The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession by John Cornwell

AUTHOR’S NOTE
    W HEN I BEGAN RESEARCH FOR THIS BOOK, I ASKED C ATHOLIC friends: ‘How long since your last confession?’ I heard ‘twenty years’, ‘thirty years’, and an occasional ‘two months’. Sometimes I was told ‘Mind your own business’. It seems only right to state my own circumstance from the outset.
    Brought up after the Second World War in London’s East End by a devout mother of Irish extraction, I was instructed in the Catholic faith by nuns from the age of five. I made my first confession at age seven, the day before my first communion. On Saturday afternoons or evenings, all the family, including four siblings, joined the lengthy queues at our local church to confess our sins—all except my father, that is, who only became a Catholic to marry my mother.
    In confession, as we were taught, you started by telling the priest how many weeks or months had elapsed since your last confession. You listed the sins committed since that last confession, then said a prayer of contrition. The priest would ask some questions to clarify the nature of the sins you had told him. He might also offer spiritual advice. You were obliged to feel genuinely sorry for having offended God, andto declare that you would try not to commit those sins again. If it was possible to make reparation to the people you had wronged, it was important to do so. The priest then imposed a penance—usually a few prayers—and said the words of absolution. We were told that absolution relieved us of the guilt for the sins we had confessed. We were taught that in the case of a mortal sin (a grave sin deserving of Hell), absolution lifted the dire penalty of eternal punishment. Nowadays, Catholics are commonly told that absolution reconciles them to God’s love.
    My father was convinced, like many non-Catholics, that confession allowed Catholics to commit sins, have them forgiven (and feel good), then commit them again. As a well-taught Catholic, I knew better. Absolution did not work unless you had a ‘firm purpose of amendment’. That determination, we realised, was as fragile as human nature itself.
    I served Mass at our local church every morning from the age of ten. At age twelve I admitted to our parish priest that I wanted to be like him—a priest. In retrospect, this was odd, for Father James Cooney—austere, desiccated, humourless—was hardly an attractive role model. My mother said that going to confession with him was like ‘going on trial for your life’. But I had fallen in love with the ritual of the Mass and would spend hours in the privacy of my bedroom bobbing up and down before a makeshift altar, muttering mumbo-jumbo pretend Latin. The following year I was enrolled in a junior seminary—a monastic boarding school for boys, 150 miles from home, where I was to spend five years receiving a privilegededucation, including Latin and Greek, in preparation for senior seminary.
    I got on well with most of our priest-teachers, who worked hard to bring us to a high standard of education. They were generally kind men and exemplary models of priesthood. One day, however, I was sexually propositioned by one of our priests while he was hearing my confession. I realised that externals of clerical piety are no guarantee of authentic holiness. I would never again enjoy unalloyed trust in the beneficence of priests, especially in confession. I nevertheless proceeded at eighteen to the senior seminary, where I stayed long enough to complete the course in philosophy of religion and experience the rigorous priestly formation of that era, including instructions that would shape a future confessor. I was becoming a ‘Catholic cleric’. My vocation had become a matter of habit rather than choice. I had confessed every week of my life—from boyhood to the age of twenty-one.
    After seven years of seminary life, junior and senior, I came to see that the priesthood was not for me. I knew in my heart of hearts, and in my genitals, that I