It has been said that the main function of confessionals in today’s Catholic churches is to hold the cleaner’s bucket and mop.

Be that as it may, the Sacrament of Reconciliation is certainly taking a very long count , it is generally agreed. It is food for thought that at Mass the numbers of those present receiving the Eucharist are higher than ever. It is highly unlikely that these represent some travelling corps of blasphemers but simply people who try to make their peace with God without going into a confessional.

That this is an unsatisfactory approach has been made clear yet again to us at this season by the Last Supper Gospels , and Our Lord’s quite clear instructions to the Apostles that whose sins they shall forgive, they are forgiven. In other words, a means of forgiveness is in their hands.

The Church , whose foundation the Apostles carried on, has done this in many ways, the most recent being auricular confession- the ‘Bless me, father, because I have sinned’ method we all know.

So if in 2020 people no longer use auricular confession, another much simpler and clearer method of carrying out Christ’s permission must be found. That is what He asked. To use once more this blog’s favourite quote of all time, (yes the one about the Lanarkshire headmaster alleged to have said at a school assembly’As Our Lord said, and I must say I think He was correct’) why don’t we find one ? And why don’t people go?

1. In St Patrick’s Anderston,Glasgow, there was a confessional which was entirely dark. My grandmother once went into it, found her way to where she felt the grille was, and stated her case for forgiveness, to hear a voice behind her asking,’Were you looking for someone?’ To be more serious, some people have apparently had very bad experiences in confession, some true some probably fictional. Some also may well have asked for what they got through trying to con their way to absolution by showing no signs of a firm purpose of amendment. Not everyone finds auricular confession congenial, but we are all human and that form of coming back to God is all we have within the sacramental framework.

But need it be ?

2. Tragically for everyone, particularly for non-paedophile priests, social media tells us of those who cannot bring themselves to confess to a priest in case he is a paedophile. (The writer has had the experience of doing this, he later discovered. It is not a comfortable experience), In general, given all the paedophile criminality and its cover ups, there must be a certain amount of perfectly human resentment. Few penitents, I suggest, are capable of accepting the legitimate intellectual acrobatics of ‘ex opere, operato’ and don’t see why they should chance it.

3. Behind this lies what the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church stubbornly refuses to accept, that there are people who in 2020 do not like or trust the secular priesthood. The reasons for this are understandable and human but the current system does not allow for them. The Flock wants to have its sins forgiven as is its right. If this only this could be accepted, our Church would be transformed.

4. All this could be avoided if the Roman Rite would allow the Flock to receive General Absolution in a penitential service without the necessity of having sins forgiven twice (!) by later auricular confession, almost always to a secular priest, celibate and supported by a parish, as Canon Law insists. The Roman Rite was moving towards another point of view, I believe, until this was stamped out by the Polish Pope and the Emeritus Pope. (No comment- at the moment)

5. Dr Johnson once said, not entirely cynically, ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’. I think all of us know the feeling in April,2020. We all hope that many of the Flock’s disaffected will want to come back. 2020 may be a great opportunity for the Roman Rite to atone for all the disasters of its past by changing Canon Law to allow a penitential service with General Absolution at the start of every Mass.

6. You may well ask why this bizarre addition of double forgiveness is added to General Absolution . It is well concealed. I have searched the internet until my fingertips are in ribbons , and I have found a possible reason ! A priest on the internet says: ‘Hearing confessions is spiritually very healthy for priests’. Oh well, that’s all right then. In all charity, even with a couple of gins, I cannot accept this as a reason for depriving the Flock of forgiveness.

7. The Roman Rite, through the Corona virus, has been prevented from ministering to the Flock. Once this scourge has left us, it can again offer forgiveness- and the Eucharist- to the Flock. May it do so in an entirely new way by allowing a penitential service before every Mass, without the absurd necessity of further, auricular, confession. The penitent makes his or her disposition personally to God. That is enough within the context of General Absolution.

8. To avoid any possible misunderstanding about the orthodoxy of this blog- which is about as orthodox theologically as one can get without being offensive-I refer you to Cardinal Pole at the Council of Trent. He pointed out that the Council should not conclude that because Luther said it’therefore it is false’. So there.

So far there has not been much notice taken of one of this year’s centenaries. Pope Francis of course mentioned it, stressing its positive value. Like the Bible , it is, of course not so much a book as a bookshelf, and it has always reminded us of those wonderful Newnes handbooks produced for every car ever heard of, in the days when normal human beings could service their own car, with instructions for everything from repairing the car cigarette lighter upwards,.
We are not cynical on this blog- now just imagine if we really were. Moreover, all we’re saying about conspiracy theories is that they can’t all be wrong. OK? But we are saying that given the enormous value of Canon Law to our bishops, both as an administrative instrument and and a removal of the necessity for thinking, we must ask one question,. Do they not want the general public to realise that Canon Law as it stands dates only back to 1917 ? Hell, we’ve got members not much younger than that. Is it possible that there are Catholics who believe it was put together on the Sunday after Pentecost in the upper room by the Apostles ? In passing, it is interesting how often the word ‘apostolic’ is misused. Wasn’t the word often used to describe Papal Delegates ? Maybe this is why Archbishop Mennini did not reply to Feed The Flock’s registered letter- I mean were there stamps and postmen then ? Sorry.
Ray Bradbury, in his short story ‘A Sound Of Thunder’, describing how a Tyrannus Rex is killed, mentiones how this process took quite a while, parts of it still clicking and whirring for possibly hours later. You may think it fanciful’ although we quite like the idea, to compare this to the slow death of the First Vatican Council before Vatican 2. Clicking and whirring , we put it to you, still goes on in two particular areas as the movement towards confining the provision of the Eucharist in general to the Tridentine priesthood grows stronger.
Two of the obstacles to this from Canon Law are of course the insistence on celibacy and the ban on general absolution. This blog has many reference to the celibacy thing and many wonderful quotations from clerics about its value to them which we hope you constantly refer to and enjoy, especially the parts about it being invaluable for the Church’s possession of so many buildings in the 12th century which are now mere heaps of ruins all over Europe.
The other obstacle is General Absolution, and the necessity of having sins forgiven twice by the recipient. We cannot hope to reach the heights of textual exegesis no doubt attained in our seminaries- remember them? –but we simply cannot find in the Gospels any reference to this at the Last Supper. It must be mentioned here, keeping in mind the number of convicted paedophile priests allowed to return to parish work, and therefore to hear confessions, that this may be an explanation of the moribund nature of the Sacrament of Reconciliation., another of course being a calcification of the Humane Vitae thing. But that is not for us to comment on just now.
What is really quite remarkable is the attachment of some priests to the actual process of giving absolution. We don’t imagine that this comes up much in conversation with priests, for those of us who undertake this, but the invaluable internet certainly tells us how they feel about it. The emphasis is very frequently on how wonderful an experience this is for the priest, one of them pointing out that he would rather hear confessions than provide the Eucharist. Google ‘general absolution’ and you’ll find them.
Lacking years of theological education we may do, but to be quite blunt, we do not think that providing wonderful experiences for priests is what the Sacrament of Reconciliation is for . And if the bizarre insistence of Canon Law on auricular confession of already forgiven sins is taking people away from the Eucharist, then Canon Law is acting against the Eucharistic imperative at the Last Supper.