The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  Only in retrospect would it be obvious that there had been something dysfunctional in the state of Catholic clericalism during our era. Given Pope John’s age—he was seventy-six—nobody could have guessed that he would initiate an epoch-making council that would shake the Church to its foundations, promoting the idea of the faithful as a pilgrim people of God, engaging with the world. The shock would expose the deep-seated problems of priestly formation. The mass exodus of ordained priests worldwide from the 1960s to the 1970s, and the collapse in vocations, would speak for themselves. Locally, in England and Wales, since the year 2000 the number of newly ordained priests, diocesan and religious, has averaged just above 20 each year; compared with the early 1960s, that is a decline of 90 per cent. In the United States the ordinations collapsed from 1,575 in 1965 to 450 in 2002. The decline of potential confessors would have been critical for the fate of the sacrament of confession even had the faithful not rejected the practice: which they did.

  WHEN I ENTERED THE SEMINARY there were more than enough priests to confess the long lines of penitents waiting to enter the dark boxes every week. Few of us could imagine the collapse in numbers that lay ahead. In the United States, about 3 per cent of parishes, 549, were without a resident priest in 1965. In 2002, there were 2,928 priestless parishes, about 15 per cent of US parishes, and rising. By 2020, it is estimated that a quarter of all parishes, 4,656, will lack a priest. Between 1965 and 2002, the number of seminarians in the United States dropped from 49,000 to 4,700, a 90 per cent decrease. Seminaries have closed in their hundreds across America: there were 596 seminaries in 1965, and only 200 in 2000.2

  There were many fine, decent men of generous temperament at Oscott. A small group of ex–national service men, and late vocations, exerted a modicum of common sense, knowledge of the world, and even at times ribald good humour. Yet the younger majority, fresh from junior seminaries, dominated the tone and were only too willing to be moulded by their superiors. The majority of our intake were born Catholics who had been catechized for confession from the age of six and younger. Many were from large and relatively poor families, many originally of Irish extraction.

  In common with my companions who had been in the junior seminary, I had no notion of what a celibate life would in time entail. Apart from brief vacations, we had been segregated from girls and women, including mothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins. We were emotionally and socially immature, certainly not prepared to make long-term commitments about our future emotional and sexual lives and relationships. We did not know, most of us, what an intimate marital relationship was, let alone what it would mean to abstain from it for a lifetime. While final ordination would take place at the age of twenty-four, six or seven years off, the commitment was not a one-off decision to be left to the day of ordination. We had already committed ourselves to something that we did not understand.

  And yet, we were not even preparing for lives as bachelors. We lived like schoolboys. Each student had his own small, sparse, identically furnished room. We were obliged to wear a cassock, Roman collar, and black shoes at all times. On rare trips outside the college, we wore black suits, black raincoats, and Roman collars. We were called at 6 A.M. for meditation in chapel before Mass at 7 A.M. A student would rap on the door and call out: ‘Laus Deo’ (Praise be to God), to which one replied ‘Deo Gratias’ (Thanks be to God). Breakfast, consisting of cold toast made the night before, cornflakes, and All-Bran, with anaemic coffee or tea, followed thanksgiving after Mass. There was usually time for a cigarette after breakfast. Most students and lecturers were addicted to smoking, which was seen as an aid to the celibate life.

  The mornings were spent in classes (punctuated by breaks for a quick smoke), followed by prayers in church before lunch at 1 P.M. We were free between lunch and supper, which was at 7:30 P.M., when we would eat in silence while listening to stories from the lives of the saints, excerpts from the Code of Canon Law, and an improving Catholic book, read from a pulpit in the refectory. Through the long afternoons and evenings, which were meant to be taken up with private study, spiritual reading, or perhaps praying, students would spend a lot of time sitting around in each other’s rooms, talking, drinking instant coffee, and, of course, smoking. If we took a walk outside the college grounds we were obliged to go in threes (having sought permission, and given a good reason), and it was laid down that there should be one in front and two behind so as not to inconvenience others on the pavements by walking three abreast. Rosary followed supper, and the Greater Silence was observed from 9 P.M., when we gathered in church for night prayers. The silence continued until breakfast the next day. ‘Lights out’ was at 10:15 P.M., with no exceptions.

  The regime was remarkable for its restrictions. We did no voluntary social work, even though the city of Birmingham had more than its fair share of poverty, the sick, the hospitalised, the homeless, and the unemployed. Women, apart from the hidden domestic servants, never entered. No visiting speakers came. Nor were we allowed to attend lectures, concerts, movies, or the theatre on the outside. There was only one ancient radio, which was situated in the billiard room. I only got to listen to it once, when there was a repeat broadcast of the Jesuit philosopher Father Frederick Copleston’s debate on the existence of God with Bertrand Russell. A single copy of The Times was delivered to the common room, to be somehow shared among the 120 of us. We visited no parishes, no offices, no factories. We never entered a school, and would learn nothing of child education or child psychology—although we were destined, as priests, to spend much time with children in catechism classes and confession. There was no gymnasium; there were no visits to public swimming pools. We were allowed brief holidays, but not at Christmas or Easter, when we might have come in contact with our wider families. Relatives and friends never visited. Despite much potential talent, there were no musical groups, and we had no record players. There was one out-of-tune piano. There was no television.

  Seminary life in its diurnal routine essentially enabled a young man to avoid the responsibilities that are shouldered by most adults of that age. For six years we were fed and sheltered gratis. We never cooked a meal, washed a dish, or laundered a shirt; nor did we sweep the floor or change the linen on our beds. The most we did for ourselves was to polish the shiny toe caps of our black shoes. We did not serve others, even our confrères: we lived to ourselves alone; yet we would have been astonished had anyone suggested that we were acquiring a warped sense of entitlement.

  Individualism was eradicated by routines of conformity, starting with our dress. Our hair was cut to a conformed shortness by visiting barbers. Being ‘singular’, or ‘ostentatious’, were the buzzwords for transgressing conformity (a contemporary in another seminary, a non-smoker, told me that his spiritual director ordered him to smoke in order to avoid being ‘singular’ among the majority smokers). Our lives, ruled by bells, meant that we made few choices about our day; the big decision about our future, to the end of our lives, had already been made. Even the decision to leave the seminary, we had been told, must be made by our superiors, lest we departed in bad faith. There was little scope for making committed friendships at just that time in life when the forging of significant relationships is crucial for growth in character, personality, generosity, and human empathy. We were encouraged to treat our fellow seminarians with an equal measure of detachment. ‘Special’ or ‘particular’ friendships, as they were known, could lead to occasions of sin. We were conscious, in any case, that committed relationships, apart from being a spiritual imperfection, would be pointless, as we would all be scattered geographically after ordination.

  The most popular, and constantly recommended, work of spiritual guidance was the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, which counselled ‘custody of the eyes’, avoidance of idle gossip, ‘recollection’ (a sense of constant, serious awareness), repeated examination of conscience, and avoidance of ‘curiosity’ about secular matters—the ‘world’. We were hardly capable of sensible discussions about cur
rent affairs, as we had little knowledge of what was current on the outside. The political tendency was reactionary. The models constantly put before us were those of St. Jean-Marie Vianney—the Curé d’Ars, and the tragic petite fleurette, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the simple young French Carmelite nun of the previous century who had achieved heroic sanctity in ‘little things’.

  Our conversations were trivial, schoolboyish, repetitive, and anecdotal; some even had stocks of edifying stories and preachy conversational gambits which even the averagely pious found cringe-making. Given the hothouse atmosphere, and suppressed youthful and sexual energies, there were occasional subterranean infatuations, jealousies, sulks, and periodic tears. On more than one occasion a student stood poised to throw himself off the crenelated central tower, to be talked down by the long-suffering spiritual director. Those with more self-control, or less labile emotions, would manifest a prim exterior of reproach in the face of such dramatics. For some, being priggish was a full-time job.

  Every so often a student would disappear without warning from his place at table and chapel. The ‘defection’, which might well have been expulsion, was never discussed or explained. Following an intense on-off ‘special friendship’, one of our number left the seminary without warning and later threw himself under a train near Oxford.

  THE WORD ‘SEMINARY’ derives from the Latin for ‘seed’: the image is of a protective environment, a greenhouse, where the seedbeds are being protected from the damaging environment of the world outside. The seeds are being specially grown, forced artificially into clerical plants. The problem for those responsible for clerical training was that the world outside had been increasingly inimical to Catholic ideals of chastity and celibacy. Pius X knew this all too well when he tightened up the disciplines of clerical formation at the beginning of the century against the background of ‘Modernist’ thought, which included psychoanalysis alongside a host of other ‘heresies’. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, a tide of influence, carried through the media and known as the ‘sexual revolution’, was threatening traditional standards of Catholic chastity, not least within the clerical and religious estate.

  Despite the attempts of our superiors to make the seminary a media-free environment, and to control our reading and our egress into the world, the impact of the new sexual freedoms seeped into our world through every nook and cranny. We did, after all, go home for several weeks a year, where we were exposed to television and magazines, and went to the cinema. Most of us had brothers and sisters in their teens and twenties whose music and dress brought the new youth culture home to us.

  IN THE MEANTIME, and in stark contrast, our minds were being shaped and narrowed through the educational curriculum. The first two years involved the study of Scholastic philosophy, which was unrelentingly abstract and dogmatic. It was taught through dictated notes from the lecturer’s rostrum. There was a single textbook in Latin with numbered paragraphs, like a car maintenance manual. There was a campaign within the Church to maintain Latin as the required language of our lectures, which was to impel the new Pope John XXIII, even as he planned the reforming Second Vatican Council, to order the exclusive use of Latin in seminary courses.3 There was variety in the study of the history of philosophy, but we were obliged to endure the dictated notes of the lecturer rather than be exposed to original texts. There were no classroom discussions, or even opportunities for discussions among ourselves. We had a well-stocked library, where the dust gathered on the rarely consulted volumes. The consequence, for those of us who digested the diet of spoonfed information, was the development of a didactic tone of voice: a dry, one-way, finger-wagging certitude. Despite the acquiescence, obedience, and humility required of us (or perhaps because of it), seminary was a school for authoritarians.

  There were occasional surprise events, which only served to demonstrate the institutional tedium. There was the student who appeared in chapel for night prayers on his first evening in the college wearing pyjamas and dressing gown instead of the cassock and collar. What was he thinking! That we were a relaxed, home-spun domestic fellowship? There were gales of nervous giggles, as if a wave of insanity had gripped the entire student body. Then there was the intensely devout student, older than the rest of us, who set his room on fire with the votive candles he kept blazing all night before a statue of the Virgin by his bed. More nervous tittering ensued in the choir stalls whenever he took his place in the days that followed. On another occasion, a small, intellectually rebellious group invited a Jesuit philosopher to meet and talk with them—he had not reckoned on being smuggled into the college clandestinely through a barred window, where he got stuck for twenty minutes. Such were our small diversions and rebellions.

  The courses in pastoral and moral theology, which sourced our training to be confessors, were based on treatises that went back to the original work of the paragon of moral theology—Alphonsus Liguori. There were two sets of manuals: the three-volume Latin textbook Summa Theologiae Moralis by H. Noldin and A. Schmitt, and the four-volume English textbook Moral and Pastoral Theology by H. Davis. The Noldin and Schmitt, whose first edition appeared in 1926, effectively set the direction of Catholic clerical thinking on morals up to the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 and somewhat beyond. For the English-speaking seminaries, Davis, first published in 1935, was essential, although sections of it, mostly dealing with sexual morals, were in Latin in order to bar the laity from acquainting themselves with material that might have put bad ideas into their heads. Davis was considered to be impressively up to date. He expounded perspectives from the latest neurophysiology in the ‘morbid sexuality’ sections. For example, he cited neurologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s ‘law of avalanche’, from around the turn of the century, to explain how in the nerves ‘a disturbance, at first localized, is diffused over a great many of the cells of the brain if attention is focused upon it.’4 He thereby explained ‘how sex feelings get beyond control if the original stimulus is fostered rather than suppressed.’ He had in mind, naturally, masturbation, the single, unrelieved obsession of Catholic moral theology and daily, it sometimes seemed, preoccupation of Catholic clerics in those days.

  A review of these texts tells us much about the Catholic moral mentality that shaped generations of clerical notions of virtue and sin, and hence the influence exerted via confession over generations of the Catholic young through two-thirds of the twentieth century. One is struck, first of all, by the dysfunctional casuistry. Take fasting before Holy Communion. It was taught that to break the fast and receive the Blessed Sacrament, as we have seen, was a mortal sin. The textbooks enlarged on the circumstances in which the fast might or might not be broken. The rule admitted, it was pointed out, of no exception, and it extended ‘to the smallest quantity of food or drink taken as such’.

  So what does it mean to ‘eat’ or ‘drink’? The thing consumed must be ‘taken exteriorly’. So it is not a violation of the fast, for example, ‘to swallow blood from the gums, or teeth, or tongue, or nasal cavities’, although it would be a violation of the fast ‘to swallow blood flowing externally from the exterior parts of the lips, or from a cut finger, or from the nose, or to swallow tears, unless in each case only a few drops entered the mouth and were mingled with the saliva.’ To violate the fast, moreover, requires that a substance ‘must pass from the mouth into the stomach, so that the fast is not broken if liquid is taken into the mouth, as an antiseptic or for gargling, and is not swallowed.’ A third condition insists that violation of the fast occurs ‘by the action of eating and drinking’, and inadvertence ‘has no bearing on the matter’ even if it is a ‘drink given to a patient during sleep’. Davis declares that the ‘divines’ are still disagreeing whether a ‘nutritive injection’ is food, but certainly the introduction of soup or milk through a stomach pump is not allowed, ‘whether the injected liquid be intended to nourish or merely to flush.’ Turning to the vexed question of nail-biting, Davis reports that he believes that this does not affe
ct the fast, ‘but biting off and swallowing pieces of finger skin might do so, if the particles were more than the smallest and not mixed with saliva.’5

  In the section on what constitutes ‘food’ as opposed to ‘non-food’, the fingernails appear again. In a final wrap-up, Davis writes:

  Metallic substances in specie (gold, silver, iron, lead, etc.) do not violate the fast, but if taken as powder and chemically treated, as iron jelloids, bismuth, charcoal tabloids and powder, sulphur, they do certainly violate the fast. The same is true of stone, and glass, probably of earth and chalk. Straw and green branches are nutritive, but not dry wood; human hair is not digestible, nor, probably, human nails. Wax is digestible and also linen and cotton, but neither silk nor wool. Paper is not certainly food, nor are dried fruit stones cleansed of all fruit, though the kernel is food.6

  As we sat digesting this information, the proposition that anyone would actually consume iron jelloids, fingernails, and sulphur never struck us as absurd.

  A similar approach was applied to other potential mortal sins within the ambit of obedience to ecclesiastical rules, such as late arrival at Mass (meaning that the Sunday obligation to attend Mass had not been fulfilled), and rules for days of fasting and abstinence. The law of fast days during this era, and going back centuries, prescribed that only one full meal be taken, but that a smaller ‘collation’ might be consumed at two points during the twenty-four hours. Lengthy casuistic argumentations followed in Noldin-Schmitt and Davis on what constituted a ‘full meal’: how many ounces; how long it could take (longer than two hours?); whether one could take a break in the middle, or several breaks, and so forth. Liquids were also a subject of arcane hair-splitting. ‘Wine, beer, tea, cocoa, coffee, do not violate the fast, but soup, oil, thick chocolate, fruit and whole milk, are foodstuffs and violate the fast.’ To complicate matters, it was allowed that while one was taking a drink, a small item of food might also be consumed ‘ne potus noceat’, as Noldin had it in Latin: ‘lest the drink by itself should do harm’. But there was much written on how much, and how often, these morsels accompanying drink could be consumed. Abstinence from meat on Fridays (a mortal sin to break) also had its complex reservations and ordinances. We learned, for example, that ‘fish’, in the view of the moralists, included ‘frogs, snails, tortoises, oysters, lobsters, otters, beavers, crabs’—also, by the peculiar ancient tradition of certain dioceses, ‘gulls, ducks, teals, and coot’.7