When I was twelve, a priest assigned me 300 Hail Marys and 300 Our Fathers for reciting the new Act of Contrition. He didn’t like it. My mother reduced the sentence to 3, reasoning that I must have misheard, and in any case God knew that I had made a proper Act.

I remain, many years later, a wary and ambivalent penitent. I don’t find dredging up sin, or even the speed of old-style confession, particularly humiliating. Rather, what daunts me is the socially and spiritually unique experience of addressing God in the presence of a single witness (an instrument of God’s mercy, true, but also a human being).

No one could feel constrained pouring out one’s failings in silence to God. So too there is freedom from self-consciousness and self-invention in communal reconciliation services, where we forge the I-Thou relationship with God and also collectively craft an image of a repentant Catholic community. But what are we doing when we address God in the presence of a priest alone?

One thing I am often doing is trimming. As a child I always ended my litany of sins with "I lied." That covered any confessional hyperbole resulting from my desire to be an appropriately scrupulous penitent. As an adult, trimming has taken the form of omissions that stem from a genuine reticence before the priest, especially in his male identity. I also admit my tendency to omission stems from unease about how a priest’s personal allegiances might color his function as a penance designer. The experience at twelve left me not just with a good story but with an abiding anxiety about the confessor’s ability to divorce his prejudices from his judgments.

Is it for good or ill that individual confession, in its very structure, tells me I cannot escape myself, my tendency to self-invention and self-forgiving? It certainly discomforts. But the confessional situation is not just uncomfortable. It is also confusing and even galling. Take the very opening, the old formulaic "Bless me, Father." To which Father am I talking? Feminist resentment, which I swear I don’t experience in any other sacramental context, bristles: Is God being invoked to shore up the institutional structure? I think this reaction is fairly common among women my age.

I frankly admire the serious labor that priests devote to realizing their role as mediators in confession. Still, despite their intense, self-effacing work, their humanity looms large in the mind of the penitent. Indeed, despite any Catholic’s wish, there seems to be more likeness between confession and the weirder expressions of our candid culture (such as the talk shows to which James O’Toole refers), than there is between confession and the candor that animates friendship and marriage. This latter, partly the result of the rise of therapy and the women’s movement, naturally means that fewer people feel the pressure to tell which swelled nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century confessionals. Increasingly, people are accustomed to confessing to people to whom they are bound by affection; the oddity now is testifying to a relative stranger. Can sacramental confession accommodate that cultural shift? Should it? 

Read more: Empty Confessionals, by James O'Toole; Not Yet in Line, by Madeline Marget;
Examination of Conscience, by Peter Steinfels