The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession Read Online Free PDF Page A

confessional to the therapist’s couch. ‘Counselling and psychotherapy’, he wrote, ‘have become more widespread because they not only make sense to many people but are also ways of effecting change.’ He argued that ‘talk’ therapies have been characterised as spiritual technologies—ways of helping people to change and find healing for their brokenness. He believes that loss and pain are central themes in most therapies, and that adjustment to change in human beings takes time. ‘For me, psychotherapy means “soul healing.” I wonder if part of the current problem is the language of sin rather than that of change and growth. The former is currently deeply unpopular while the latter is understandable to more people.’
    A woman in her late forties wrote that she had enjoyed spiritual direction since her twenties and finds that this, along with daily quiet time, keeping a journal, and the like, is usually enough to allow her to ‘reflect on my journey and see what is going astray, where I am drawn and where I feel driven.’ About once or twice a year she seeks something ‘more formal’, although not necessarily in a Catholic church. ‘I last went to a reconciliation service in Holy Week in an Anglican setting’, she said. She values going on retreats, where she gets‘a great sense of clearing out and a new start.’ This woman was not alone in declaring her belief that ‘forgiveness is there always. The sacrament is more about my recognition that I’ve been forgiven, my acceptance of that forgiveness.’
    There were many correspondents who were critical of Catholic confessional practice even though they had not personally been victims of abuse. Their experiences in youth, however, measured the distance between the pre–Vatican II Church and the Church today. An ex-priest wrote that there is great satisfaction to be gained from confession, since it is only natural to offload the burdens on one’s mind. He takes this to be ‘a fundamental human experience and need.’ Yet, now in his sixties, he recalls the unnecessary, negative impact on children. ‘Our models for purity in adolescence were Dominic Savio an Italian youth of the mid-nineteenth century who died of pleurisy at the age of fifteen. As a child he put stones in his bed to be uncomfortable and wore a hair shirt. Then there was Maria Goretti, murdered during a rape attack by the family’s lodger . . . We fought impure thoughts as energetically and wearily as our father fought the Germans.’ Only today, half a century on, can he see the funny side of it. ‘I can chuckle at our local curate who used to ask us as children —“Are you married or single?”—when we confessed in unbroken voices to having dirty thoughts.’
    A former seminarian, now a professed Buddhist, commented on his years in junior seminary. He never experienced abuse, yet his story reveals the constructive potential of one former Catholic’s negative experiences. ‘For an adolescentwith a little imagination, the idea that sexual transgressions killed the soul was horrifying’, he wrote. ‘You had to see yourself as having deliberately cut yourself off from God’s grace, the most important thing in life, and it made the need for the confessional even stronger: one had to get absolution if one was to restore life to one’s own soul, a restoration that depended absolutely upon the power of the church.’ But, even worse, he wrote, ‘was the hatred of the body that this ideology of mortal sin brought about, a hatred of a body whose impulses led to this constant death of the soul, and a self-loathing at the weakness that led to the succumbing to these evil impulses.’ It was not until he was in his early thirties, he went on, that he overcame the negative feelings this training generated. He wondered whether the process of seminary formation did not lead to a kind of erosion of a future priest’s moral integrity. ‘One either repressed the horror of mortal sin and