribed for him. Though experience had made him skeptical, he finished his treatment with unusual confidence. His physical and mental condition were unusually good. Above all, he believed he had acquired such a profound knowledge of the inner workings of his mind and its hidden springs that relapse was unthinkable. Nevertheless, he was drunk in a short time. More baffling still, he could give himself no satisfactory explanation for his fall.
So he returned to this doctor, whom he admired, and asked him point blank why he could not recover. He wished above all things to regain self-control. He seemed quite rational and well balanced with respect to other problems. Yet he had no control whatever over alcohol. Why was this?

He begged the doctor to tell him the whole truth, and he got it. In the doctor's judgment, he was utterly hopeless; he would never regain his position in society and he would have to place himself under lock and key or hire a body guard if he expected to live long. That was a great physician's opinion.

But this man still lives, and is a free man. He does not need a bodyguard nor is he confined. He can go anywhere on this earth where other free men may go without disaster, provided he remains willing to maintain a certain simple attitude.

Some of our alcoholic readers may think they can do without spiritual help. Let us tell you the rest of the conversation our friend had with his doctor.

The doctor said "You have the mind of a chronic alcoholic. I have never seen one single case recover, where that state of mind existed to the extent that it does in you." Our friend felt as though the gates of hell had closed on him with a clang.

He said to the doctor, "Is there no exception?"

"Yes", replied the doctor, "there is. Exceptions to cases such as yours have been occurring since early times. Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences. To me, these occurrences are phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them. In fact, I have been trying to produce some such emotional rearrangement within you. With many individuals, the methods which I employed are successful, but I have never been successful with an alcoholic of your description. (*) For amplification, see appendix II)

Upon hearing this, our friend was somewhat relieved, for he reflected that, after all, he was a good church member. This hope, however, was destroyed by the doctor's telling him that while his religious convictions were very good, in his case they did not spell the necessary vital spiritual experience.

Here was the terrible dilemma in which our friend found himself when he had the extraordinary experience, which as we have already told you, made him a free man.

We, in our turn, sought the same escape with all the desperation of drowning men. What seemed at first a flimsy reed, has proven to be the loving and powerful hand of God. A new life has been given us or, if you prefer, "a design for living" that really works.

The distinguished American psychologist William James, in his book "Varieties of Religious Experience," indicates a multitude of ways in which men have discovered God. We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired. If what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or color are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try. Those having religious affiliations will find here nothing disturbing to their beliefs or ceremonies. There is no friction among us over such matters.

We think it no concern of ours what religious bodies our members identify themselves with as individuals. This should be an entirely personal affair which each one decides for himself in the light of past associations, or his present choice. Not all of us join religious bodies, but most of us favor such memberships.

And here's the entire content of Appendix II; a date is not given here, but clearly it's an addition to a later printing of the book.  It's meant to clarify and expand on the nature of the "huge emotional displacements and rearrangements" referred to by Jung in the citation above.

SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

The terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual awakening” are used many times in this book which, upon careful reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms.

Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the impression that these personality changes, or religious experiences, must be in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals. Happily for everyone, this conclusion is erroneous.

In the first few chapters a number of sudden revolutionary changes are described. Though it was not our intention to create such an impression, many alcoholics have nevertheless concluded that in order to recover they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming “God-consciousness” followed at once by a vast change in feeling and outlook.

Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of alcoholics such transformations, though frequent, are by no means the rule. Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the “educational variety” because they develop slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before he is himself. He finally realizes that he has undergone a profound alteration in his reaction to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by himself alone. What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline. With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.

Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our more religious members call it “God-consciousness.”

Most emphatically we wish to say that any alcoholic capable of honestly facing his problems in the light of our experience can recover, provided he does not close his mind to all spiritual concepts. He can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial.

We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of the program. Willingness, honesty and open mindedness are the essentials of recovery. But these are indispensable.

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

—Herbert Spencer

Examination of concience

From the Ascetical Theology entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia 1913, this is point #1 in the section "Means for realizing the Christian ideal"; note please the second half, which I've bolded:

Prayer, above all, in its stricter meaning, is a means of attaining perfection; special devotions approved by the Church and the sacramental means of sanctification have a special reference to the striving after perfection (frequent confession and communion). Ascetics proves the necessity of prayer (2 Corinthians 3:5) and teaches the mode of praying with spiritual profit; it justifies vocal prayers and teaches the art of meditating according to the various methods of St. Peter of Alcantara, of St. Ignatius, and other saints, especially the "tres modi orandi" of St. Ignatius. An important place is assigned to the examination of conscience, because ascetical life wanes or waxes with its neglect or careful performance; without this regular practice, a thorough purification of the soul and progress in spiritual life are out of the question. It centres the searchlight of the interior vision on every single action: all sins, whether committed with full consciousness or only half voluntarily, even the negligences which, though not sinful, lessen the perfection of the act, all are carefully scrutinized (peccata, offensiones, negligentioe; cf. "Exercitia spiritualia" of St. Ignatius, ed. P. Roothaan, p. 3). Ascetics distinguishes a twofold examination of conscience: one general (examen generale), the other special (examen particulare), giving at the same time directions how both kinds may be made profitable by means of certain practical and psychological aids. The general examination recalls all the faults of one day; the particular, on the contrary, focusses on one single defect and marks its frequency, or on one virtue to augment the number of its acts.

(Again, I'm not mad for the word "perfection" here - although I'm very happy with the statement elsewhere in this article that "The essence of Christian perfection is love."  I certainly wouldn't argue with that.)

It's very, very interesting to me that the section on "Prayer" is itself made up primarily of a lengthy discussion of  "examination of conscience"; clearly, the church believed these two things were and are intimately related.  (And so, of course, does A.A.)  I will be exploring this idea in more depth at some point; from an initial read of the article "Repentence and Confession in Orthodoxy," which contains comments on metanoia from numerous early Christian writers, I'd say this is a very old idea.

Meanwhile, notice the introductory and summing-up sentences:

• An important place is assigned to the examination of conscience, because ascetical life wanes or waxes with its neglect or careful performance; without this regular practice, a thorough purification of the soul and progress in spiritual life are out of the question.

and

• "The general examination recalls all the faults of one day; the particular, on the contrary, focusses on one single defect and marks its frequency, or on one virtue to augment the number of its acts."

And there you have a concise summary of A.A.'s Step 4 and Step 10, folks.

The church, in fact, does offer something that isn't found anywhere else: a true kind of metanoia - an authentic new life.  A way of life that "the world cannot give" - because it truly doesn't know anything about it.  It's "a completely unknown social reality [that has] started to instantiate itself in our midst, thus entirely altering our understanding of the social reality which we took for normal."  

It would be nice, I suppose, if this new reality occurred spontaneously - but I see little evidence that it does.   At the moment, for instance, the church itself is not very different from the world; it's full of rancor and rage.  This, I think, happens because the church is focused on righteousness - which at the moment has morphed into self-righteousness.  No surprise there, since self-righteousness is the basic human modus operandi to begin with.  It does seem to me this has been the major failing of the church throughout its history; perhaps because the church is run by people who are themselves especially worried about/desirous of the condition of  righteousness? 

In any case:  the "new reality" referred to above does seem to take some work to conform ourselves to it - perhaps it needs work for us even to be able to see it.  And the work, it seems to me, involves a slow, methodical effort to kill off the deadly grip the ego maintains as it attempts to control us from cradle to grave.  It simply won't let go on its own, as far as I can tell.

Step Six: "Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character."

The first line of this Step is always a great favorite in meetings; there's something so really 1930s and hilarious about it (as there is about a lot of A.A.'s literature).

And I think this Step is where A.A. might actually go beyond what the church offers - although I admit I'm not sure what the function of "Hail Marys" and "Our Fathers" in the Catholic rite of Penance is.  It could be that they function as foci for achieving a state of mind something akin to "becoming entirely ready to have God remove" whatever defects they're dealing with in Confession.  I just don't know - nor do I know exactly what happens in Confession in Orthodox churches.

Notice, too, the word repeatedly.  Some people argue that the first 9 Steps are "do-'em-once" affairs; that these "clearing away the wreckage of the past" Steps are meant to deal with history only.  I'd say the content of this and the other Steps found in the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions goes to argue against that idea.    (The words "lifetime job" below might be another clue!)

Anyway, for now here's the whole Step from the book; my bolding:

"This is the Step that separates the men from the boys." So declares a well-loved clergyman who happens to be one of A.A.'s greatest friends. He goes on to explain that any person capable of enough willingness and honesty to try repeatedly Step Six on all his faults--without any reservations whatever--has indeed come a long way spiritually, and is therefore entitled to be called a man who is sincerely trying to grow in the image and likeness of his own Creator.

Of course, the often disputed question of whether God can--and will, under certain conditions--remove defects of character will be answered with a prompt affirmative by almost any A.A. member. To him, this proposition will be no theory at all; it will be just about the largest fact in his life. He will usually offer his proof in a statement like this:

"Sure, I was beaten, absolutely licked. My own willpower just wouldn't work on alcohol. Change of scene, the best efforts of family, friends, doctors, and clergymen got no place with my alcoholism. I simply couldn't stop drinking, and no human being could seem to do the job for me. But when I became willing to clean house and then asked a Higher Power, God as I understood Him, to give me release, my obsession to drink vanished. It was lifted right out of me."

In A.A. meetings all over the world, statements just like this are heard daily. It is plain for everybody to see that each sober A.A. member has been granted a release from this very obstinate and potentially fatal obsession. So in a very complete and literal way, all A.A.'s have "become entirely ready" to have God remove the mania for alcohol from their lives. And God has proceeded to do exactly that. Having been granted a perfect release from alcoholism, why then shouldn't we be able to achieve by the same means a perfect release from every other difficulty or defect? This is a riddle of our existence, the full answer to which may be only in the mind of God. Nevertheless, at least a part of the answer to it is apparent to us.

When men and women pour so much alcohol into themselves that they destroy their lives, they commit a most unnatural act. Defying their instinctive desire for self-preservation, they seem bent upon self-destruction. They work against their own deepest instinct. As they are humbled by the terrific beating administered by alcohol, the grace of God can enter them and expel their obsession. Here their powerful instinct to live can cooperate fully with their Creator's desire to give them new life. For nature and God alike abhor suicide.

But most of our other difficulties don't fall under such a category at all. Every normal person wants, for example, to eat, to reproduce, to be somebody in the society of his fellows. And he wishes to be reasonably safe and secure as he tries to attain these things. Indeed, God made him that way. He did not design man to destroy himself by alcohol, but He did give man instincts to help him to stay alive.

It is nowhere evident, at least in this life, that our Creator expects us fully to eliminate our instinctual drives. So far as we know, it is nowhere on the record that God has completely removed from any human being all his natural drives.

Since most of us are born with an abundance of natural desires, it isn't strange that we often let these far exceed their intended purpose. When they drive us blindly, or we willfully demand that they supply us with more satisfactions or pleasures than are possible or due us, that is the point at which we depart from the degree of perfection that God wishes for us here on earth. That is the measure of our character defects, or, if you wish, of our sins.

If we ask, God will certainly forgive our derelictions. But in no case does He render us white as snow and keep us that way without our cooperation. That is something we are supposed to be willing to work toward ourselves. He asks only that we try as best we know how to make progress in the building of character.

So Step Six--"Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character"--is A.A.'s way of stating the best possible attitude one can take in order to make a beginning on this lifetime job. This does not mean that we expect all our character defects to be lifted out of us as the drive to drink was. A few of them may be, but with most of them we shall have to be content with patient improvement. The key words "entirely ready" underline the fact that we want to aim at the very best we know or can learn.

How many of us have this degree of readiness? In an absolute sense practically nobody has it. The best we can do, with all the honesty that we can summon, is to try to have it. Even then the best of us will discover to our dismay that there is always a sticking point, a point at which we say, "No, I can't give this up yet." And we shall often tread on even more dangerous ground when we cry, "This I will never give up!" Such is the power of our instincts to overreach themselves. No matter how far we have progressed, desires will always be found which oppose the grace of God.

Some who feel they have done well may dispute this, so let's try to think it through a little further. Practically everybody wishes to be rid of his most glaring and destructive handicaps. No one wants to be so proud that he is scorned as a braggart, nor so greedy that he is labeled a thief. No one wants to be angry enough to murder, lustful enough to rape, gluttonous enough to ruin his health. No one wants to be agonized by the chronic pain of envy or to be paralyzed by sloth. Of course, most human beings don't suffer these defects at these rock-bottom levels.

We who have escaped these extremes are apt to congratulate ourselves. Yet can we? After all, hasn't it been self-interest, pure and simple, that has enabled most of us to escape? Not much spiritual effort is involved in avoiding excesses which will bring us punishment anyway. But when we face up to the less violent aspects of these very same defects, then where do we stand?

What we must recognize now is that we exult in some of our defects. We really love them. Who, for example, doesn't like to feel just a little superior to the next fellow, or even quite a lot superior? Isn't it true that we like to let greed masquerade as ambition? To think of liking lust seems impossible. But how many men and women speak love with their lips, and believe what they say, so that they can hide lust in a dark corner of their minds? And even while staying within conventional bounds, many people have to admit that their imaginary sex excursions are apt to be all dressed up as dreams of romance.

Self-righteous anger also can be very enjoyable. In a perverse way we can actually take satisfaction from the fact that many people annoy us, for it brings a comfortable feeling of superiority. Gossip barbed with our anger, a polite form of murder by character assassination, has its satisfactions for us, too. Here we are not trying to help those we criticize; we are trying to proclaim our own righteousness.

When gluttony is less than ruinous, we have a milder word for that, too; we call it "taking our comfort." We live in a world riddled with envy. To a greater or less degree, everybody is infected with it. From this defect we must surely get a warped yet definite satisfaction. Else why would we consume such great amounts of time wishing for what we have not, rather than working for it, or angrily looking for attributes we shall never have, instead of adjusting to the fact, and accepting it? And how often we work hard with no better motive than to be secure and slothful later on-- only we call that "retiring." Consider, too, our talents for procrastination, which is really sloth in five syllables. Nearly anyone could submit a good list of such defects as these, and few of us would seriously think of giving them up, at least until they cause us excessive misery.

Some people, of course, may conclude that they are indeed ready to have all such defects taken from them. But even these people, if they construct a list of still milder defects, will be obliged to admit that they prefer to hang on to some of them. Therefore, it seems plain that few of us can quickly or easily become ready to aim at spiritual and moral perfection; we want to settle for only as much perfection as will get us by in life, according, of course, to our various and sundry ideas of what will get us by. So the difference between "the boys and the men" is the difference between striving for a self-determined objective and for the perfect objective which is of God.

Many will at once ask, "How can we accept the entire implication of Step Six? Why--that is perfection!" This sounds like a hard question, but practically speaking, it isn't. Only Step One, where we made the 100 percent admission we were powerless over alcohol, can be practiced with absolute perfection. The remaining eleven Steps state perfect ideals. They are goals toward which we look, and the measuring sticks by which we estimate our progress. Seen in this light, Step Six is still difficult, but not at all impossible. The only urgent thing is that we make a beginning, and keep trying.

If we would gain any real advantage in the use of this Step on problems other than alcohol, we shall need to make a brand new venture into open-mindedness. We shall need to raise our eyes toward perfection, and be ready to walk in that direction. It will seldom matter how haltingly we walk. The only question will be "Are we ready?"

Looking again at those defects we are still unwilling to give up, we ought to erase the hard-and-fast lines that we have drawn. Perhaps we shall be obliged in some cases still to say, "This I cannot give up yet...," but we should not say to ourselves, "This I will never give up!"

Let's dispose of what appears to be a hazardous open end we have left. It is suggested that we ought to become entirely willing to aim toward perfection. We note that some delay, however, might be pardoned. That word, in the mind of a rationalizing alcoholic, could certainly be given a long term meaning. He could say, "How very easy! Sure, I'll head toward perfection, but I'm certainly not going to hurry any. Maybe I can postpone dealing with some of my problems indefinitely." Of course, this won't do. Such a bluffing of oneself will have to go the way of many another pleasant rationalization. At the very least, we shall have to come to grips with some of our worst character defects and take action toward their removal as quickly as we can.

The moment we say, "No, never!" our minds close against the grace of God. Delay is dangerous, and rebellion may be fatal. This is the exact point at which we abandon limited objectives, and move toward God's will for us.

(I don't particularly care for the use of the word "perfection" in this Step; I think thinking that way is actually another pitfall.)

But the interesting concept here, again, is willingness, as it relates to "letting go" - of the ego, that is, and of one's own self-understanding.   This idea also plays a starring role in the very first paragraph of Step 3: 

Practicing Step Three is like the opening of a door which to all appearances is still closed and locked. All we need is a key, and the decision to swing the door open. There is only one key, and it is called willingness. Once unlocked by willingness, the door opens almost of itself, and looking through it, we shall see a pathway beside which is an inscription. It reads: "This is the way to a faith that works."

And this, alongside the "separating the men from the boys" idea here, says that willingness - in the form of "becoming open to change" -  may be the whole key to the spiritual life.

I will be revisiting that thought at some point.

"The Sacrament of Penance"

From the USCCB site:

The Sacrament of Penance is an experience of the gift of God's boundless mercy.  Not only does it free us from our sins but it also challenges us to have the same kind of compassion and forgiveness for those who sin against us.  We are liberated to be forgivers.  We obtain new insight into the words of the Prayer of St. Francis: "It is in pardoning that we are pardoned."

Jesus entrusted the ministry of reconciliation to the Church.  The Sacrament of Penance is God's gift to us so that any sin committed after Baptism can be forgiven.  In confession we have the opportunity to repent and recover the grace of friendship with God. It is a holy moment in which we place ourselves in his presence and honestly acknowledge our sins, especially mortal sins.  With absolution, we are reconciled to God and the Church. The Sacrament helps us stay close to the truth that we cannot live without God. "In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). While all the Sacraments bring us an experience of the mercy that comes from Christ's dying and rising, it is the Sacrament of Reconciliation that is the unique Sacrament of mercy.

-From the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults

Are you seeking to recover your friendship with God? Has it been a while since your last confession? No matter how long it has been or what your questions may be, we invite you to join us on a journey to rediscover the Sacrament of Penance.

Leaders seeking to develop Penance resources are invited to explore the diocesan and parish resource site. 

"Repentance and Confession in Orthodoxy"

And yes:  Confession is "in decline," apparently, in Orthodoxy as well:, according to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

Confession is in decline and repentance is misappre­hended. The decline and the misapprehension cannot be easily qualified, but they are unmistakable at least inasmuch as they are considered to be no more than incidental prac­tices in the life of the Church today. The "traditional" way of thinking of sin and forgiveness has collapsed among a growing number of Christians. Nothing less than a theo­logical and pastoral renewal is necessary in order to redis­cover the living meaning of repentance and confession.

The degeneration is often attributed to secularization. Yet secularization should not be seen, in a scapegoat fashion, as merely an external enemy. It acts from within the Church. Even those actively involved in church life suffer from for­malism caused by the established patterns of religious prac­tice. There is a need to appeal to the deepening of repen­tance and confession as spiritual realities rather than their imposition as obligatory customs. It is only in a realization of the nature of sacramental life that repentance acquires its significance as a way of renewal and reconciliation in Christ.

Repentance is indeed an act of reconciliation, of reintegra­tion into the Body of Christ, which has been torn asunder by sin. For "if one member suffers, all suffer together" (1 Corinthians 12.26). "Therefore, confess your sins to one another ... that you may be healed" (James 5.16). The whole Church expresses a search for repentance in the repeated words of the Psalmist, commonly known as the "miserere" (Psalms 50). It is through the faith of the community that the individual is readmitted and forgiven. "When Jesus saw their faith he said, 'man, your sins are forgiven' " (Luke 5.20; cf. Matthew 9.2 and Mark 2.5). "Justification" in the New Testament does not mean a transaction - a kind of deal; and repentance defies mechanical definition. It is a continual enactment of freedom, a movement forward, deriving from renewed choice and leading to restoration. The aim of the Christian is not even justification but a re-entry by sinner and saint alike into communion in which God and man meet once again and personal experience of divine life becomes possible. Both prodigal and saint are "repenting sinners."

Repentance is not to be confused with mere remorse, with a self-regarding feeling of being sorry for a wrong done. It is not a state but a stage, a beginning. Rather, it is an invitation to new life, an opening up of new horizons, the gaining of a new vision. Christianity testifies that the past can be undone. It knows the mystery of obliterating or rather renewing memory, of forgiveness and regenera­tion, eschewing the fixed division between the "good" and the "wicked," the pious and the rebellious, the believers and the unbelievers. Indeed, "the last" can be "the first," the sin­ner can reach out to holiness. Passions are conquered by stronger passions; love is overcome by more abundant love. One repents not because one is virtuous, but because human nature can change, because what is impossible for man is possible for God. The motive for repentance is at all times humility, unself-sufficiency - not a means of justification for oneself, or of realizing some abstract idea of goodness, or of receiving a reward in some future life. Just as the strength of God is revealed in the extreme vulnerability of His Son on the Cross, so also the greatest strength of man is to embrace his weakness: "for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I render glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me" (2 Corinthians 12.9). To be flawed is the illogical, perhaps supernatural characteristic of humanity in which one en­counters God.

The Greek term for repentance, metanoia, denotes a change of mind, a reorientation, a fundamental transforma­tion of outlook, of man's vision of the world and of himself, and a new way of loving others and God. In the words of a second-century text, The Shepherd of Hermas, it implies "great understanding,"1 discernment. It involves, that is, not mere regret of past evil but a recognition by man of a dar­kened vision of his own condition, in which sin, by sepa­rating him from God, has reduced him to a divided, auto­nomous existence, depriving him of both his natural glory and freedom. "Repentance," says Basil the Great, "is salva­tion, but lack of understanding is the death of repentance." [2]

It is clear that what is at stake here is not particular acts of contrition, but an attitude, a state of mind. "For this life," states John Chrysostom, "is in truth wholly devoted to repen­tance, penthos and wailing. This is why it is necessary to re­pent, not merely for one or two days, but throughout one's whole life."[3]

Any division within oneself or distinction between the "time to repent" and the "rest of one's time" is, in the lan­guage of the Church, attributed to the demons. The role of these demons is extortionate, offensive - "diavallo," the root of the word "devil," means to tear asunder.[4] We cannot be deprived of true repentance or diverted from its path by the deception of demons. Yet the demons can work through virtue, working to produce a kind of spurious repentance. By nature we are destined to advance and ascend spiri­tually, but the demons divert the course by simulating ad­vance in the form of a fitful movement, a wobbling from side to side, like crabs. One can test the quality of repen­tance by ascertaining whether it is fleeting or fluttering. In­constancy and inconsistency are a danger signal; lastingness is auspicious. One is being tempted by the demons when one is caused "at times to laugh, and at other times to weep."[5]

More at the link.

"Why have Catholics stopped confessing?"

As I suspected, Confession has fallen off drastically among Catholics; the PBS article linked below says it's gone from 38% monthly in 1965 to 8% today.  From Nov. 2005, in Slate; my bold:

A Catholic friend of mine recently went to confession at her parish church for the first time in years. She had personal reasons for wanting to seek absolution, but there was this, too: She said she'd long felt a little sorry for the priests sitting alone in their confessional boxes, waiting for sinners to arrive.

A generation ago, you'd see a lot of us lined up inside Catholic churches on Saturday afternoons, waiting to take our turn in one of the confessionals. We'd recite the familiar phrases ("Bless me Father, for I have sinned"), list our transgressions and the number of times we'd committed them, maybe endure a priestly lecture, and emerge to recite a few Hail Marys as an act of penance. In some parishes, the machinery of forgiveness was so well-oiled you could see the line move. Confession was essential to Catholic faith and a badge of Catholic identity. It also carried with it the promise of personal renewal. Yet in most parishes, the lines for the confessionals have pretty much disappeared. Confession—or the sacrament of reconciliation, as it's officially known—has become the one sacrament casual Catholics feel free to skip. We'll get married in church, we'll be buried from church, and we'll take Communion at Mass. But regularly confessing one's sins to God and the parish priest seems to be a part of fewer and fewer Catholic lives. Where have all the sinners gone?

On the surface, the drop-off in confessors might seem like no surprise.

To congregations scarred by the recent sex-abuse scandal, the thought of turning to a priest for forgiveness might not hold the attraction that it once did. And regular penance is not the only Catholic sacrament that has declined in practice recently: The scant number of young Catholic men training for the sacrament of holy orders, or ordination, for example, has left the church with a serious shortage of priests.

But it's strange that so many lay Catholics should have abandoned the confessional even while secular culture is increasingly awash in confession, apology, and acts of contrition of every sort. Parents own up to pedophilia on Jerry Springer. Authors reveal their fetishes and infidelities in self-lacerating memoirs. On Web sites like Daily Confession and Not Proud, the anonymous poster can unburden his conscience electronically. The confessions on these sites are displayed in categories borrowed from Sunday school lessons: the Ten Commandments or the seven deadly sins. At least one posting I read was framed in the language of the Catholic confessional. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," it began before going on to catalog a series of mostly mundane misdeeds. (Others are simply odd: "I eat ants but only the little red ones. They're sweet as hell and I just can't get enough.")

All this public confessing testifies to the impulse to share our deepest shame. So, why isn't that impulse manifesting itself in Catholics practicing the ritual that was created expressly for that purpose? Of course, Catholic penance—whether it's done in a confessional booth or in a face-to-face meeting with a priest, an innovation introduced in 1973—is supposed to be private and confidential. It may be that in an age of media-fueled exhibitionism, some people want more attention for our misdeeds than can be had from whispering a list of sins in a box in a church. But those Internet confessions won't count toward absolution in the eyes of the church any time soon. "There are no sacraments on the Internet," declared the Pontifical Council for Social Communication unequivocally in 2002.

The Catholic tradition of listing the number and kinds of one's sins in regular, private confessions became standard practice after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Penance took root in Catholic ritual and established itself as, in the words of religion writer Peter Steinfels, "the linchpin of the Catholic sacramental economy." The Eucharist and the other sacraments, Steinfels points out, provided access to God's grace. But expressing contrition in confession could mean the difference between going to heaven or hell: Dying with unconfessed mortal sin on your soul meant eternal torment. Early 20^th-century Catholics might have taken Communion only once a year—some referred to it as their Easter duty—but they generally confessed their sins far more regularly. As recently as 40 years ago, many Catholics would not have thought of accepting the Eucharist until after they'd cleansed their souls.

Today the situation is almost exactly the reverse: Entire congregations receive Communion, while the confessionals remain mostly empty. Between 1965 and 1975, according to the National Opinion Research Council, the proportion of Catholics who confessed monthly fell from 38 percent to 17 percent. A University of Notre Dame study in the 1980s showed the decline continuing. In a 1997 poll by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, only 10 percent of Catholics surveyed said that they confessed at least once a month; another 10 percent said they never went to confession at all.

Like most of the recent changes in the church, the shift occurred in the wake of the Vatican II reforms. The program of renewal for the church that emerged from the Vatican II council said almost nothing about penance and reconciliation. The church's emphasis after Vatican II seemed to be less on guilt and damnation and more on love and forgiveness. The sacrament was given its current kinder, gentler name—reconciliation. Which seemed to reduce the stakes: If priests rarely talked about going to hell anymore, why bother confessing to them? To the extent that confession seemed necessary, the church's post-Vatican II efforts to empower the people in the pews left some Catholics figuring that they could confess their sins directly to God in prayer. At the same time, baby boomers who had been educated in the arcane legalisms of Catholic transgression—is eating meat on Friday a mortal or venial sin?—found themselves as adults thinking less about whether they were breaking the rules and more about their attitudes, intentions, and ideas about how to live a Christian life.

Last but surely not least, there was the growing gap between church teachings and the daily practices of American Catholics, especially when it came to sex and contraception. If you practiced birth control or had sex outside marriage, and you were scrupulous about confession, you might end up spending a lot of time in the confessional sharing every detail of your personal life with the (celibate and male) parish priest. That prospect is particularly bothersome to some Catholic women. I know one who says she'll go back to confession when she can confide in a female priest.

The biggest barrier between Catholics and the confessional, however, may be the real effort it requires. Unloading your transgressions on the Internet takes a few computer clicks—you can do it on your coffee break. But done right, Catholic confession demands a rigorous examination of conscience and real contrition, to say nothing of the prayers you may be assigned for penance and the thinking a priest may ask you to do about the ways you've let yourself and God down. No wonder we are more comfortable with the Eucharist service, which demands only that we line up like consumers and accept something for free. Dorothy Day wrote of having to "rack your brain for even the beginnings of sin." That's work.

A.A. (typically!) offers a good explanation for the "confessional culture" discussed in the article; see my bolded paragraphs below:

All of A.A.'s Twelve Steps ask us to go contrary to our natural desires . . . they all deflate our egos. When it comes to ego deflation, few Steps are harder to take than Five. But scarcely any Step is more necessary to longtime sobriety and peace of mind than this one.

A.A. experience has taught us we cannot live alone with our pressing problems and the character defects which cause or aggravate them. If we have swept the searchlight of Step Four back and forth over our careers, and it has revealed in stark relief those experiences we'd rather not remember, if we have come to know how wrong thinking and action have hurt us and others, then the need to quit living by ourselves with those tormenting ghosts of yesterday gets more urgent than ever. We have to talk to somebody about them.

So intense, though, is our fear and reluctance to do this, that many A.A.'s at first try to bypass Step Five. We search for an easier way--which usually consists of the general and fairly painless admission that when drinking we were sometimes bad actors. Then, for good measure, we add dramatic descriptions of that part of our drinking behavior which our friends probably know about anyhow.

But of the things which really bother and burn us, we say nothing. Certain distressing or humiliating memories, we tell ourselves, ought not be shared with anyone. These will remain our secret. Not a soul must ever know. We hope they'll go to the grave with us.

In other words:  things that don't "bother and burn" are not really very hard to confess to!  If it's just attention-seeking behavior, it doesn't apply to the category.  Anyway, "confessional culture" is mostly vicarious; most people simply watch Jerry Springer - and laugh at it.  Right?

And you don't actually have to be worried about the state of your mortal soul.  "A broken and contrite heart God will not despise" says nothing at all about the afterlife - but it does have a great to say about one's relationship with the Holy One, and therefore about one's ability to live "in harmony with God and man."   That is to say:  with a peaceful heart and in good relationship with others.

The Church itself is, in fact, one of the angriest (and, often, craziest) organizations I've ever been a part of.   While the rest of the world has been prejudiced about homosexuality (for instance) too - the church, in my experience, has been astoundingly hard-hearted and nasty.  (Anglicans in particular have been shockingly vicious, which is why I think Confession - or, rather, the lack of it - might be a root problem.)

A.A. is also full of crazy people, of course - but at the very least, A.A. people know and admit they're crazy.  Alcoholics know something has gone very wrong, and know they need to address their problems if they hope to stay sober and "live to good purpose."  The church, by contrast, is a hospital for people who apparently think they're perfectly fine - and/or that everybody else is a mess.

Of course, some of the Orthodox I've come across - priests, in particular - can be completely nuts, too; obviously Confession itself is not a cure-all.   (Or, perhaps, the Orthodox have abandoned Confession as well; that could be true, too.)

The Church has - for a long time, it seems - used its own elevated self-regard and the buffer of its alleged "holiness" to hide from its own craziness.  But that's not working so well anymore, pretty obviously.

Well, it'll hit bottom eventually, as we all must when living delusionally....

RSA Animate: "The Truth About Dishonesty"

This is pretty good! Worth watching just for the drawing, I think - but of course the content is what I'm mainly interested in here. The voice on the video is Dan Ariely's; he's a professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke.  The part about Confession is especially interesting - and so is the thing about the banking crisis.



HT Brain Pickings.

Step 4: Light

"4.  Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves."

It just struck me that this Step - well, approximately - is (was?) performed regularly - weekly, if not more often - until quite recently, in the Catholic and Orthodox varieties of the Christian faith.  It's quite obviously what Confession is, in its essence - or perhaps better said, what preparation for Confession is.  Which is what I need to go have a look at right now.  Will be back....

OK, here I am again. As I suspected, the Catechism covers "preparation for Confession." (Not the Episcopal Catechism, of course! The Baltimore Catechism of the Catholic Church from 1941, I believe.) Here's what it says there:

Q. 741. What must we do to receive the Sacrament of Penance worthily?
A. To receive the Sacrament of Penance worthily we must do five things:

1. We must examine our conscience.
2. We must have sorrow for our sins.
3. We must make a firm resolution never more to offend God.
4. We must confess our sins to the priest.
5. We must accept the penance which the priest gives us.

Q. 742. What should we pray for in preparing for confession?
A. In preparing for confession we should pray to the Holy Ghost to give us light to know our sins and to understand their guilt; for grace to detest them; for courage to confess them and for strength to keep our resolutions.

Q. 743. What faults do many commit in preparing for confession?
A. In preparing for confession many commit the faults:

1. Of giving too much time to the examination of conscience and little or none in exciting themselves to true sorrow for the sins discovered;
2. Of trying to recall every trifling circumstance, instead of thinking of the means by which they will avoid their sins for the future.

Q. 744. What, then, is the most important part of the preparation for confession?
A. The most important part of the preparation for confession is sincere sorrow for the sins committed and the firm determination to avoid them for the future.

And just for the record, here's a page titled "Self-Examination Before Confession
The Whole Armour of Truth" from "OrthodoxInfo.com," which offers these and other points to ponder:

Sins Against God

Do you pray to God in the morning and evening, before and after meals?
During prayer have you allowed your thoughts to wander?
Have you rushed or gabbled your prayers? or when reading in church?
Do you read the Scriptures daily? Do you read other spiritual writings regularly?
Have you read books whose content is not Orthodox or even anti-Orthodox, or is spiritually damaging?
....

Sins Against Your Neighbours

Do you respect and obey your parents?
Have you offended them by rudeness or contradiction?
(These two apply also to priests, superiors, teachers and elders.)
Have you insulted anyone?
Have you quarreled or fought with anyone? Have you hit anyone?
Are you always respectful to old people?
Are you ever angry, bad tempered or irritable?
Have you called anyone names? Do you use foul language?
Have you derided any that are disabled, poor, old or in some way disadvantaged?
Have you entertained bad feelings, ill will or hatred against anyone?
Have you forgiven those who have offended you?
Have you asked forgiveness from those whom you have offended?
....

Sins Against Yourself

Have you been proud? Do you boast of your abilities, achievements, family, connections or riches?
Do you consider yourself worthy before God?
Are you vain, ambitious? Do you try to win praise and glory?
Do you bear it easily when you are blamed, scolded or treated unjustly? Do you think too much about your looks, outward appearance and the impression you make?
....

Anyone preparing for confession must ask God to help his resolve to tell all his sins. A penitent should prepare for confession and collect his thoughts regarding his sins at least a day before confession. The most valuable thing in the eyes of God is the confession of the sin which weighs most on the conscience.

The questions listed are intended to help the Orthodox Christian examine himself and identify the symptoms of his spiritual ills; they should not be taken as some kind of test to ascertain how well we are doing as if there was a certain "pass-mark." Before God's perfections, we shall always fail. It is for that reason that, as believing Christians, we throw ourselves on the mercy of the Lord and do not trust in our own righteousness.

Remember that our sins can never outweigh God's love towards us. Even if we should seem to have failed with regard to all the points mentioned above and more, we should not lose heart but confess our sins unshamefacedly, we should regret the wrongs we have done, be resolved to make amends, and receive whatever remedy our confessor should be guided to lay upon us. Most of all, one should be assured of the blessing of God which these endeavours will bring upon you.

Most Protestants - outside Anglicanism and Lutheranism perhaps? - do not seem to have a systematic theology of Confession, and therefore wouldn't have one for "preparation for Confession." I could be entirely wrong about this, and am willing to be corrected, if anybody can do so.

Well, this is just an intro to Step 4. I used the word "light" because it comes directly out of the long version of the Step: "Once we have a complete willingness to take inventory, and exert ourselves to do the job thoroughly, a wonderful light falls upon this foggy scene. As we persist, a brand-new kind of confidence is born, and the sense of relief at finally facing ourselves is indescribable. These are the first fruits of Step Four."

The Step views the "character defects" that alcoholics must address in themselves as "instincts gone astray." Somebody once said he found this "interesting" - meaning, I guess, that it's not the usual thing. I don't, to be honest, know what terms the psychiatric literature uses, if there is any dominant point of view (which probably there is not) - and I've never objected to A.A.'s understanding, so I'll discuss this Step from this point of view. (We do get into a discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins, in fact! The Step notes - sardonically, I assume! - that "Some will become quite annoyed if there is talk about immorality, let alone sin. But all who are in the least reasonable will agree upon one point: that there is plenty wrong with us alcoholics about which plenty will have to be done if we are to expect sobriety, progress, and any real ability to cope with life."

Well, yes - we have to change. More later.