The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (7 page)

Christendom was beginning to fragment, and the sacrament of confession, as defined and legislated by Rome, was a crucial centrifugal impetus. In England the question of the validity of confession was heatedly debated between the conservatives, who said the sacrament was instituted by Christ, and evangelicals such as Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, who said it was a human institution. The doctrinal disputes and antagonisms would soon become violent. During the reign of Elizabeth a few decades later, Catholic confessors would be hung and then drawn and quartered for hearing the confessions of devout Catholics.
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Three

Confession and the Counter-Reformers

So many abuses and such grave diseases have rushed upon the church of God that we now see her afflicted almost to the despair of salvation.

—Secret report on the need for a Church council, commissioned by Pope Paul III in 1536, quoted in John W. O’Malley,
Trent: What Happened at the Council

F
OR TWO DECADES OF THE MID-SIXTEENTH CENTURY, THE
ancient walled city of Trent, high in the bracing air of the Tyrol, was the scene for the Church of Rome’s response to the laxities and corruptions within Latin Christianity and the grievances and challenges of the Protestant reformers. A favoured Protestant metaphor speaks of the Council of Trent as the point at which Western Christendom broke into a delta of separated streams, with the Roman flood carrying off the
filth and flotsam of the Middle Ages. Rome, however, speaks of that Council as the majestic continuation of Christianity’s authentic mainstream, from which the Protestant churches broke away in heretical discontinuities.
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Pope Paul III had for eight years attempted to find the ideal location for the Council. Mantua, Piacenza, and Cambrai had been suggested and rejected. Trent held appeal because it was at a midpoint between the Papal States and the Germanic imperial territories. On 13 December 1545, the assembled prelates celebrated Mass in the city’s Duomo, invoking the guidance of the Holy Ghost. There were four cardinals, including the Englishman Reginald Pole; four archbishops; twenty-one bishops; five heads of religious orders; and some fifty theologians and canon lawyers. The numbers would expand in time. It was a French prince of the Church, Cardinal Jean de Lorraine, who called on the assembly to acknowledge its responsibility for Christendom’s woes: ‘Whom shall we accuse my fellow bishops? Whom shall we declare to be the authors of such great misfortune? Ourselves; we must admit that much with shame and with repentance for our past lives.’ Cardinal Pole declared, ‘We ourselves are largely responsible for the misfortune that has occurred—because we have failed to cultivate the field that was entrusted to us.’ Before departing from the council, he pleaded with the participants to read the works of ‘our adversaries’ with an open mind. They should not conclude, moreover, that because Luther said it, ‘therefore it is false’.
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There were those who believed that the Council would last no longer than a few weeks. But it would take eighteen
years for the conciliar documents to be signed off. There were to be fierce arguments, protracted suspensions, expressions of nationalistic hubris, even physical attacks. When a Franciscan bishop called a Neapolitan prelate a knave and a fool, the indignant Italian pulled out a fistful of the bishop’s beard. In time the Council would settle down peaceably enough. Its work would shape the ethos and discipline of the Catholic Church for the next three hundred years and beyond.

There was a total of twenty-five sessions in three great sittings. The main business was to condemn Protestant heresies while clarifying Catholic orthodoxy across a broad span of doctrines. High on the agenda, and with the practice of confession in mind, was an insistence that the clergy should be better educated; seminaries must be established for clerical formation, with minor seminaries starting at the age of twelve. The disciplines for religious orders, male and female, were to be tightened. The roles of enclosure (keeping monastic inmates in, and the laity out) would be enforced to preclude the lax and scandalous habits that had developed through the Middle Ages. Nuns were instructed to make their confessions at least once a month.

Deliberations on confession began in earnest when the Council fathers moved temporarily to Bologna in 1547–1548, with the deficiencies of confessors topping the list of priorities. The bishop of Bologna, chairing the discussion, remarked: ‘If we take pains to expel the wicked and ignorant priests, we can easily restore Christianity to its old splendour and dignity; if not, we will waste our energy in devising regulations and statutes.’
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The proceedings continued back at Trent, leading to the completion of the fourteenth session of the Council—which stated that confession had been given ‘great consideration . . . so great are the number of errors relative to this sacrament’. Absolution and penance were necessary at all times for all men ‘who had stained themselves by mortal sin’. The acts of the penitent, namely, contrition, confession, and satisfaction (making good the consequences of the crime, with reparation and penance), constituted the ‘matter’, which brings about ‘reconciliation’ with God as well as ‘serenity of conscience and exceedingly great consolation of spirit.’ The Council condemned the Protestant claim that forgiveness of sin was principally a question of faith rather than penance. For those who objected that confession created a sin-confession-sin cycle, the Council decreed that true contrition must be accompanied by ‘the purpose of not sinning in the future’.

Against critics such as Erasmus, who taught that contrition in one’s heart was sufficient for God’s forgiveness, the Council declared that although perfect contrition might well reconcile a soul to God before the penitent performed the sacrament, ‘a desire of the sacrament’ was also essential. It was granted that, though fear of Hell was ‘imperfect’ (a kind of contrition labelled ‘attrition’), such fearful sorrow was nevertheless ‘a gift from God’ and would prepare a soul for the desire for justice and the reception of God’s grace.

Complete confession of all ‘mortal sins’, one by one, to a priest, who sat as judge and healer, was necessary for valid absolution, hence the need for ‘diligent self-examination’.
Venial, or lesser, sins should be told in confession as a matter of piety, but might be omitted in confession without guilt. The Council confirmed that confession ‘should be complied with by each and all at least once a year when they have attained the age of discretion.’ Like the Fourth Lateran Council, the Council of Trent left the age of ‘discretion’, in actual years, unstated.

The enforcement of the decrees of the Council fell to the bishops and religious orders of the Church. Some were more creative and rigorous than others. Given the vast and complex cultural, social, and political differences across the continent, the Council hardly could have imposed universal conformity even had it tried. The obligation to go to confession on pain of excommunication, laid down at the Fourth Lateran Council, was reaffirmed. Registers were to be kept by parish priests. Failure to attend annual confession could mean answering to the Inquisition.

Within the diversities peculiar to local and national conditions, and against the background of hostility between Protestant and Roman Catholic communities, confession became a test of inclusion or exclusion across Europe. In the 1550s, not long after the fourteenth session of the Council, Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria used military troops to suppress Lutheranism within the region by imposing obligatory attendance at confession. Neighbours were encouraged to report on non-confessing fellow parishioners.
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Elsewhere in Germany, in Passau and Geisenhausen, parishioners refusing to attend the sacrament were jailed.

In England, where Mary Tudor had acceded to the throne in 1553 after the brief, iconoclastic Protestant reign of Edward VI, and Roman Catholicism was reimposed, mandatory confession became a test of allegiance to the Crown and a token of reconciliation with the old faith. During the Lent of 1555, every adult in the country was instructed to confess to their local parish priest—to ‘reconcile themselves to the churche’ before Easter. An instruction issued by the bishops warned that should any of the faithful disobey, ‘every one of them shall have process made ageynst him, according to the Canons . . . for which purpose the pastors and curates of every parysche . . . [are] to certify me in writing of every mans and womans name that is not so reconciled.’
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In the archdiocese of York, priests were ordered to enquire during confession about specific articles of faith—belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the supremacy of the pope, justification by faith alone or through the sacraments—in order to detect lingering heresy. A measure of the strict enforcement, in May 1556 at least fifteen Kentish people, such as carpenters, weavers, and farm labourers, were arrested for what were deemed heretical opinions and failure to confess. Five of them died of starvation in jail by November of that year. Ten were burnt at the stake in January 1557.
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More fortunate were the many other recalcitrant ‘heretics’, guilty of such crimes as refusing to look at the elevated Host during Mass, who were merely punished with public humiliation. One Margaret Geoffrie of Ashford was forced to kneel in the chancel of the
parish church holding a rosary—symbol of Roman Catholic devotion—and disporting herself with reverence before the rest of the congregation.

It was all in vain. Under Elizabeth, who succeeded Mary in 1558, Catholicism became synonymous with Spanish and Popish treachery. Some 200 Catholics were executed in her bid to overturn Mary’s reversion to the Catholic faith, 123 of them priests condemned as spies working in the interests of a foreign power. This was the era of priest-holes—secret hiding places in Catholic homes—and Jesuits flitting from house to house with the Eucharist. For the Elizabethan authorities, confession, with its seal and secrecy, enabled priests to encourage treason by ‘reconciliation’ among subjects who might well appear outwardly obedient to the state.
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A
MONG THE
I
TALIAN PRELATES
present at the Council of Trent was a cardinal who led a thoroughgoing reform of confessional practice throughout Roman Christendom. Cardinal Charles Borromeo has been credited with inventing the confessional box—an iconic piece of church furnishing to this day. Speaking to his diocesan priests, Borromeo would declare that confessors ‘have the souls in their hands, as it were, and “speak to Jerusalem’s heart.”’
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Borromeo was endowed from birth with many ecclesiastical and aristocratic privileges. Nephew of Pope Pius IV, he had received the clerical tonsure at age eight, and at
twelve he became the titular abbot of a monastery, which he attempted to reform with juvenile zeal. Tall, exceedingly thin, with an unusually prominent aquiline nose, Charles was awarded the red hat at the age of twenty-two and appointed Secretary of State to the Holy See. He was ennobled and wealthy in his own right, but the Church loaded him with even more titles and wealth. He became archbishop of Milan, protector of Portugal and Lower Germany, legate at Bologna, and archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. He was also granted many parish benefices. Nevertheless, it was said at his funeral that he slept on straw and adopted a regime of austerity and self-denial. Scholar, theologian, and canonist, he was an outstanding administrator in the preparation and proceedings of the Council. These abilities, in combination with a natural charisma and reputation for holiness, put him in good stead as he entered the archdiocese of Milan in September 1565.
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Milan was a vast province stretching from the Veneto to the Swiss Alps. The archdiocese, comprising eight hundred parishes, was in crisis, its priests sunk in ignorance (some knew so little Latin that they could not pronounce the words of absolution, let alone understand them). There were clerics in minor orders—in other words, not ordained priests—who heard confessions invalidly. Borromeo’s hagiographer, Giovanni Giussano, wrote that the cardinal realised that his clergy ‘could not have been more scandalous nor serve as a worse example.’
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Priests wore lay clothes, carried weapons in public, and lived openly with their mistresses. Many priests
were absentee pastors, either abandoning their benefices or letting them out to hire. Priests, Giussano wrote, were ‘mean and almost detestable’. Their churches were often leased as storage barns for the crops of Lombardy; monasteries were available for hire as venues for balls and weddings. Calling a series of synods, councils, and other meetings with the heads of religious orders and auxiliary bishops, Borromeo moved to enforce the decrees of the Trent with vigour. First he focused on confession, for this, in his view, was a sacrament that involved more engagement between clergy and faithful than any other. It was a sacrament, he believed that had scope for far-reaching social and moral renewal.