One of the most haunting literary depictions of a confession appears toward the end of Brian Moore’s extraordinary novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Worn down by loneliness, misfortune, religious doubt and bouts of drunkenness, Miss Hearne seeks desperate relief in the sacrament of confession. Trembling, she inserts herself in line during a shift reserved for children. When she enters the confessional, the priest chides her for her boldness in coming during the children’s time. Miss Hearne responds by pleading for him to hear a general confession, and she begins to pour out her existential struggle with faith and her daily struggles with depression and drink.
In the midst of her raw disclosures, she catches a glimpse of the confessor through the grill of the confessional and goes silent: “She had seen his face. A weary face, his cheek resting on the palm of his hand, his eyes shut. He’s not listening, her mind cried. Not listening!”
The realization is crushing. The sacramental exchange then goes on without her. Prompted by Miss Hearne’s sudden silence, the priest offers a formulaic rebuke, indicates a penance and speaks the formula of absolution. In the end, Moore writes, “she was alone in the darkness. Shriven, her sins were washed away,” while the priest moved on to the young penitent waiting on the other side of the confessional.
What hurt Judith Hearne most was that her confessor had been so disinterested in her. “God’s anointed, with God’s guidance, he should have known it was important, perhaps the most important confession of my life. But he didn’t see that. And if he didn’t see, why didn’t You tell him, O Sacred Heart, why didn’t you guide him, help him to help me? Why?” The inattentive confessor and the botched exchange lead to a crisis of faith in which Judith Hearne understands the Sacred Heart of Jesus to be cruel, unresponsive, maybe even made up.
In the conclusion of his artful account of American participation in the sacrament of confession, For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America, James O’Toole offers a succinct explanation of the sacrament’s collapse after the Second Vatican Council (1963-65): “Catholics did not enjoy confessing, and they often struggled to achieve the relief and reassurance it was supposed to offer.”
So many contingencies, so many variables enter into the process of the sacrament as O’Toole describes it: contrition (with its detailed examination of conscience); the dramatic, evanescent confessional exchange itself; and the penance imposed to complete the sacrament. A variety of contingencies—emphases within an examination of conscience, the context and physical components of the confession, the mood and competence of the confessor—all converge in a delicate moment that could be one of relief or one of intensified burden for the penitent.
These many contingent elements of the sacrament seem to work against its efficacy. So many things can go wrong: haphazard preparation, a misunderstood word, a misinterpreted tone, a confessor’s inexperience, as well as the penitent’s ignorance of a prescribed element within this “oral transaction,” could so easily alienate a penitent or confuse a confessor. No wonder, as O’Toole writes, aspects of confession can become “odious” or “distasteful.”
Even without these contingencies, even with a penitent’s habitual use of the sacrament, even with a kind, attentive and competent confessor, O’Toole posits a basic theme right from the beginning:
For many Catholics, almost nothing about their religion was harder than going to confession…. That they submitted themselves to it as a matter of course confirmed the sense that theirs was a demanding but ultimately redeeming faith.
Some basic facts can help situate O’Toole’s study. First, for Catholics in the United States from the early 1800s through the 1970s, “[p]arishioners and pastors encountered one another, however anonymously, most often in the confessional.” O’Toole cites diary entries and tally sheets that tell of the sheer numbers of people going to confession. For example, over 12 months in 1896-97, Jesuit priests at St. Francis Xavier Parish in New York City heard 173,394 confessions. Nearly 75 years later, just at the beginning of the collapse in number of confessions, the Franciscans at St. Francis of Assisi Parish near Penn Station in New York installed automatic counters in the kneelers of their busy confessionals. In 1970, the parish recorded more than 275,000 confessions.
Some more facts: Thoughtful preparation was a crucial part of the process of the sacrament. Laypeople were trained how to weigh the gravity of their sins: “[Ordinary laypeople] knew how to identify what they had done wrong. They knew how to describe their failings in a few words, and they knew both why these offenses were wrong and why they should ask for forgiveness for them,” O’Toole writes. “Those understandings shaped the mental universe of American Catholics in profound ways.”
This mental universe was inscribed into Catholics when they were students and it persisted through adulthood. O’Toole summarizes the consequence of this intricate moral vision and its taxonomies wonderfully:
That framework was complicated and expansive, filled with categories and distinctions: original and actual sins; mortal and venial sins, sins of omission and sins of commission; grievous matter, sufficient reflection, and full consent; proximate and remote occasions of sin; necessary and unnecessary occasions. Detailed though it was, this method of mental analysis was, the church believed, capable of being mastered by ordinary parishioners and even by children. The Church had given Catholics the tools, the words, to judge the moral and ethical dimensions of their lives, to know right and wrong.
O’Toole is most insightful in delineating many of the causes of collapse: the speed with which confession was administered, seemingly minimizing the experience; priestly behavior, from overbearing to indifferent to actually hurtful; the reality of gender—female penitents were (and are) always disclosing their sins to a man; the confessor’s trivializing of sins or the confessor’s fixation on the trivial; and the reality of the Second Vatican Council. O’Toole articulates well the impact of this massively consequential event in the life of the church and its effect on participation in confession:
[Laymen and women] still considered themselves to be Catholics, still participated (occasionally or even regularly) in the church’s rituals, still sent their children to Catholic schools, from kindergarten to college. But they were now doing all that on renegotiated terms. In some cases, they explicitly rejected specific church teachings—on clerical celibacy, on the ordination of women, on homosexuality—but they nonetheless considered themselves to be Catholic. And in particular, these “defecting” Catholics were deciding that they would no longer go to confession.
In the end, the vast majority of Catholics decided not to go to confession anymore. As so many elements of ecclesial life seemed up for renegotiation in light of the council, Catholics decided that the distasteful aspects and the contingencies of the experience of confession did not justify the risk or the effort of entering the confessional in order to be shriven.
O’Toole’s account of the sacrament concludes where it began, in a parish church in Leominster, Mass., and a visitor’s decision to observe the parish’s confessional routine but not participate in the sacrament itself.
A missed opportunity. The confessional has, for this reviewer, been a place of tremendous grace, both as a confessor and as a penitent. When I turn myself in at the Franciscan parish in New York City noted above, I always mark the fact that my confessor never knows who might walk in the door to his busy weekday confessional. A Jesuit priest, a church historian, someone suffering a crisis like Judith Hearne. Yet, somehow grace always surrounds the exchange. The sacrament is, after all, effected and made effective by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Perhaps the collapse in participation has helped confessors and penitents alike recognize anew the gravity and grace of the confessional exchange, making it not just more palatable but also a vital, life-giving and necessary part of the life of a Catholic. Perhaps, in collapse, the confessional process itself has been shriven of some of its distasteful contingencies.
This article appears in June 2026.
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