Morrow's question put simply is ‘why did Catholics stop going to confession’? From the 1950s, when it was normal to see long lines of penitents in most parish churches on Saturday evenings, to the 1970s when the practice effectively disappeared in many places – what happened?
She develops a complex answer, parts of which are specific to the American context but most of which are applicable elsewhere. It was, she says, a combination of sociological changes in American Catholicism, changes in the penitential theology and practices of the Church, developments in moral theology particularly in relation to the understanding of sin, and the crisis of Humanae Vitae, that together account for the dramatic change.
As a migrant Church moved from the ghettoes to join the American middle classes in their religiously pluralist suburbs, so too the practices of those migrant communities changed. Those practices – confession on Saturdays, fish on Fridays, serious fasting during Lent – had helped to give them a strong sense of identity within, more often over against, the dominant culture. These social and cultural changes impacted on people's sense of identity and on the ways in which they had before felt it necessary to protect the communal identity of a Catholic ‘subculture’. Add to that changes coming from the broader culture in which Catholics now moved, through things like the rise of counseling and psychology, shifting notions of sexuality and sexual sin, and a stronger sense of individual freedom.
Another source of change came from within the Catholic community itself. The sacrament of penance was the pinnacle of a spirituality that included a range of devotional and penitential practices. These were interpreted by a theological language that offered an understanding not only of suffering to be accepted and offered up in union with the sufferings of Christ, but also of penances to be freely chosen. The language of reparation and satisfaction, of temporal punishment due to sin, of indulgences and expiation, provided a rationale within which the practice of confession, often of frequent devotional confession, made perfect sense.
Morrow then contrasts the famous handbooks of neo‐scholastic moral theology authored by the Jesuits Ford and Kelly with the then increasingly influential personalist moral theology of Bernard Häring. Very quickly the language within which the practice of frequent confession had made perfect sense was replaced with a theological language in which the sacrament was not rejected, but in which its practice was to be more intentional, conscious and free, more meaningful.
It is reasonable to link with that personalist theology of the 1960s Paul VI's instruction on penance issued immediately after Vatican II (Paenitemini, 1966) and interpreted in a particular way by the American hierarchy. The values of the day were ‘active and conscious participation’ on the part of believers, values that were taken to express a more mature and adult faith. Earlier ways of practicing penance and of celebrating the sacrament came to be regarded as immature, even infantile, in the kind of moral responsibility they encouraged and the attitudes to sin and punishment they endorsed.
So changes came in the Church's laws of fasting and abstinence, as Catholics were encouraged not to give up penance but to choose for themselves appropriate penances, encouraged to think of actions that would be positive, such as works of mercy and charity, instead of choosing penances that seemed simply negative or egoistic, such as giving up chocolate or alcohol for a few weeks. Penance was to be more ‘meaningful and effective’: without being explicit about it Morrow alerts the reader to the utilitarianism, rationalism and even pelagianism implicit in such aspirations.
What seemed to some like a simple change of discipline, allowing Catholics freedom to choose a penance other than abstaining from meat on Fridays, actually had more radical consequences. This happened on a number of levels. Sociologically it removed one of the most powerful identity markers of a Catholic community, particularly in a minority situation. From being a tribe that ‘does not eat meat on Fridays’ Catholics became more difficult to distinguish from anybody else, mixing in more smoothly with their neighbours without embarrassing and quaint dietary requirements.
At another level – that of confidence in Church authority – the changes in regard to penance had serious consequences. Eating meat on a Friday had been not just a recommended practice but a matter of Church law which provided the grave matter that would make its infringement, carried out with clear knowledge and full consent, mortally sinful. What had been mortally sinful the year before was now not sinful at all. Those whose penance now was to give extra money to the poor, or to visit the sick or prisoners, could have their steak on a Friday without any qualms of conscience. The year before it had been matter for the anxiety, guilt and sometimes scrupulosity that were often taken to characterize ‘the Catholic conscience’.
This paved the way for an even more serious development following on the publication of Humanae Vitae (1968). If what had been mortally sinful could become morally acceptable by a decision of the magisterium, perhaps other things that had been considered in the same way might also be changed by the same authority. In the American Catholic church there were high expectations of such a change in regard to the use of artificial contraception. One of the fears of the minority group advising Paul VI was that a change in the Church's teaching would seriously undermine the confidence of Catholics in the Church's teaching authority. The encyclical's publication led to precisely the loss of confidence feared by the minority. Priests were sacked and demoted for opposing the decision of the Pope, hierarchies twisted and turned as they sought to present interpretations that would be faithful to the encyclical and yet acceptable to their people, people stopped confessing their use of contraception because they could not be sure what approach a particular priest might take, eventually people stopped confessing altogether as they lost confidence in the wisdom of the Church's teaching on a matter about which there was agreement in the society at large that it was a matter of personal conscience.
Put all this together, add another forty years of argument about sexual and marital morality, and you get the present situation where the virtue of penance is hardly considered, the sacrament of penance is rarely celebrated, and the language of reparation, contrition and satisfaction is an unknown dialect for most Catholics under the age of sixty.
While Morrow's book is at times repetitive, overall it is a stimulating reflection on a major cultural and spiritual change within the Church. It will prove a valuable resource for any theological reflection on the virtue and sacrament of penance today.
