The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  Some thirty national reports on clergy sexual abuse were published between 1989 and 2013, as well as reports of individual court cases. The culpability of bishops is usually cited, but the reports are weak on systemic causes. There is a failure in all the reports to recognise the problems inherent in clericalism, clerical formation, and the practice of confession as crucial causes of the phenomenon of clerical sexual abuse.

  Pope Benedict XVI and many bishops urged that Catholics return to frequent reception of confession with no hint of revising the age at which children are catechised and receive the sacrament. In the Vatican document ‘The Priest, Minister of Divine Mercy: An Aid for Confessors and Spiritual Directors’, issued in 2011, Pope Benedict XVI wrote: ‘It is necessary to return to the confessional as a place in which to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but also as a place in which “to dwell” more often.’ The sacrament of confession must be ‘rediscovered’, states the directive. And this must be part of the ‘new evangelization and the ongoing renewal of the Church’. In the entire scope of the document, the oppression of generations of children in confession goes unrecognised. Nor is there even a passing acknowledgement of the exploitation of confession by clerical abusers over decades of the last century.

  In the next chapter we will explore the emerging links between confession and criminal attacks on children, the use of confession by the priests to square the circle of their pastoral and offending lives, and the far-reaching consequences for victims and their families.

  PART THREE

  ‘SOUL MURDER’

  Ten

  Sexual Abuse in the Confessional

  The Church was showing a quite new aspect of itself, devouring its own children.

  —Carlo Falconi, The Popes in the Twentieth Century

  WHEN PRIESTS SEXUALLY ABUSE CHILDREN THEY VIOLATE a trust between spiritual innocence and sacred fatherhood. Specialists in childhood trauma have used the term ‘soul murder’ to describe the profound damage that can ensue when a priest abuses a young member of the faithful. Psychotherapist Richard Sipe, a former priest who specialises in treatment of clerical child-abuse survivors, writes: ‘A person who has been grounded since childhood in one faith, where their self-worth, acceptance, spiritual identity, and salvation were vested, cannot simply forget, put it behind them or join another faith. They can go on with their lives, but the part that is missing cannot be restored. Something is dead; something has been truly killed.’ The spiritual empowerment that might have aided recovery has been profoundly undermined. For children, it is especially difficult to separate the abusing priest from the auspices of the Church, with all its comforting and healing associations.1

  The consequences of clerical abuse of minors have been emerging in reports of contemplated suicide, attempted suicide, and actual suicide of victims. In Melbourne, Australia, five men who claimed to have been abused while serving as altar boys in the church of the priest Ronald Pickering committed suicide. These deaths, uncovered by lawyer Judy Courtin, add to the forty other suicides in the state of Victoria by victims who had been abused by priests, according to documented police reports. Courtin is conducting investigatory research into clerical sexual abuse for Monash University’s law faculty.2

  When the original grooming, or sexual attack, occurs in the circumstance of confession, the auspices of the sacrament aggravate the harm. Sexual abuse of children linked to the confessional has not only been widespread, but is known to be especially destructive to the children involved. A priest in England, ordained thirty years ago, and for twenty years a psychotherapist treating clerical sex offenders within his diocese, wrote to me that ‘in all those cases [of clerical abuse of minors], the sacrament of confession was used [by the molester] to discover vulnerability and groom candidates for abuse.’3

  In March 2010, when the Catholic Church in Germany set up a hotline and invited victims and their families to report instances of clerical abuse in parishes and schools, more than 8,500 people responded. Andreas Zimmermann, the expert responsible for analysing the results, told the German Catholic news agency KNA that the abusing ‘priests had used their moral authority and psychological effect of rites like confession’ [my italics] to gain power over children, ‘even to the point of telling them that the assaults were an expression of “God’s special love” for them.’4

  CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS and Church authorities have failed to identify the link between confession and the access, opportunity, and special trauma of clerical abuse. When I was in my early teens I experienced the connection at first hand. In the course of interviews and extensive correspondence, I would come across many similar instances.

  In my Catholic junior seminary in the late 1950s I was sexually propositioned during confession by a priest who, I discovered, had used the sacrament as a seduction tactic with other boys. I had chosen him initially as my confessor, as had other pupils in the college, because he made a point of merging his priesthood with the role of counsellor and mentor. He combined an exterior sense of piety and devotion with an extroverted, fun-loving personality. Confessions, held in his private quarters, became a treat and a privilege, the religious auspices nevertheless creating an atmosphere of unquestioning trust.5

  Although I told him that I preferred to kneel to make my confession, this priest, Father Leslie McCallum of the archdiocese of Birmingham in England, insisted that I sit in an armchair and accept a glass of Madeira. How different from the more traditionalist priests on the staff, who avoided familiarity and sociability. Father McCallum’s priest colleagues seemed, in contrast, cold and austere; they continued to conduct confessions impersonally, behind a screen in the college sacristy. Father McCallum was a picture of devotion when robed and in the sanctuary, where I had often served his Mass. His manner of making his thanksgiving at the back of the church was a model of recollection, as if communing directly with the divine. Outside of the church he offered warmth, humour, and friendship: he seemed to understand our adolescent ways of thinking. He was up to date with the latest novels and films. He had a record player on which he played Elvis Presley numbers, music we would only otherwise hear on our vacations back at home.

  On the occasion in question, having imbibed the usual glass of Madeira, and before I could finish my laundry list of peccadillos, he interrupted to ask: ‘Have you had problems with sexual sins?’ Then he said that I shouldn’t feel any guilt about masturbation because not to masturbate was abnormal. The American Kinsey report on sexual behaviour, he said, stated that 99.9 per cent of all males masturbated.

  Then he asked if he could see my penis so that he could manipulate it to discover whether I had any of the ‘well-known deformities that led to excessive erections’. Nothing wrong with masturbation, he was saying: just not good for the health to do it too much. Five years earlier I had been abused in a public toilet in London by a man who started his overtures with similar blandishments. Now, I stood up and left the room. I said nothing about the incident to anyone in authority in the college because I felt that it would be my word against Father McCallum’s. In any case, even penitents in those days believed that the seal of confession applied to them. Thereafter, whenever we passed, he would smile and greet me as if nothing had happened.

  The following year, Father McCallum was removed from the junior seminary and appointed chaplain to a boy’s preparatory boarding school, to care for the souls of an even younger age group of boys than ours. He had clearly been trying his seductions on other students, and his superiors had got wind of it. The decision of the archbishop of Birmingham to move him to a place where he might continue his grooming activities was typical of Catholic hierarchies at that time. Another feature of this experience was his mention of the Kinsey report, indicating the view, acceptable among some clerics by the 1950s, that despite the vow of celibacy, sexual expression in the form of auto-eroticism was not merely okay, but essential: here was permissiveness revealing a despotic streak. The beginnings of the sexually permissive society were
affecting elements, restricted but significant, within the long repressed Catholic clerical caste for whom confession now became an opportunity for grooming potential victims.6

  ALTHOUGH EXTENSIVE STUDIES of Catholic clerical sexual abuse have been conducted in the United States and Ireland, there have been less detailed reports in other countries where it is known nevertheless that abuse has been widespread, including Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Australia. Obstacles to rigorous research continue to arise, a result of clerical secrecy and reluctance on the part of Church authorities to cooperate. For example, on 9 January 2013, the German bishops’ conference cancelled a research project it had agreed to undertake in 2011 in combination with the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony, headed by Professor Christian Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer accused the bishops of trying to censor abuse investigations. A Forsa Institute poll published in Christ & Welt, a supplement of the Germany weekly newspaper Die Zeit, claimed that the closure of the enquiry had done further damage to the reputation of the Catholic clergy in Germany. According to the poll, 75 per cent of the German respondents believed that the Catholic Church was trying to prevent a comprehensive investigation.7

  Yet even where reports of clerical abuse have been open and extensive, statistics have failed to show the connection between abuse and the practice of confession. As we saw earlier, the principal American report on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, commissioned by the US bishops and conducted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, found that, from 1950 to 2002, 10,667 individuals had made allegations of child sexual abuse. Of these, 6,700 accusations of abuse had been substantiated against 4,329 priests. The John Jay Report cited the locations of attacks, separating, for example, the confessional box from the sacristy, where the priest vests in liturgical robes (or other private places within the church building); the priests’ living quarters; and locations outside of the parish. The numbers were misleading, however, since the methodology suggested that confession as a context of abuse occurs only within a traditional confessional box. By the late 1950s, not only was the practice of confession moving out of the box, but the boundaries of the sacrament were also being blurred—as with Father McCallum’s socializing-counselling mode as confessor. By the 1960s confession was routinely taking place at different locations within the church precincts and beyond. As it happens, the John Jay figures for boys showed that 29.6 per cent of abusive encounters took place in the confessional box, elsewhere within the church building (such as the sacristy), or in the priest’s house, where children’s confessions were frequently taking place by the late 1950s; for girls, the figure was an accumulated 27.8 per cent. Trips and social events as locations of abuse accounted for almost 40 per cent of incidents for both sexes.8

  According to my interviews and the letters I received from respondents, as well as official reports in many countries, abusive relationships between cleric and child have almost invariably begun as a continuation of the sacrament of confession. Although the statistics about the locations of abuse cited in the John Jay Report are an important feature of the evidence, it is only in the stories of abuse that we see the repeated connection between the initial trust accorded the priest as sacramental minister—confessor—and his multidimensional status as trusted spiritual ‘father’, counsellor, mentor, and friend that continues in other contexts and places. That status, with the unequal power relationship it implies, the access the priest has to the child, and the child’s unquestioning trust, once in place, continues to govern the relationship on trips, retreats, country walks, social occasions (often in a priest’s private room), sporting activities, hikes, campfire parties, and journeys alone or in groups by car.

  In a typical case cited in the report on clerical abuse in the Diocese of Cloyne in Ireland, for example, a boy victim told the police of scattered locations of abuse originally linked with confession. The complainant, Patrick, had told police that in 1983 he was on retreat at a convent in Mallow. He went to confession, he claimed, with a priest in a private room, where the priest asked him to take off his clothes. The priest, he alleged, touched his genitals and kissed his lips. The priest admitted that abuse took place in a variety of locations, including the sacristy of the church in Shanballymore in North Cork and when they were walking together on a quiet country road. The priest pleaded guilty to three counts of indecency against a sixteen-year-old youth during 1982 and 1983 and was given an eighteen-month suspended sentence.9

  A report contained in a child welfare document published by the Diocese of Cloyne revealed how confession, and accompanying abuse, could take place far distant from the church. A female complainant wrote to her bishop alleging that a certain priest ‘sexually abused her during a young people’s retreat’. She further alleged that ‘the abuse took place during the hearing of her confession which was conducted in a bedroom at the retreat house. She was instructed to lie on the bed for her confession to be heard. [The priest] then abused her.’10

  At the same time, narratives of abuse show how the attitudes of priests towards sexuality and their familiarity with the young were beginning to change during the late 1950s and into the 1960s. The black suit and Roman collar were coming off, and priests were often indistinguishable from the laity in all but their special status. According to one witness, Ansgar Hocke, reporting to the Round Table Group in Germany on clerical sexual abuse at his school in 1960s, a new spirit of permissiveness had arisen among priests: ‘The days of the priests in cassocks, who shouted at their students, were deeply conservative and who saw the catechism as their only guideline, were coming to an end.’ Priests now seemed to be breathing new life into the schools, Hocke noted. ‘But we didn’t see how sick and unstable they were.’ The pupils seemed to feel that the priests had a right to sexual happiness. ‘We knew that the young priests were excluded from this happiness, and we often saw how helpless they were.’ The pupils who belonged to a Father R.’s inner circle were constantly subjected, he said, to ‘one-on-one talks’, suggesting a continuity between the privileged access of confession and intimate counselling beyond. The sessions sometimes took place in a basement, which quickly acquired a notorious reputation among students, who referred to it as the ‘masturbation basement’ or the ‘interrogation room’. A former student said: ‘He wanted to watch me masturbate, and he touched me while I was doing it.’11

  The tendency for priests to fraternise socially with young boys coincided with the easing of the physical boundaries established by the old-style confessional booths: hence Father McCallum’s practice of hearing confession in his room from the comfort of armchairs. Yet, as the boys in the German case indicate, the priests had not undergone a corresponding development in maturity to cope with the new climate of ‘liberation’. Moreover, a slippage was occurring between confession as the strict performance of the ritual, on the one hand, and, on the other, modes of counselling and hospitality that included plying even prepubescent boys and girls with cigarettes and alcohol during or after confession. In one Irish report, a Father Calder was alleged to have heard confessions in his study before repairing to his private quarters, where he offered boys alcoholic ‘concoctions’.12 In another report, a Father Drust was said to have routinely seduced a girl named Ulla by offering her sherry in his private room:

  Ulla is the younger of two daughters of a family with whom Fr Drust appears to have formed a close relationship [he would also abuse Ulla’s sister]. She first met Fr Drust when she was aged seven or eight in 1964/65. She said that the sexual abuse began a few months later. Initially the abuse occurred in his car when he put her in his lap. Some time afterwards she started to visit his house at weekends. In her statement to the Gardaí in 2002 she stated that Fr Drust would give her three or four glasses of sherry and she would wake up in bed the following morning. He would then abuse her. Sometimes he would bring her toast in bed. When she was nine he taught her to shave him. She said that Fr Drust referred to her as his ‘L
olita’.13

  Privileged access and the availability of opportunities for intimate encounters were invariably preceded by chance, or contrived, ‘pious’ overtures. A priest responsible for rehabilitating abusing clerics in his diocese in England described how one abuser, popular in his diocese as confessor and spiritual director, would begin his grooming tactics by saying: ‘I have been praying about you and I feel you have sexual problems you need to talk about.’14 The potential of the penitent for abuse could thus be safely probed within the boundaries of a ‘religious’ context.

  An example of the warped ‘religiose’ nature of grooming and sexual activity within the confessional situation is told by the American writer Paul Hendrickson (a former Washington Post journalist, later director of the non-fiction writing program at Pennsylvania State University). He describes a confession ritual in a priest’s room in the 1960s which he endured once or twice a week for more than five years, starting at the age of eleven: ‘I would go in, sit in a chair beside his desk, talk for a short while, await his nod, unzipper my trousers, take out my penis, rub it while I allowed impure thoughts to flow through my brain, and, at the point where I felt myself fully large and close to emission, say “Father, I’m ready now.”’ The priest would then reach over and hand him a black wooden crucifix. ‘I would then begin reciting the various reasons why I wished to conquer this temptation. . . . The power of the crucified Savior in my left hand as overpowering the evil of impurity and the world in my right.’15