Confession: The Dangers Ahead

 

 

After the decision of the Australian Anglos to ditch the mock confessional seal of their mock confessions, the Catholic Church will be put under pressure to do the same. This may seem a trivial matter (“who will go to a priest and confess himself a pedophile?”), but it is an extremely serious situation for at least two reasons:

1. If a lawgiver can decide how to deal with one sacrament, it can do so with all the others. Who says a priest can be obliged by law to go to the police and denounce a penitent, but he cannot be obliged to give consecrated hosts to an atheist who feels “discriminated against” that he is kept out of a free food distribution? Or of a church marriage ceremony? Or who thinks he has a “human right” to receive first communion? If this seems outlandish to you, think how many would have thought, only 50 years ago, of a lawmaker obliging a priest to report a criminal offence heard in the confessional. Once a legal system starts to tamper with the sacraments, they will… continue to do just that. When the door has been first opened, given time there’s no limit to the kind of rubbish that might get through it. 

2.  Catholic priests could be targeted just because of their refusal to denounce the culprit. Every activist fag and their friends could go to the confessional with the recorder on his smartphone switched on, and make a mock confession of a criminal offence, giving away enough of his fictional “self” that the priest could have the police identify him (“you see, I live in the little brown house by the railway crossing in South Sodom, Indiana, and see the children on the playground nearby”; or “it’s easy for me to approach young boys, because I am the janitor in such and such school”). Then, they could go to the police because the priest has not gone to the police giving all the details he has about the self-confessed pedophile living in the little brown house by the railway crossing in South Sodom, Indiana, or who is the janitor in such and such school. At this point it would be to the priest to show that, say, he thought the indication a fake one and not worth checking; but hey, if he has an obligation to go to the police then he should have done just that, right? If the criminal offence is in not denouncing the alleged crime, every Catholic priest would be exposed to a behaviour like that.

Do not take this confession matter lightly. This has serious consequences both for the freedom of the single priest and for the precedent that it would establish.

Mundabor