The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (26 page)

Contemporaneously with Joyce’s novel, a very different kind of literary confession and spiritual liberation was proving a mass best-seller throughout the Catholic world in hun
dreds of editions and translations. St. Thérèse of Lisieux was a Carmelite nun who had entered the convent at the unusually youthful age of fifteen. Born in 1873, she was dead by 1897, wracked with tuberculosis and exhausted by the rigours of the highly ascetical, enclosed Carmelite convent she had entered while still little more than a child.

Losing her mother at the age of four, and her eldest sisters to the convent soon afterwards, Thérèse was prone to introversion, scrupulosity, psychosomatic illness, and an intense religiosity. The story of her short life, compiled and edited posthumously from three manuscripts, was published in English in 1912 as
Sœur Thérèse of Lisieux: The Little Flower
. It remains as popular to this day in the realm of Catholic piety as Joyce’s
Portrait
does in that of Modernist literary novels. The autobiography of Thérèse is precisely the fulfilment of the ‘pale life in service of the altar’ that Stephen rejects. The book’s internal commentary establishes that the narrative was composed out of a series of drafts written under obedience to her sister, her religious superior. This most Anti-Modernist of confessions, by the nun whom Pius X called the ‘greatest saint of the modern period’, is arguably the first
post
-Modernist ‘confession’ and hagiography, given the author’s apologetic, self-conscious commentary on its construction. At the same time, its confessional impetus betrays an admission of profound scepticism more radical even than that of many confessed agnostics and atheists of the period. It is hard to think of a piece of Christian spiritual writing, including the
Dark Night of the Soul
of St. John of
the Cross, in which a ‘saint’s’ trials of faith have been publicly confessed so unremittingly—to extremes of agonised despair. In the year before she died, Thérèse suffered for months ‘in the midst of the darkest storm’. She writes of an iron curtain that rises up to the heavens, blotting out the stars; of crawling through a tunnel, walking in thick mists, and plunging into a black hole where ‘everything has disappeared’. She
hears
the darkness speak to her mockingly, telling her that the heavenly country is all a dream, that she is destined for a night darker than ever, of mere non-existence.
⁷

What appealed to the clergy about Thérèse’s story, and especially to Pius X, who initiated the process for her beatification in 1914, was her religious acquiescence and obedience to her superiors in everything, whatever the temptations to independence of spirit, whatever the doubts and temptations to rebellion. She proved equally attractive to senior Catholic theologians and intellectuals. The Catholic historian Henri Daniel-Rops argued that she posed the ‘irrefutable answer’ to the ‘assertions of Nietzsche and Karl Marx’ as well as to ‘all forms of contemporary apostasy’. She overcame her profound doubt, he argued, with an act of love arising from sheer, intransigent will. In his book
Holy Daring
, John Udris noted a strange paradox: ‘Her strategy is “not to struggle against the chimeras of the night” but to surrender oneself in the certainty that we are being carried. She counsels a consent
not
to see; a consent which confounds the “empty” fear which she felt so unfitting for such a little child.’ Thérèse’s obedient confession of ‘
serviam
’ stands at the opposite extreme to Joyce’s confession of ‘
non serviam
’.
⁸

Joyce’s handling of the sacrament of penance, in the case of Stephen’s original conversion of life, exemplifies, as does Thérèse’s entire life story in the convent, the Catholic confessional dilemma. The conversion of life, the metanoia, involves a radical decision to seek the face of God. Yet there is a price to be paid in self-inflicted wounds and the stifling of human emotions and instincts. Stephen has noted the first temptation: the acquisition of a power greater than that of the angels—of binding and loosing in Heaven and Hell. Later he observes the mirthless face of the early morning priest: ‘eyeless and sour-favoured and devout, shot with pink tinges of suffocated anger.’ The combination of temptation to power and the realities of ultimate self-denial have inevitable consequences: as Richard Crashaw put it in a poem in honour of St. Teresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic and Thérèse’s spiritual model, ‘the wounded is the wounding heart.’
⁹

O
N ANOTHER PLANE
, in the mundane world of everyday Catholic realities, the dilemma proposed by the life of Thérèse was being played out in the sexual lives of countless Catholic couples throughout the twentieth century. With the availability of cheap and efficient condoms, followed in the 1960s by the birth control pill, Catholics were faced with a choice between following the Church’s teaching on contraception or lowering their spiritual ideals (risking the loss of Heaven) and opting for the benefits of a planned family. The Church’s awareness of this dilemma, which no devout,
yet sexually active, Catholic was spared, was evinced by Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical
Casti Connubii
(Of Chaste Marriage). The encyclical became the Ur-text for subsequent popes, from Pius XII (with his advocacy of the ‘rhythm method’) through John Paul II’s frequent animadversions on ‘sexology’. Pius XI’s insistence on the sinful nature of contraception, and the duty of priests to preach its evils, was uncompromising. Contraception, he declared, was ‘a horrible crime’ (adding, with evident approval, that in times past it was ‘punished with death’). Quoting St. Augustine, he went on: ‘Intercourse even with one’s legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of the offspring is prevented. Onan, the son of Juda, did this and the Lord killed him for it.’

The encounter between a sinning married person and the priest was a time for firm instruction, reproof, and reconciliation. ‘We admonish, therefore, priests, . . . in virtue of Our supreme authority and in Our solicitude for the salvation of souls, not to allow the faithful entrusted to them to err regarding this most grave law of God’, wrote Pius XI. He went on: ‘Much more, that they keep themselves immune from such false opinions, in no way conniving in them.’ Any deviation from the Church’s teaching within the confessional, he warned, placed a heavy burden on the conscience of the confessor. ‘If any confessor or pastor of souls, which may God forbid, lead the faithful entrusted to him into these errors or should at least confirm them by approval or by guilty silence, let him be mindful of the fact that he must render a strict account to God, the Supreme Judge, for the betrayal of his
sacred trust, and let him take to himself the words of Christ: “They are blind and leaders of the blind: and if the blind lead the blind, both fall into the pit.”’
¹⁰

A
S THE LIBERATIONS OF THE 1960
s swept through the many worlds of the Catholic faithful, the
serviam
of married Catholics—typical of my grandmother, who had eight children, one of whom died, and who herself died at the age of fifty—was giving way to
non serviam
, at least where sexual practice and confession were concerned. There was a simultaneous decline, particularly on the part of the laity, in obedience to papal authority, as well as a plunge in the number of Catholics practising confession. The trends were revealed in two studies, one in Germany and the other in the United States. The former was reported by the moral theologian Bernard Häring in 1979, the latter by Andrew Greeley, the Chicago-based priest, novelist and sociologist of religion, in 1993. Greeley claimed that only 32 per cent of Catholics thought it was ‘certainly true’ that the pope was infallible in matters of faith and morals. One proposed cause was a rejection of papal teaching on contraception; another was social and political awakening on the part of women. With the invention and mass distribution of the birth control pill, women were in control of their reproductive lives in an unprecedented way. The ‘liberation’ of the sex act from procreative liability created scope for effective family planning,
creating tensions for devout Catholics, who were constantly exposed to the clerical warnings of ‘sinfulness’, accompanied by the advocacy of ‘abstinence’, or the calendar-watching option of the ‘safe period’. In the wider sexual revolution of the 1960s, moreover, the pill had made cohabitation of unmarried couples both feasible and acceptable. The link between responsible parenthood and economic security was becoming a norm. Sexually active Catholics were adopting these trends in developed countries, and their rates of divorce were beginning to equal those of non-Catholic couples.
¹¹

As we saw earlier, following the Second Vatican Council the faithful, lay and clerical, had expected a relaxation of the papal condemnation of artificial contraception. It was widely believed that the Church would soon allow freedom of conscience on the question for married couples. It was not to be. In 1968, Pope Paul VI made the uncollegial decision to publish his encyclical
Humanae Vitae
, which stressed the principle that ‘each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.’ Not only did he stress that contraception was a mortal sin within marriage, but he also said that contraception compounded the sin of sex outside of marriage. Homosexuality was also condemned. The Church’s views on homosexuality would be spelled out in more detail in a declaration made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1975, which ruled that homosexual practices and all masturbation were ‘disordered’ and constituted mortal sins.
¹²

After
Humanae Vitae
, two crucial tendencies occurred with important implications for confession. Although actual
figures are unknown, and probably unknowable, there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence of a massive decline of confessional practice, and of course the decline is quite obvious to anyone who has been a Catholic during these years. There were those Catholics who refused to believe, despite the Church’s teaching, that their sexual behaviour was wrong, particularly when it came to the use of contraception within marriage. Confession was nevertheless difficult for them, as they balked at making a ‘bad confession’ by not admitting their use of contraception. Catholics brought up from childhood in the faith knew only too well that absolution depended on a ‘firm purpose of amendment’. So, on their own consciences, they decided to go to communion at Mass while giving up on confession altogether. In contrast, there were those Catholics who simply abandoned their Catholicism in a process of self-exclusion, having decided that it was too difficult to live up to the Church’s sexual teachings.

The position of confessors was invidious. Anthony Kenny, an Oxford philosopher, was a Catholic curate in Liverpool in the early 1960s. In his memoir
A Path from Rome
, a significant ‘confessional’ narrative of its time, he outlined the dilemma of confessors. ‘The wrongness of contraception had been taught as explicitly and definitively by the Church as any moral doctrine. Yet, like most of the Church’s critics, I could see little force in the natural law arguments against it.’ He found himself constantly repeating and enforcing the Church’s teaching even though he was conscious that, ‘If the other doctrines I doubted turned out false, then in
general no one was a loser but myself; but in a case like this it was others who were paying the penalty if the advice was wrong.’ Kenny wrote that he had no alternative but to follow the Church’s doctrine. This was a confessional admission of his decision for ‘
serviam’
, despite the consequences for his penitents.
¹³

Many priests, however, were beginning to rebel within the confessional, taking matters on their own conscience and telling their female penitents to go ahead and take the pill. The situation served to increase the anxiety of many priests during this period and added impetus to the mass walkout of some 100,000 priests worldwide in the following decades.