Catholic sacrament has moved into the light

The dread, damp palms and anxiety may still be there, but Catholic confession has moved out of the dark, creaky booth where a priest listened to penitents and then meted out penalties to every last sinner to show up.

The confessional box has largely given way to a lighted room where priest and penitent can gaze into each other’s eyes and have a private conversation about lapses in holy living. That’s especially true in Arizona, where Catholic churches tend to be newer.

Or sinners can still anonymously recount their wrongs kneeling behind a screen on a table in a well-lighted room, uttering the traditional words, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned” and noting the date of the last confession. Largely gone is the dark confessional booth, tagged the “sin box,” with a kneeler and demarcating shuttered divider between the two parties.

Also gone are the long lines of penitents who humbly spill out their venial and mortal offenses to God through a priest who is forbidden from repeating them to anyone.

Surveys taken in 1965 and 1995 found that the number of Catholics who went to confession dropped from 38 percent to 8 percent.

Catholics keep records on just about everything, but how many partake in the Eucharist and go to confession are not among them, notes the Rev. Christopher Walsh, a Connecticut priest and author of “The Untapped Power of the Sacrament of Penance — A Priest’s View.”

He estimates that 20 percent of Catholics regularly go to confession. That jibes with statistics that 25 percent to 35 percent of Catholics attend Mass weekly. A 2003 University of Notre Dame study of Catholics on their frequency of confessions found 9 percent went once a month or more; 10 percent several times a year; 27 percent once or twice a year; 52 percent almost never or never; and 1 percent didn’t know or refused to answer. Researchers noted that responses on frequency of Mass attendance was too high, “so probably the reported level of going to private confession is too high also.”

With fewer Catholics choosing it, some parishes find they can accommodate their reconciliation schedule in an hour on Saturday afternoons before Mass and offer them to others by appointment.

Walsh gives possible explanations for the decline: It is not fulfilling for many Catholics. There is a “misinterpretation” of the Vatican II Council that confession itself was obsolete. Catholics are “absorbing the culture” that has been “just casting off the whole idea of sin and guilt.”

Catholics are expected to go to confession at least once a year. Many take advantage of “communal confession” at their parishes, in which six or eight priests come one night during Lent and Advent for two to three hours and hear confessions in private spaces around the sanctuary. Some may intentionally choose priests who don’t know them.

“Confession is all about turning to God,” said the Rev. Kieran Kleczewski, director of the Office of Worship for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix. “It is an act of conversion. It is an act of our whole life. We are kind of drawing, step by step, through our lives closer to God and closer to perfection -- and the hope is that by the time we die, we will be ready for heaven.”

Kleczewski, who is pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas parish in Avondale, notes that Aquinas once said, “If we could get rid of one sin each year of our lives, by the time we died, we’d be perfect.”

“That is kind of the idea of confession,” he said. “Sometimes being a good confessor is to be able to see what may be rooted in the person’s life and suggesting some things the person needs to do in order to deal with it, so it doesn’t become just sin that they confess every time they come to confession.”

Women who have had abortions, he said, “have carried that sin around, and it has haunted them for 20 or 30 years. They cannot find solace. . . . Sometimes if I can get a woman to give a name to that child, to recognize that that was a child and name that child,” she can move on in her life. In his parish, Kleczewski encourages such women to visit Holy Cross Cemetery nearby, sit beside its statue of Rachel who weeps for her children, speak the name given that child and “tell that child how sorry you are that you took their life and then to recognize that God has forgiven you for this sin.”

Sometimes Catholics are told, “Oh, yeah, I’d love to be a Catholic. You can do whatever you want. Go to confession, and you can start all over again,” Kleczewski said. What matters, he said, is that the penitent is truly sorry for a transgression, undergoes the sacrament and receives absolution.

It need not be formally done, the priest said. It can be at any time the sinner and priest can find private space. “The place isn’t important, but it’s the matter, that sorrow of the heart, a desire to kind of be made right before God,” he said.

Kleczewski said people don’t fall into the habit of a particular sin overnight. He reminds penitents of that. “Keep working, don’t give up,” he tells them, sometimes pronouncing a more creative form of penance, or punishment, to be carried out.

“You are not supposed to come to the confessional unless you’ve spent some time examining your conscience,” he said. “A sorrowful heart is one of the first requirements for the sacrament. It starts with that.”

Kleczewski said he is encouraged that young Catholics are showing “a huge return to the sacrament.”

Walsh and Kleczewski said they are not discouraged or jaded by constantly hearing the sordid details of people’s misdeeds. “I think the older you become as a priest, the more you realize the brokenness of humanity,” Kleczewski said, “and it doesn’t matter in a sense of who the individuals are, what are their backgrounds, what their education may be, how rich or poor they are.”

Trying to help people to move on in their lives to overcome that brokenness and separation for God, he said, “is more humbling than anything.”

Kleczewski calls confession an “embarrassment kind of owning up to another human being who is sitting there in the place of Christ.” It is a “process of thinking through ‘What have I done?’ ” — thus bringing about a “deeper understanding of what needs changing.”

Fifty years ago, Walsh said, Catholics often went to confession weekly and got only a few minutes with the priest. “It was almost rote and automatic” and was “probably not fulfilling for the penitent or the priest,” he said.

Yet it remains today “a powerful way to reconcile people to the Lord, to the church and often their own selves,” Walsh said.

“Guilt is really very human and a very mature action when we know we are doing something wrong,” he said. Having a process for removing it and being forgiven is healthy and liberating, he said.