A few months back, I wrote a review of James O’Toole’s book, For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America. The editors of First Things chose the title, “Confession Eclipsed,” and rightly so. O’Toole, a historian out of Boston College, tells the story of how the sacrament of penance became a central aspect of American Catholic life soon after the Civil War, hit a highpoint in the mid-twentieth century, and crumbled in the decades following the Second Vatican Council. In essence, O’Toole recounts the near disappearance of what had been a defining mark of Catholicism in the United States. 

I was struck by his bold assertion that the undoing of confession was partly the result of an increased erudition among the Catholic laity on moral matters. The regular practice of preparing for confession by examining one’s conscience required the average Catholic to become an expert of sorts on what constituted a serious sin—and what did not. The stakes were supremely high given the long list of possible mortal sins and the ever-present risk of leaving one unconfessed and unabsolved. The fall of confession, therefore, came not solely from the increased moral laxity of the sixties and seventies, the popularity of secular therapy, or greater sensitivity to social sins, but also from a failure of the practice of the sacrament to keep pace with the education of the laity. As the sixties approached, there was an undeniable tension between the moral sophistication of many Catholics and going to confession in the same way they did when they were ten years old. Something had to give, and it was the sacrament.

I can attest, as someone who experienced the tail end of the American enthusiasm for confession, that my parents sought to educate themselves on moral theology. Various paperbacks on the shelves of the family room witnessed to their earnestness. I often overheard them discussing the inadequacies of how the Church dealt with certain moral issues, such as the suicide of a teenage girl in our parish, or whether priests were sufficiently trained to give psychological advice. These were not flippant conversations nor rationalizations of immortality, but rather the thoughts of morally serious average Catholics striving to make sense of their Church’s teachings in a time of cultural upheaval. 

While my review was mostly positive, I chided the author for his dedication to a narrative of decline beyond what the facts suggest. Here is how I put it:

There are signs of renewal, as more and more young people seek meaning beyond the superficialities of a culture saturated by social media. Certainly, part of attaining a meaningful life is a realization of the possibility of sin and the need of making amends on the way to reconciliation. O’Toole acknowledges that some Catholics continue to go to confession, but he has little to say about them. One wonders whether their inclusion would have complicated the declinist narrative he offers.

O’Toole belongs to a fairly large group of post-conciliar writers who struggle to see the collapse of the Catholicism of their youth as anything other than the end of the story. The idea that the traditional ways might still retain the power to attract the young is either dismissed or explained as the proclivities of a weird fringe.

In saying this, I am not questioning the basic truth of O’Toole’s history. His account of the fate of confession in twentieth-century America is in accord with other books on the same topic, such as Patrick Carey’s Confession: Catholics, Repentance, and Forgiveness in America and Maria C. Morrow’s Sin in the Sixties: Catholics and Confession, 1955-1975. While Carey spends more time on the impact of theological developments, Morrow couples the decline in confession to the disappearance of other penitential practices. She points especially to the American Bishops’ decision, promulgated the year after Vatican II, to lift the required Friday abstention from meat. The expressed desire of the bishops was that “the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law.” A miscalculation if ever there was. What joins all three authors is the sense that the intersection of human sin and divine mercy is part of the deep logic of Christianity, and its loss within the Church mirrors its loss in greater society. Moreover, each assumes that it will take some action by the hierarchy to revive the sacrament. 

Some recent commentators offer a different perspective, one based on the inherent power of the traditional practice. They see confession as either having a revival or posed to do so. Prominent among these is Ross Douthat of the New York Times. He is responding directly to O’Toole, faulting him for refusing to consider whether confession has a place in the twenty-first century.

His story is told as though the ending is settled: Confession is a “ghost sacrament,” practiced only by a “tiny minority of Catholics,” sufficiently anachronistic that the faith clearly awaits some entirely “new form” of self-scrutiny and repentance to make its moral vision stick.

To make his counter case, Douthat points to a recent Pew survey that shows that more than half of Catholics who attend mass weekly (around 28 percent) report going to confession at least once a year (23 percent). In this sense, confession remains integral to the life of active Catholics. Another poll conducted by EWTN News and Real Clear Opinion in 2024 found a slight increase in the number of those who go more than once a year or even monthly. While there’s no denying the drop-off since the Council, it is an exaggeration to speak of the demise of the sacrament. Something remains and is likely growing.

To strengthen his point, Douthat points to the latest installment of the “Knives Out” franchise: Wake Up Dead Man, directed by Rian Johnson. While the film has a lot to hate (and like), it contains a surprisingly attractive depiction of a young Catholic priest. Father Jud Duplenticy, played by Josh O’Connor, is contrasted to a judgmental older monsignor with a penchant for running gay couples, single mothers, and (in a brilliant turn) mask wearers out of the church. While one is welcoming and sincere, the other is brusque and corrupt. So far, so expected from a Hollywood product. 

Yet, while one might anticipate the sympathetic Father Jud to dissent from Church teaching or eager to equate the Gospel with social justice, the movie offers a Christ-centered priest who highlights confession as the path towards healing. Indeed, the climax of the movie is a slightly off-kilter but nonetheless powerful confession on the part of the murderer. For Douthat, the movie, perhaps apart from the intentions of its makers, bespeaks a thirst not for “the secularized or therapeutic vision of Christian ministry that predominated in some liberal circles after Vatican II” but “a sacramental and mystical vocation, carrying with it the special capacity to hear confessions and forgive sins, to bind and loose.” 

I think Douthat is right about this. Evidence of the continuing power of the sacrament is ready at hand. For example, recently, the Lamp published a quite remarkable essay entitled “The Croppy Boy,” by a newly ordained Irish priest, Fr. Peter George Flynn, OFM Conv. Father Peter recounts how he was drawn back to the confessional by James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a biography of the Irish Nationalist and martyr to the cause, Michael Collins. In particular, Flynn notes the famous hellfire sermon that leads to Stephen Dedalus’ confession in Portrait, and the story of a comrade who reaches Collins as he lay dying from gunshot wounds inflicted by the British: 

He held the dying general’s hand, whispered the Act of Contrition into his ear, and felt the general squeeze his hand in gratitude. That squeeze—that tiny physical act won the mercy of God.

The power of the story for Flynn is inseparable from the many bad things Collins did before that fateful day and the powerlessness of those sins before his final act of contrition. He contrasts this with the failure of the Irish priests of his own youth to give much attention to the importance of confession and the attempt by the Irish bishops to push general absolution services on their flocks. 

A second essay appeared recently from the writer Valarie Stivers, “How I Learned to Love Confession.” I am not sure that I have read anything like it before in First Things. The author tells the story of how as a new convert to the faith, who had lived a life at quite a distance from Catholic teaching and still, even after entering the Church, had real difficulties (both intellectual and practical) with its moral teaching, came to experience the transformative power of the confessional. It was a slow burn. When in RCIA (now OCIA), she learned of the requirement to take advantage of the sacrament once a year and whenever a mortal sin had been committed. She listened but the gravity of the matter did not come through. She explains: “The word ‘required’ is itself meaningless to a secular liberal American used to making her own decisions about her personal life.” Moreover, her experience with Catholics her age was that they did not regularly go to confession. In any case, the priest who oversaw her entrance had the pastoral prudence to emphasize the welcoming aspects of Catholicism. She writes:

I am a blue-stater and sex-positive child of the sexual revolution, and a struggling mother of teenagers, living post–civil divorce. My religious conversion experience strongly suggested to me that this church was the one I should turn to, but to approach Catholicism was to override a lifetime’s opposition to many of the Church’s positions. If I’d understood more clearly what those positions were, I would have opposed them even more strongly. In this sense, there was wisdom in my RCIA priest’s welcoming, intellectual approach, which discussed love, friendship, the Trinity, religious art, and the role of the Church in the world, and didn’t tackle controversial topics. Had I been presented with a harsh and incomprehensible list of sins upon first meeting, it is possible (perhaps, if we discount God’s agency in the matter) that I would have shrugged and looked elsewhere.

Welcoming, however, would not suffice. 

Things took a turn when she inquired what would happen if she remarried without having her first marriage annulled. Being informed that she would be prohibited from receiving the Eucharist was both unexpected and off-putting. It did, however, occasion much deeper reflection on the seriousness of sin and what it means to partake in the Body and Blood of Christ. Being a Catholic ceased to simply be a “misty way” to love her neighbor, but a real struggle with sin.

I started going to confession (a saga of its own in a big, busy city with few available hours and a crazy-­quilt of procedures). I couldn’t not, once I knew it was required of me. I had an inner voice, and I listened to it. I more or less confessed to the sins on the list, and when I didn’t really think they were sins, I confessed to doubting the word of the Church, too. Slowly I began praying for something my rational mind did not want, which was to actually believe this stuff. I can’t pray to be single forever; it goes too deeply against my heart. But I can pray to do Christ’s will instead of my own, so I pray for that. I didn’t take the whole list seriously all at once, nor did I always recognize all of the sins as sins, and I probably still don’t, but over time I’ve understood more. And I started modifying my behavior, not because I was fully convinced, but because I wanted to take the Eucharist, and it was inconvenient to have to confess.

In the end, it was this that she was looking for. A Church “that rolls up its sleeves, militantly and gently, offering the lists, the booths, the men on duty if you need them, the long slow interplay of experience and self-examination, aided by prayer and the promise of the Eucharist as a reward.”

There is little room for Fr. Flynn or Valerie Stivers in O’Toole’s narrative of the rise and fall of confession. At the same time, I am in basic agreement that whatever the future of the sacrament looks like, it will not be a simple return to its heyday. For the moment, however, it is a mistake to overlook the enduring power of a penitent confessing his or her sins in the dark of the confessional to a priest ready to offer absolution.