Confession, the Catholic and Orthodox practice of listing one’s sins in the presence of a priest who then offers absolution and is sworn to secrecy under pain of eternal damnation, has long been a source of fascination and scorn from those outside these faiths.
The belief that priests are wellsprings of damaging and compromising information freely provided by the penitents who come to the confessional booth seeking forgiveness has, at times, seen priests face extreme pressure from those who wish to find out what was said under the seal.
One example is Father Mateo Correa Magallanes, a Catholic priest in Mexico during the early decades of the 20th century. In the 1920s, the Mexican government engaged in a wholesale persecution of the Catholic Church, enacting numerous anti-clerical laws and precipitating a conflict known as the Cristero War.
In 1927, at the height of this conflict, Magallanes was arrested by the Mexican authorities. Mexican Gen. Eulogio Ortiz then brought him a group of prisoners set to be executed so that the priest could hear their confessions. After Magallanes heard these confessions, Ortiz demanded to know what had been said. The priest refused. Again, Ortiz demanded that he reveal what was said in confession and threatened to kill him. Magallanes’s repeated refusals to break the confessional seal eventually led to his execution. In 2000, Pope John Paul II declared Magallanes a saint in the Catholic Church and a martyr for the faith.
Magallanes was not the first or the last priest willing to die rather than break the seal of confession. St. John Nepomucene, in the 14th century, is said to have been killed by the Bohemian King Wenceslaus IV for refusing to divulge the contents of the queen’s confession. Felipe Císcar Puig and Fernando Olmedo Reguera were each killed in 1936 by Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War for refusing to reveal what they had heard in confession.
What would compel someone to choose death rather than divulge the sins of another? The penalty in the Catholic Church for breaking the seal of confession is excommunication latae sententiae, meaning any priest who breaks the seal is automatically separated from the church and must reconcile himself with the church, lest he risk eternity in hell. For men of faith, the eternal justice of God is of far greater consequence than any punishment or coercion that man can conceive.
But faithless men are famously shortsighted, believing that the threat of prison or death can coerce those who believe their actions will result in eternal salvation or damnation into taking actions contrary to their salvation.
Such shortsighted and faithless men exist today in Washington state, where Gov. Bob Ferguson (D-WA) recently signed into law a bill requiring that any priest who hears of child abuse in the confessional report it to the authorities, confessional seal be damned. Any priest who refuses to comply with the law could face up to a year in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.
During the signing ceremony, Ferguson, who was raised Catholic, said he was “very familiar” with the sacrament of confession. Well, he might want to brush up on his catechism.
“He should know better,” Thomas Daly, the Catholic bishop of Spokane, Washington, told me in an interview. “He claims to be a Catholic, but he doesn’t understand his faith. He’s, I believe, a poorly formed Catholic, poorly catechized.”
Daly said those who pushed the legislation and enacted it fundamentally do not understand the spiritual character of confession, which sets it apart from other forums in which a person may confide in a clergy member.
“There’s a lack of understanding of what confession, reconciliation, is in the Catholic Church,” Daly said, “and they’re confusing it with a conversation that takes place between any denominational clergy and a person.” Although he added that there is a “strong anti-Catholic attitude” in parts of Washington.
“Anti-Catholic” was precisely the terminology used to describe the law by the Department of Justice, which announced earlier this week that it was launching a federal civil rights investigation into Washington for enacting the legislation.
“SB 5375 demands that Catholic priests violate their deeply held faith in order to obey the law, a violation of the Constitution and a breach of the free exercise of religion cannot stand under our Constitutional system of government,” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement.
“They can’t believe that if someone confesses something very serious, like abuse or murder, that we will not break the seal,” Daly said. “They don’t understand it as a sacrament, and it’s sacred nature.”
“The purpose of the sacrament of confession is not the gathering of information. It is to bring the mercy of God to the sinner and the repentant sinner home to God,” he continued. “That’s what the sacrament is about. It’s not a counseling session. It’s not an intelligence gathering forum. It is very clear. The priest, by virtue of his vocation, is entrusted to reconcile sinners to God.”
A priest cannot violate that mission to reconcile sinners to God without imperiling his soul. His vocation as a priest is a vocation from God that is not subject to the whims of the secular state.
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“I tell the men when I ordain them, if you want to be a good confessor, you must first be a good penitent,” Daly said. “We answer to God for this, and the efforts of the state under the guise of concern for the safety of young people is just that — it’s a guise. In the end, we do answer to God, and that penitent-priest relationship is sacred. It has been disrespected, it has been challenged, but nonetheless, it has held true.”
It is hard to see Washington’s law as anything but a direct attack on the Catholic Church and an attempt to impose the state on the church. But for the priests of Washington, prison or a fine is far more preferable than eternal damnation.