'Forgive me, father': why we don't go to confession.

Why don't Catholics go to confession anymore? Or not nearly as often as they used to? Church conservatives blame the "infidelity" of American Catholics on the society's rampant secularism. Here in the land of individual liberty, guilt and sin are out, permissiveness is in.

Such accusations miss the mark. They don't explain the decline in penance among deeply committed Catholics. I've heard friends say that while they faithfully attend Mass every Sunday, they no longer go to confession. "I last went when my children made their first Communion," they report; or in a more tart rejection, "I stopped going because I decided it was sick."

While I dutifully go to confession twice a year during Advent and Lent, I too have difficulties. It's not that I object to feeling guilt over sin. Without good guilt and appropriate shame we would all be psychopaths. Sin, after all, is the corollary of our freedom as moral agents created in God's image. And for Christians the acknowledgment of sin is followed by the assurance of forgiveness.

On a personal level, too, self-reflection and examination of conscience lead to mindfulness. Recent psychological research shows that confronting and expressing negative emotions can help heal mind and body. The act of confessing to God and one another is not only right, but good for us. Surely accepting this truth doesn't collapse confession into therapy; God wants us to be healed.

Then what's my problem with confession? Unfortunately, the present structure of the sacrament, the private confession offered in most parishes, seems to be disembodied, disconnected, and an all-too-brief encounter. In my own case, no matter how kind the priests have been, or how hard I try to make a good confession, the effort falls flat. The experience is too hyperverbal, abstract, and artificial. First, I have to dredge through my memory (increasingly unreliable) to try to remember and articulate all my sins. The priest doesn't know me from Eve, so he can't help me avoid laxity or scrupulosity, or some dread combination of the two.

Granted, if I had committed murder and was desperate to confess I wouldn't care who the priest was or how penance was structured. At the other extreme, Catholics who confess to their spiritual directors enter into a more intimate relationship and one with genuine continuity. But for most ordinary Catholics, having a spiritual director is as unlikely as having a family physician who makes house calls.

Another drawback with the way we set up confession is the brevity of the process; most penances given are short prayers that take three minutes at the most. Slam, bam, go in peace. Worse still, nowadays the church is deserted and there are few other penitents to keep you company. A member of our small Renew group, who no longer goes to confession regularly, made the point that in his youth confession seemed more compelling because the Saturday-night ritual provided you with spiritual support: You waited in a long line with a crowd of your fellow parishioners who were praying with you in the pews.

Today it's also the case that Catholics have been encouraged to participate more fully in the Mass, including its penitential prayers. The congregation's appeals for mercy and forgiveness gain a force absent in private confession, because as you ask the Lord and your brothers and sisters to forgive you, they are right there. Forgiveness and reconciliation are concretely present when the peace of Christ is exchanged.

In the same way, communal and collective celebrations of penance benefit from the spiritual energy of the gathered community. James Dallen, a priest who is an expert on penance and its development in the church, says forthrightly that "unless a parish community gathers regularly for such celebrations, the revitalization of the sacrament of penance will be impossible; it will continue to be understood and used in a distorted and misleading fashion" (The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, Pueblo Publishing Company).

Dallen also claims that others beside the priest can participate in specific ministries of penance and reconciliation. I confess that this is a new idea to me, one I want to hear more about.

I found Dallen's presentation of the historical evolution of penance into one of the seven sacraments to be liberating. I use the word "liberating" because knowing of church changes in the past gives hope for change in the future. Since continuing conversion and reconciliation are the heart of the Christian life, the rite of penance should be a fruitful sacrament for everyone.

Obviously, we need more experimentation in penance services in local communities, In the meantime, if we are confined to isolated private confessions in empty churches, maybe we can import some practices from other Catholic lands to help make confession a more embodied and a less truncated encounter.

With tongue only partly in cheek, I suggest that we could inch down the aisle on our knees to the confessional, praying as we go (as in Mexico and the pilgrimage up Saint Patrick's Croagh in County Mayo). This would give us more time to prepare and focus our attention on the slow progress we are making in the Christian life. To pray one's penance we could kneel with arms outstretched in a cross, like the ancient Irish saints. And why can't the nonordained or nonprofessed baptized church members ever have a chance to prostrate themselves before God at the altar? At least the pope's habit of kissing the ground in gratitude could be democratized.

All right, it can't happen here. Most American Catholics not only can't sing, but they're far too reserved to express themselves in extravagant gestures of devotion. But you get the point I'm trying to make. It's damnably hard to accept the forgiveness of sin, especially our own sins, so we need all the help we can get. When penance is revitalized, the people will come.