The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (30 page)

The late Father Herbert McCabe, a Dominican theologian, gave a homily on confession not long before he died: ‘You are not forgiven because you confess your sin’, he said. ‘You confess your sin, recognise yourself for what you are,
because
you are forgiven.’ The theologian Karl Rahner, citing Augustine, made the same point, invoking the image of Lazarus rising from the tomb. When a Christian stands outside the confessional ready to tell his sins to a priest, ‘he has already been raised by the word of grace of Christ from the tomb of sin like a Lazarus[;] . . . he has already begun to live.’
¹³

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T
HIS BOOK OWES ITS EXISTENCE TO
the late Peter Carson, my publisher for forty years at Allen Lane, Viking-Penguin, and Profile Books. Peter midwifed the text of this book until his death in January 2013. He is sorely missed by colleagues and the rest of the publishing world. Being above all an ‘authors’ publisher’, he is especially missed by the many writers he discovered, nurtured, and inspired. My personal debt to him is incalculable.

My research has drawn on a wide circuit of recent scholarly work on the role of confession in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, especially in the archives of the Spanish Inquisition and canon law tribunals in Italy. Counter-Reformation studies continue to attract scholars, and their work provides new perspectives and overviews of a period and subject that, from a Catholic view, had become closer to apologetics than authentic history. A critical overview of modern manuals of moral and pastoral theology, from Alphonsus Liguori to Henry Davis, has enabled me to form an impression of a confessor’s formation in the seminaries through the first two-thirds of the past century. For the link between sexual abuse
and confession in the second half of the twentieth century, official reports from the United States, Canada, Ireland, Germany, and Australia have been crucial. Information continues to come in piecemeal via the media and the courts.

I was part of a seminar at University College, Dublin, in the spring of 2012 run by Dr. Marie Keenan, whose interviews with offending priests (on leaving jail) have proved essential to my research. I am grateful to Dr. Keenan for permission to quote from interviews with priests who had served jail sentences as a result of convictions relating to clerical sexual abuse. Research on the local incidence of abuse conducted by Professor Gerry Kearns (who also participated in the seminar) of Maynooth University College, Dublin, has also proved invaluable. Understanding the psychological dimensions of confession, and stages of moral development, took me to the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and others as well as to the ideas of Michel Foucault. At the same time, I have derived considerable benefit from my conversations with the psychoanalyst and sociologist Professor Juliet Mitchell of the University of Cambridge and with the London psychoanalyst Josephine Klein.

In the summer of 2012 I was invited by the international Catholic weekly
The Tablet
to publish an article on the neglect of confession. In consequence I received more than three hundred responses from readers around the world. This correspondence, together with interviews with penitents and confessors, has provided ample source material for the views expressed by the lay and clerical Catholic faithful that I have discussed in Part Three. I am indebted to Catherine
Pepinster, editor of
The Tablet
, for publishing my article. In addition, I thank all the respondents for their contributions. Their views have been essential even if they are not cited in the text. Charles Lysaght; Professor Bryan Fanning of University College, Dublin; and the late Dr. Pádraic Conway of the Newman Centre, Dublin, also helped to expedite my research and discussions in Ireland.

I have also benefited from my correspondence with Father Desmond O’Donnell, OMI. Dr. David Bernard McLoughlin of Newman University College enlightened me on the topic of penitentials. The moral theologian Father Jim McManus advised me on questions relating to Alphonsus Liguori.

I would also like to thank Professor Nicholas Lash, Dr. Mary Laven, Nathan Brooker, and Roger Labrie for reading the book, or parts of it, in manuscript form, and for their valued comments; and I must thank Father Alban McCoy, Canon John Koenig, Janet Lash, John Wilkins, Professor John Mahoney, Dr. Christopher Burlinson and Dr. Michael McGhee for their insights on specific matters.

In addition, I thank my friend and agent Clare Alexander in London, Zoë Pagnamenta in New York, and my publishers Andrew Franklin, Lara Heimert, and Jens Dehning.

This book was written under the hospitable auspices of Jesus College, Cambridge, for which I thank its Master and Fellows. Finally, I am especially grateful to my friend and ‘reader’ Professor Stephen Heath of Jesus College, Cambridge, for his encouragement and advice, and for scrutinising the manuscript and proofs. Any remaining infelicities are my responsibility.

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