No First Confessions as the Solution to Clergy Sexual Abuse?
In the wake of sex abuse scandals in the German Archdiocese of Freiburg, a commission has called for children not to be admitted to Confession prior to First Communion. Instead, their report asserts, the sacrament should be delayed until before Confirmation. In Freiburg-im-Breisgau, that usually means age 15-16.
The “theological experts” say that children prior to First Communion—usually eight to nine years of age—do not have “an appropriate sense of guilt and sin” and so need not be admitted to the sacrament.
I admit to a sense of déjà vu.
Invoking the sex abuse scandal as a reason to keep children from Confession is an argument that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Are we to understand German clergy as having a particular predilection for prepubescent pederasty? Why wouldn’t teens in the throes of hormones be equally, if not more appealing? And instead of asking these kinds of questions, shouldn’t we really be keeping pervert priests, not penitents, out of the confessional?
Incidentally, there is a reason why confessionals were invented: the fixed grill was intended to ensure the sanctity and propriety of the sacrament or, as the Freiburg Commission phrases it, to ensure “boundaries” are not “violated.” Perhaps our German brothers might dust the old versions off, instead of using “reconciliation rooms.” Fixed times for Confessions in public places—an hour in church as opposed to “appointments”—would also maintain probity.
That said, I really don’t believe this is about warding off sexual advances so much as it is a fig leaf to push a theological agenda. I say déjà vu because many of these ideas are retreads, moldy oldies that didn’t make it the first time around when they were proposed in the 1970s.
