The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (10 page)

A fine line between genuine mysticism and florid neuroses bordering on psychoses is manifest in the repertoire of strange stories that erupted during the period. Some religious women, such as Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, reported experiencing unbearably high temperatures (interpreted as the ‘furnace of divine love’), stigmata, odours of sanctity, and visions of devils (one was said to sit on Teresa’s breviary to distract her from prayer). Confessors, including highly placed prelates, at times administered spiritual direction to charismatic women who,
by today’s state of knowledge, were likely suffering from a range of illnesses—bulimia, anorexia, and forms of self-harm sufficiently injurious to make them bedridden, sometimes for years. The confessors wrote up curious, semi-hagiographical accounts of these subjects, often judging their symptoms—including visions, voices, and ‘lights in prayers’—as on the borders of the diabolical and the authentic. It is perhaps no coincidence that the seventeenth century saw the initiation of Pope Urban VIII’s ‘scientific’ procedures for canonization, a more empirical approach than was used in earlier centuries. A hundred years on, Pope Benedict XIV would draw up a list of saints who allegedly did not eat, attempting to distinguish between those who were holy women and those who were ‘possessed’.
³³

Professor Rudolph Bell, in his 1985 book
Holy Anorexia
, argues that such borderline holy women exemplified the consequences of a new regime of male-dominant Tridentine clericalism; that women seeking the highest levels of sanctity, independent of the cloister and stricter codes of canon law, were driven neurotically in on themselves. Invariably such women had suffered from the envy, even hatred, of prelates who objected to their powers of spiritual insight and spiritual counselling. Whatever the case, their stories reveal a role in the early modern period for the confessor as diagnostician and therapist: now advising, now critiquing, the penitent as patient—hovering between adulation and suspicion, superstition and scepticism. Among the well-attested biographies, we find, for example, the seventeenth-century
saint, Margaret Marie Alacoque, a French nun of Parayle-Monial, who founded the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Margaret would deliberately eat cheese knowing that it made her vomit, and by her own admission she ate the vomit of sister nuns.

H
ISTORIANS HAVE TENDED
to impose a grand unifying narrative on the Counter-Reformation era, claiming widespread conformity of belief and practice, as if the Catholic faithful had begun to march in unified and disciplined step. Yet despite the powerful influence of the Council of Trent on Catholic orthodoxy and militancy for subsequent centuries, Catholic culture and practice were marked by considerable variety, local discretion, and original manifestations of vibrant religious and artistic imagination. Latin Christianity was in a process of revitalisation in every dimension of its life—including art, architecture, music, poetry, and spirituality.

New religious orders were founded that were prepared to engage a rapidly changing and expanding world. These included the Jesuits under Ignatius Loyola, and the Oratorians under Philip Neri. A new spirit of evangelism, and rivalry with Protestant opponents, drew Catholic missionaries to the Americas and the Far East. In almost aggressive rebuttal of the Protestant denial of the real presence in the Eucharist, the great Baroque churches drew the eyes of their congregations to the tabernacle at the centre of the high altar, where resided
the ‘sacred species’ of the preserved Eucharist. Basilicas, cathedrals, and other large churches boasted imposing and ornate confessionals.

Meanwhile, the drive to demonstrate Catholicism’s possession of the moral high ground would lead to intense academic explorations in moral theology. The major preoccupation of Catholic moralists was with distinctions between mortal and venial sin. Moral theology, following the Council of Trent, would focus with casuistic intensity on the refined complexities of intentions and conscience. These approaches to moral and pastoral guidance would lead to heated conflicts between schools of moralists with far reaching consequences for the confessional.

Four

Fact, Fiction, and Anticlericalism

He who acts in obedience to a learned and pious confessor, acts not only with no doubt, but with the greatest security that can be had upon earth,—on the divine words of Jesus Christ, that he who hears his ministers is as though he heard himself: ‘He that heareth you heareth Me.’
¹

—Alphonsus Liguori,
The Way of Salvation and of Perfection
, 1767

F
ROM THE
F
OURTH
L
ATERAN
C
OUNCIL IN THE THIRTEENTH
century to the Council of Trent in the sixteenth, and beyond to the Vatican Council of 1869–1870, the Church’s moral theology did not enjoy a separate existence within theology as a whole. While there had been two rich seams
of moral and ethical teaching available to theologians—the legacies of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, with their foundations in the thought of Plato and Aristotle—much of what passed for moral theology had focused on the confessor-penitent relationship in the sacrament of penance.
²

Moral guidance, especially when given to members of religious orders and priests, was synonymous with spiritual direction. Such advice centred on ascetical practices and prayer; individual poverty of spirit and obedience; rules relating to obligations to fast, attend Mass, and receive Holy Communion. Matters of sexual transgression in thought, word, and deed were crucial. There was scant emphasis in Trent, and hence in subsequent seminary education, on how the lay faithful should live their moral lives in light of Scripture, or reflection on a positive Christian moral theology: the fostering of the virtues or the common good, ideas inherent in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

Ever since the period of the penitentials, restitution and reparation to those wronged—by theft, say, or libel—had been advocated as a condition of absolution. Yet the chief focus of interest had been the state of the individual sinner’s soul, not the victims of sin. There was, indeed, the work of the great Spanish moralists of the sixteenth century—Francisco Suárez, Francisco de Vitoria, and Bartolomé de Las Casas—who had had enlarged on themes of natural law relating to warfare, international law (especially on questions of conquest and colonialism), and property rights. Aspects of their work anticipated the great encyclical of Leo XIII (
Rerum
Novarum
, 1891) on Catholic social teaching. But as the moral theologian and professor John Mahoney has pointed out: ‘This social teaching has, until fairly recently been aimed to quite a large extent at the defence of the individual in society, as in the arguments traditionally marshalled to justify and defend the institution of private property’. He added that the Church’s official and humanitarian teachings had concentrated more on the individual’s response ‘to the divine command not to steal, . . . often in the context of his eternal fate’ than the ‘context of the social well-being of others.’
³

Against this background, the early modern Catholic confessors and seminary pastoral theologians were preoccupied with ‘what morally may I do or not do to avoid mortal sin?’ (Or, as the novelist David Lodge, four hundred years on, would put it in the title of his satirical novel on Catholic sexual morality,
How Far Can You Go?)
Hence, in the era that followed the Council of Trent, there was ample scope for conflict between those who pursued the most stringent principles in judging what constituted mortal sin, on the one hand, and those who were inclined to be more permissive, on the other. A rigorist standpoint, Jansenism, emerged in France and the Lowlands in the seventeenth century, based on the book
Augustinus
by the Louvain theologian Cornelius Jansen, published in 1640, two years after his death. Jansen’s followers advocated the strictest moral standards, ultimately basing themselves on the darker, more negative elements in Augustinian thought, with an emphasis on the corruption of Original Sin. A fiercely antagonistic debate arose between
the Jansenists and the Jesuits, whom the Jansenists accused of morally harmful laxity, indicting their ‘casuistry’—alleged chop logic, allowing greater latitude in moral opinions and judgements. The disputes fragmented into a chaos of viewpoints, resulting in Jansenism’s polar opposite, Quietism, which recommended contemplative passivity aimed at achieving unity with God. A key characteristic of Quietism was its opposition to active strivings in one’s moral life.
⁴

A major focus of conflict between moralists, moreover, was the principle known as ‘probabilism’, which meant that a confessor should recommend a solution to a tricky moral case by invoking the most lenient judgement on offer, even if it was held by a single pastoral theologian. Probabilism was defended by many Jesuits. Much time was expended on test cases, such as whether it would be breaking the fast on an official fast day (Good Friday, say), leading to mortal sin, if one were to eat tiny quantities of food frequently through the day, which might amount to more than the normal fast-day allowance of the single main meal.

In the end, papal authority weighed in, condemning the extremes of both Jansenism and Quietism, in 1653 and 1689 respectively.
⁵
In time, the wider disputes were eased, if not entirely settled, by the influential works and teaching of Alphonsus Liguori in the 1700s. Son of an aristocratic family in Naples, Liguori was a man of wide scholarship and artistic talent. He was an accomplished harpsichordist, having practised the instrument for three hours each day during his youth. He had trained originally as a lawyer, but after
witnessing a rigged court case in Naples he devoted himself to work among the poor, both in the city and the countryside—where he discovered that the peasants were sunk in ignorance of the faith. After ordination to the priesthood, he founded the Redemptorist congregation, dedicated to parish mission work, retreats, preaching, and, above all, hearing confessions. He wrote more than a hundred works—mainly instructions for priests and works of apologetics against the Church’s enemies. His lasting legacy, however, was his
Theologia Moralis
(
Moral Theology
), which went through nine revisions during his lifetime, and a vast number after his death. There are many thousands of editions and translations of his various works on morals in existence.

Liguori was dedicated to the task of preparing priests as confessors. His achievement—for better or for worse—was to limit the scope of Catholic moral and pastoral theology to the questions, scruples, and judgements that arise in the confessional. He succeeded, however, in promoting an uneasy peace between the rigorists and the laxists. As we shall see, his prestige and influence would shape the textbooks in moral and pastoral theology into the first half of the twentieth century, and, in consequence, the guidance given to confessors up to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Among his many reflections on the supreme importance of confession, and the need for souls to be moulded by their confessors, was his recommendation of blind obedience to one’s confessor. Pius IX would declare him a ‘Doctor of the Church’, and in 1950 Pius XII would proclaim that the teaching of Alphonsus
Liguori was the ‘most thoroughly approved’ and ‘safe norm’ throughout the Church. The pontiff also declared him patron of moral theologians.
⁶

B
EFORE HIS DEATH IN
1787, Liguori noted that attendance at confession was in steep decline. His impression of the reason for the collapse, based on personal experience of parish life in Italy’s cities and rural communities, was that rigorist confessors were routinely withdrawing absolution from their penitents. Other reasons were not difficult to discern. Sexual solicitation had continued to give confessors a bad name, and there was a perception, on the part of men, that confessors were coming between themselves and their women. Anticlericalism was spreading throughout Europe, partly because of a growing resentment over the power that priests wielded over women in confession. The anticlerical sentiments grew especially in France, where Voltaire, along with other Enlightenment philosophers, had prepared the ground with their claims for the supremacy of reason over faith and accusations of clerical corruption. The French Revolution dealt a further massive blow to the Church in France, which had been closely associated with the privileges of monarchy and aristocracy. Some 20,000 priests were laicised under threat of death or imprisonment. Parishes were abandoned in their thousands, and some 30,000 religious sent into exile. The Mass and the sacraments virtually disappeared.