The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  Historians of ideas have pondered the significance of the confessional box as a symptom, or perhaps even a cause, of a shift in notions of the mind and self-consciousness at the dawning of the modern period.16 According to this view, John Locke’s description of the self as an ‘empty cabinet’ found its physical counterpart in the penitent’s location in a cubicle. Isolation in the dark prompts a heightened sense of interiority. The confessional box thus encourages an image of the soul as essentially disembodied. In the dark box, penitents searched their consciences—those innermost thoughts known only to themselves and to God—sharing secrets with His representative, mediator, and judge on earth: the confessor. The advent of the dark box arguably prompted a shift of emphasis: from preoccupation with moral precepts and laws to an examination of subjective intentions; from the public or social nature of sin to the scrupulous examination of recollected motivation. Hence the confessional box had its part to play in a further shift within Catholicism from a consequentialist morality to interiorised, ‘casuistic’ soul-searching.

  The box was meant to bring an end to the scandal of sexual solicitation, yet cases of sexual abuse of women brought against confessors appeared to be on the increase even as the Borromeo confessional became more widely used. This increase may well have been due to improved reporting of such incidents, especially in Spain. By 1561 Pope Pius IV had given permission to the Spanish Inquisition to prosecute the ‘crime’, as opposed to the ‘abuse’, of seducing women sexually in the confessional—sollicitatio ad turpia. But there was independent and general evidence that such sexual attacks were occurring despite, and perhaps even because of, the emergence of the dark box.

  At a time when priests were being called to strict discipline in matters of chastity, celibacy, and sins of impurity, the new confessional apparatus was to become—for many confessors, it appears—a provocation to unchastity. Borromeo’s Avertenze clearly acknowledged as much, warning that a confessor could find his ‘soul stained after hearing the filth of others.’ The advice is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s satirical evocation in Tale of a Tub of the confessional box as a ‘whispering office’ for the purpose of ‘evomition’. It was widely recognised that within the privacy of the confessional booth, the whispered sins, especially of married women—and especially the details of the bedchamber, recounted under cross-examination—could inflame the imagination of a confessor, leading to ‘occasions of sin’ on his part. Cardinal Thomas Cajetan, Luther’s great antagonist, had warned confessors of the danger of probing too deeply into a penitent’s sexual life. They should employ modest euphemisms: ‘If . . . a woman confesses to having been known outside the natural vessel, this suffices; it should not be asked in what part of the body.’ The Borromeo box, for all its physical barriers, still allowed for whispered pillow talk in the dark: the penitent’s voice and breath up close to the confessor’s ear. Many married women, suffering from domestic and marital frustrations, became addicted to the atmosphere of crepuscular intimacy. Confessors, for their own reasons and circumstances, were equally vulnerable. As the provost of Santa Fedele, a new Jesuit church in Milan, noted (arguing that the penitent should not face the grille full on, but sideways to it), there were distinct dangers in the circumstance of a ‘woman’s mouth being close to the confessor’s ear’.17

  IN THE CENTURIES FOLLOWING the Council of Trent, a variety of ecclesiastical and secular tribunals across Europe, including episcopal chancellories, the Holy Office in Rome, and the Spanish Inquisition, sought to enforce Trent’s conciliar decrees. From Spain to France, Germany, and Italy, the surviving documentation provides an overview of the emotional and psychological dimensions of confessional practice even as bishops attempted to make confession a focus of regular Catholic practice and constrained clerics to new standards of discipline. In Spain, the scholarly work achieved by Professor Stephen Haliczer in the Archivo Histórico Nacional, especially in the Sección de Inquisición, is instructive. Haliczer, who presented his findings in Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned, published in 1996, offers an insight into the broad scope of the problem of sexual solicitation. His research involved thousands of cases in this most Catholic of countries. The friars, or mendicant preaching orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians), were the greatest offenders. This is not surprising, given their licence to wander far and wide, largely free of episcopal jurisdiction. The friars had extensive access to convents of nuns, whose numbers in Spain increased from 25,000 in 1591 to 33,000 in 1747. Nuns, being obliged to make their confessions monthly, now had more frequent contact with confessors. Given the economic and familial pressures that sent many women reluctantly into the cloister, and given, moreover, the harsher rules of enclosure and asceticism laid down by the Council of Trent, it is not surprising that problems arose within the confessor-penitent relationship in religious communities of women. The Council of Trent had not only imposed virtual imprisonment on religious orders of women, but had also deprived them of sensory and imaginative stimuli. Even as Baroque music and painting flourished outside their walls, many communities were forbidden even to sing the Divine Office, or to display pictures and sculpture. From a twentieth-century perspective, it is clear that the dependency associated with transference in psychotherapy was common. It was customary for confessors to speak of penitent nuns as their ‘spiritual daughters’, and in one Venetian convent there was talk of ‘marriages’ taking place between friars and nuns. One Don Apollinario of Ravenna, giving witness to a tribunal, remembered how a Don Gregorio ‘was given a nun as his spiritual friend, and apparently gave her a ring and they carried out certain ceremonies.’18

  In a book for confessors published in 1644, Alonso de Andrade in Spain warned his readers that nuns became obsessed with their confessors, so much so ‘that they neither thought nor spoke of anything else.’ By the same token, a predatory confessor could carry out his attempted and successful seductions on vulnerable women unobserved. Mary Laven’s study of nuns in Venice, where there were more than fifty convents during the early modern period, reveals the extent of the depravity of some convent chaplains even during the first flush of the Counter-Reformation. A contemporary commentator, Ippolito Capilupi, declared that one confessor-seducer existed ‘alone, like a great Turk in his Seraglio’. Giovanni Pietro Lion (later beheaded for his crimes) had spiritual charge of a convent of four hundred nuns on the Giudecca. Capilupi wrote: ‘When he confessed one of the nuns whom he liked, he would in the very act of confession try to draw her to his will with some pre-prepared speech, and by placing his hands upon her in order to excite the carnal appetite in her more readily; and if he found her at all opposed to his advances he would praise her greatly for her strength and constancy, and would seek to have her understand that he was moved to try her as a test of her goodness.’19

  The phenomenon of sexual solicitation in the confessional during this period is perhaps inseparable from the background of clerical frustrations, inadequacies, and stress. Alcoholism among mendicant confessors was common. Take Fra Gaspar de Nájera, who, reportedly drunk in the middle of the day, attempted to seduce a fifteen-year-old girl in confession, then followed her from the church back to her home. Only after soliciting sex from nine female penitents was he brought before the Inquisition. In another case, reported to the tribunal in the Canaries in 1784, Fra Antonio de Arvelo, a highly intelligent scholar, was said to be so bored with hearing confessions under obedience to his superiors that he took to the bottle. He would hear confessions lying in bed, the worse for drink. He confessed to the Inquisition tribunal that he tried to guess his penitents’ sins before they confessed them. Eventually he was denounced for attempting to draw women penitents into his bed.20

  Some parish priests were in the habit of hearing the confessions of sickly female penitents in their bedrooms. In the 1580s Fra Gabriel de Osca was accused of soliciting four female penitents while they lay ill in bed. On one occasion he offered to soothe one Lucia Hernandez of what ailed her,
placing his hand under her shift. When the hand wandered to her thighs, she screamed. On other occasions he reversed the tactic and invited women into his bedroom, where he allegedly lay sick, from which vantage point he was liable to pull the penitent into the bed with him.21

  The Inquisition records show nevertheless that 41 per cent of solicitation cases in Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were at least initiated from within the box. The presence of a screen did not stop assignations, and many of the confessionals were in any case rudimentary affairs. There were reports of screens full of holes, which allowed a priest to touch the faces of female penitents. We hear of a box in a Dominican convent which had a special opening so that the confessor could hold the hands of penitents. We have the story of José Borges of Valencia, who would use the confessional to make regular trysts with his lover. She would then meet with him later in the bedroom of the house of a widow friend of his. Then there was the prior of a Carmelite monastery in Ciudad Real who made dates within the secrecy of the box for subsequent meetings with his amour Maria Lopez Molina.22

  Haliczer’s study of sexual abuse in the confessionals of Spain puts the average age of women victims at twenty-seven. Children, whether boys or girls, were not abused in the confessional at that time only because the age of first confession was invariably after puberty. Outside of the confessional, however, we do see instances of sexual acts involving minors. For example, a Franciscan priest, José Nuela, was deprived by his superiors of the right to hear confessions after he was discovered masturbating in front of a young boy.23

  Boys in the educational care of priests were not immune from abuse by priests, as shown by the scandal of the Pious Schools and their associated order of teaching priests, founded at the beginning of the seventeenth century in Rome by Father José de Calasanz. The harsh disciplinary regime, imposed mainly on boys from poverty-stricken families, can be surmised by Father Calasanz’s warning that his priestly teachers should not draw blood from the noses and ears of their pupils, or leave bruises or cuts. One of the leading figures of the schools, a Father Stefano Cherubini, went beyond such masochistic punishments to engage in sexual abuse. We do not have the precise details of his activities, as he and his influential family burnt the documents that had been assembled to report him to the Holy Office. Calasanz, who was eventually canonized for his good deeds for poor youth, moved Cherubini from place to place, where he proceeded to reoffend.24

  ALTHOUGH CULPABLE PRIESTS and confessors appear to have gotten off lightly—with a suspension for a period of months or years from the right to hear confession—savage punishments were meted out to women who had confessed voluntarily or under torture to alleged sexual deviancy and witchcraft.

  The Church had traditionally taught that masturbation was a more grievous sin than rape, since even in the case of rape, the semen was being deposited in nature’s appropriate ‘receptacle’. Female masturbation was deemed to yield a form of semen, too, according to the long accepted sexual biology of the period, hence the deed was every bit as evil as in the case of a self-abusing man. At the same time, mutual masturbation between women was held to be as wicked as sodomy between men. The Italian jurist Prospero Farinacci opined that when a woman ‘behaves like a man with another woman she will be in danger of the penalties for sodomy and death.’ Moreover, ‘if she introduced some wooden or glass instrument into the [vagina] of another’, she should be executed.25

  In an attempt to clarify the true circumstances and morality of sexual acts between women, the late seventeenth-century Italian canonist Ludovico Maria Sinistrari wrote a treatise for the guidance of confessors. ‘In practice, it is necessary for confessors to be able to discern the case in which women by touching each other provoke themselves to voluntary pollution and when they fall into the Sodomitical crime, in order to come to a judgment about the gravity of the sin.’ Drawing a parallel between sodomitical men and women, he claimed that women with excessively large clitorises were capable of penetrating a female partner. Moreover, the enlarged clitoris, he argued, was a result of frequent masturbation from childhood. When a woman was suspected of ‘sodomy’ with another woman, he recommended that her clitoris be examined by a midwife. A large clitoris was taken as proof of the case, and the punishment was death by hanging followed by burning at the stake.26

  As fear of witchcraft swept Europe with renewed vigour in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, affecting both Catholic and Protestant communities, confession was exploited to discover evidence of diabolism and sorcery in women. No doubt there was a small percentage of women who were practising benign magic, and an even smaller group engaged in maleficent magic, or maleficium. Yet of the thousands burnt at the stake (it is thought that as many as 65,000 women and girls were executed in Europe for witchcraft in the early modern period), the majority had been found guilty as a result of inquisitorial confessions obtained by torture, as opposed to sacramental confessions.27

  Great doubt has been cast, in retrospect, on the existence of diabolism and witches’ sabbaths—even some of the inquisitors of the day later questioned their earlier conclusions. Alonso de Salazar, having interrogated hundreds of alleged witches who confessed to diabolism, concluded in 1610 that their accounts were ‘nothing but a chimera’. The Italian historian, the late Piero Camporesi, argued in his Bread of Dreams that the self-condemnation of many women in hunger-stricken areas of Europe was frequently affected by adulterated breads made with poppy seeds, mushrooms, and all manner of fruits, berries, and roots. The sixteenth-century Lombardy naturalist and doctor Girolamo Cardano, writing on the phenomenon of witches and sorceresses, observed that ‘these wretched little women, living on herbs and wild vegetables . . . hardly differ from those who are thought to be possessed by the devil’. Even Joseph of Cupertino, who was eventually canonised as a saint, believed that he could fly, as did his devotees; yet the explanation for his flights probably owed more to his reputation as a ‘maker of black bread’ than supernatural impetus. Under cross-examination, women likely suffered a form of false recovered-memory syndrome, familiar to this day in cases of alleged ritual abuse. Above all, the accused women were routinely subjected to torture, a supremely unreliable basis for authentic confessions.28

  One of the most remarkable confessors of the seventeenth century, and perhaps of any other, was the Jesuit priest Friedrich Spee, who blew the whistle on the Dominican inquisitors in Germany. A scholar and poet, he was employed by the bishop of Westphalia to hear the final sacramental confessions of women and girls, some as young as ten, before they were burnt to death. Eventually convinced that their extorted inquisitional ‘confessions’ were false, he wrote a tract, published in 1631, entitled Cautio Criminalis (Warning to Prosecutors). Writing anonymously and in eloquent Latin, he scorned the Inquisition and suggested that the judges should be liable for damages. Spee showed great courage in standing up to the era’s tide of prejudice. His book made a significant contribution to the eventual decline and suppression of the witch trials. His readership, however, was less numerous than that of the popular Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches) by the Dominican tormentors, which went through hundreds of editions in many languages. Spee was eventually discovered to be the author of the Cautio and was exiled to the Harz Mountains, where he ended his days writing elegiac poetry.29

  MANY ‘HOLY WOMEN’, known for their outlandish religious behaviour, including trances and excessive asceticism, also found themselves under investigation. Confessors played an important role protecting them from ecclesiastical censure. The era saw the blossoming of high spiritual aspirations, especially within austere religious orders. St. Teresa of Avila became an outstanding reformer in her order of Carmelites while pursuing her own personal spiritual perfection. Her efforts led to a form of mystical abandonment which was described by her fellow Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, as the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’.30

  Teresa insisted that a good confessor was essential for progress in the spiritual life. She p
referred, she said, an intelligent and scholarly confessor to an ignorant saint. She went through a number of confessors, not all of them convinced that she was an authentic mystic. One, Gaspar Daza, a saintly man given to missionary zeal and work among the poor, eventually refused to confess her. He thought her voices and visions were bizarre, if not the work of the devil. She commented on his departure: ‘I do not think that my soul would have prospered.’ He was followed by two Jesuits, one old and one young, who both reassured her that her visions were genuine. It was not until she met Father Juan de Prádanos, however, that she rose to new heights of mystical experience. The key to his confessional instruction was that she should abandon a particular friendship as a matter of self-denial. Following his advice, albeit reluctantly at first, she was granted an ecstasy that would be immortalised in Bernini’s famous sculpture. ‘There came upon me’, she wrote, ‘a rapture so sudden that it almost carried me away—something so sure that there could be no mistaking it. This was the first time that the Lord granted me the grace of ecstasy.’31