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

separation from God and acted almost as an automaton; or one was cynical about the whole story of mortal sin and sexual transgression and got on with it under the cover of priestly prestige.’ He concluded by saying, ‘Thank God I never became a priest.’
    Only one bishop wrote in response to my invitation in The Tablet . Like Anthony Kenny, author of The Path from Rome (discussed in Chapter 11 ), the bishop turned the tables by writing about the burdens of a confessor. ‘We ask about the effect on the penitent of the “shopping list” confession, but what about its effect on the priest? I found that the daily round of almost entirely predictable minor infringements ofwhat was perceived of as “Church rules” quite frustrating and dispiriting. Only once did I experience a satisfactory encounter when one individual actually said that he was not ready for absolution at the end of the meeting, and was not ready for some time after that.’ The bishop believes that the ‘shopping list’ confessions were an attempt to engage with the guilt that many felt and still feel as Catholics. ‘On the one hand’, he said, ‘I think this is a pity that Catholics were made to feel guilty by an over-emphasis on sin and the threat of hell, but on the other hand it is a recognition that none of us is responding sufficiently to the call of the gospel.’ The laundry list and the brief penance gave people temporary relief, he went on, but ‘often (in my own experience) more akin to coming out of the dentist, glad the experience is over and pleased to have been strong enough to do it.’ He asserted that:
    the people in our churches are not good or less good because they come to confession or not. They are going to be ‘better Catholics’ (whatever that might mean) if they are trying to deepen their understanding of what faith might mean to them. Deus Caritas Est [God Is Love] reminds us that faith is an encounter with a person, and that the basic message of the gospel is that ‘God loved the world so much . . .’ If the Sacrament of Reconciliation can help us to be more loveable, then all the better; if it reinforces my belief that I am not loveable, then so much the worse.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    T HIS BOOK OWES ITS EXISTENCE TO the late Peter Carson, my publisher for forty years at Allen Lane, Viking-Penguin, and Profile Books. Peter midwifed the text of this book until his death in January 2013. He is sorely missed by colleagues and the rest of the publishing world. Being above all an ‘authors’ publisher’, he is especially missed by the many writers he discovered, nurtured, and inspired. My personal debt to him is incalculable.
    My research has drawn on a wide circuit of recent scholarly work on the role of confession in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, especially in the archives of the Spanish Inquisition and canon law tribunals in Italy. Counter-Reformation studies continue to attract scholars, and their work provides new perspectives and overviews of a period and subject that, from a Catholic view, had become closer to apologetics than authentic history. A critical overview of modern manuals of moral and pastoral theology, from Alphonsus Liguori to Henry Davis, has enabled me to form an impression of a confessor’s formation in the seminaries through the first two-thirds of the past century. For the link between sexual abuseand confession in the second half of the twentieth century, official reports from the United States, Canada, Ireland, Germany, and Australia have been crucial. Information continues to come in piecemeal via the media and the courts.
    I was part of a seminar at University College, Dublin, in the spring of 2012 run by Dr. Marie Keenan, whose interviews with offending priests (on leaving jail) have proved essential to my research. I am grateful to Dr. Keenan for permission to quote from interviews with priests who had served jail sentences as a result of convictions relating to clerical sexual