The state should stay clear of the confession booth

The details of the Pennsylvania grand jury report on the sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church are revolting. And to read it from Australia is to encounter something familiar: A royal commission released a horrific report last year examining how Australian institutions had mishandled child sex abuse for decades.

The range of Australian institutions implicated — religious and secular — and the numbers of children abused, including examples of abuse taking place in the confessional box itself, are vast. The recommendations were also vast, and local governments across the country have widely accepted them.

The most controversial suggestion was to change the law to require priests to report people who admit to committing sexual crimes during confession. The Pennsylvania grand jury did not go that far; it left the confessional booth alone.

In Australia, the state of Victoria has delayed its decision on confessions, having made a point of accepting most of the other recommendations. This contrasts with commitments given by Tasmania, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory. The state of South Australia, meanwhile, has already made it a crime for priests to fail to report abuse confessed to in church.

Some advocates for abuse victims, like Leonie Sheedy from the Care Leavers Australasia Network, have accused Victoria of “putting the church ahead of children.”

That sentiment is easy to understand, particularly when you absorb the royal commission’s discussion about the confession box.

In Australia, as in Pennsylvania, the church’s culture of secrecy and cover up underwrote the scourge of child sex abuse. The royal commission found that the confessional was part of that broader culture of secrecy.

The commission relied on the expert testimony of psychologists who said that the practice of confession, including the absolution granted by priests, assuaged the guilt of child abusers, at times allowing them to rationalize their behavior and proceed as if with a clean moral slate, leading to more abuse. Confessors were rarely reprimanded, often let off lightly, and permitted to minimize the gravity of their offenses.

It was an ethos of forgiveness, inclined to view child sex abuse through the lens of sin, rather than crime. The consequences were devastating. Confessors and priests alike came to the misguided conclusion that God was the primary, or even the sole, victim of the abuse, leaving human victims to continue suffering.

Against all that, as far as the secular state is concerned, there is no legitimate reason to privilege an institution that has contributed to such monstrous wrongdoings. From this viewpoint, exempting priests who hear confessions from mandatory reporting of crime, when doctors and teachers aren’t, simply because that’s what canon law requires, places the church above the law.

And yet the focus on the confession booth is not the answer, mainly because it’s unlikely that priests will comply and turn in confessors.

For a Catholic priest to violate the confessional seal and report a confessed abuser is to face the gravest spiritual penalty the church can muster: excommunication and eternal damnation. You don’t need to value canon law or Catholicism to recognize that is an extremely serious matter for someone who does. So serious, in fact, that the state has no way of outbidding it.

What criminal penalty can be severe enough to make someone who is Catholic enough to be a priest decide to risk excommunication? South Australia has set the punishment for failing to report abuse at a maximum of about $7,500. Who are these priests who value their spiritual salvation about as much as they might value a secondhand car?

Little wonder that South Australian priests have echoed their peers from around the country in declaring they will defy this law. The royal commission acknowledged this possibility, having heard from several priests who said as much in their testimony.

For all of its impressive rigor, the royal commission report simply doesn’t engage with the question of what to do about a law that seems likely to be ignored.

But the royal commission reported on testimony from several priests who said, in the words of one, that a priest hearing confessions “has always been required to have at least ‘moral certitude’ of the penitent’s contrition and purpose of amendment before granting absolution.”

Accordingly, the commission’s said that “a priest can defer granting absolution until the act of satisfaction” has been carried out. For example, the report says, a confessed abuser would not be forgiven by a priest unless he reports himself to the police. Several priests told the commission that this is exactly what priests hearing confession should do.

This approach is far more likely to curtail reoffending than any attempt to compromise the institution of the confessional. It certainly addresses the commission’s finding that the easy availability of absolution contributes to reoffending. It would increase the likelihood that abusers will go to the authorities since it is the only way they can receive forgiveness.

And since keeping the state out of the confession booth wouldn’t require priests to commit an excommunicable offence, it is far more likely to be applied than a law that extends mandatory reporting into the confessional booth.

Whatever power the state possesses, it cannot simply rewrite canon law, and it cannot legislate away people’s religious convictions, however much it might want to. The best approach would operate within the confines of Catholic practice, and thus remain equally persuasive anywhere it was adopted, whether in Victoria or Pennsylvania.

(Waleed Aly lectures on politics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.)