The Catholic Church has issued a warning to its clergy in Washington state: Any priest who complies with a new law requiring the reporting of child abuse confessions to authorities will be excommunicated.
https://www.newsweek.com/catholic-church-excommunicate-priests-following-new-us-state-law-2069039
To be fair and if we consider Catholic lore and dogma technically any kind of breach of the confessional seal is a major breach in Catholic law or whatever. So I understand this from a faith based perspective.
On the other hand, I’m an atheist so fuck the confessional seal and report major crimes. Especially fucking child abuse! Any kind of child abuse!
Other professions that hear personal information, such as psychologists and lawyers, are subject to mandatory reporting requirements, generally when people’s lives, either the client or members of the public, are endangered by not reporting.
We make the laws, the Catholic Church is subject to them, regardless of what the reactionary and corrupt Supreme Court might claim.
Catholics and all christians by extension are also bound to do good and protect those who can’t defend themselves.
I’m going to risk that denouncing and delivering to secular authoroties those who practice one of the most heinous acts we can think of falls under that responsibility.
Or because the church has lost its power to deliver “justice” of their accord (read inquisition and the follow up torture and mutilation) it has also lost the will to persecute evil deeds?
The confessional is one of the world’s most productive intelligence-gathering systems. And it wasn’t part of the earliest forms of Christianity-- there’s no evidence it was used prior to Constantine. Even when it was first introduced, it was more of an annual thing connected to Lent.
The modern system grew in the middle ages because of its revenue-generating possibilities: the confession -> penance -> absolution pipeline included the possibliity of gaining forgiveness by donating large sums to the Church (remember indulgences?). Nice little earner, that. And it remains a rich source of material to blackmail Catholics who would otherwise do things that are inconvenient to the church hierarchy.
I’ve phrased this in such a way as to make it clear that it’s not just about pedophilia. The Church commits other crimes too (remember the financial entanglement with the Mafia that was exposed during the Banco Ambrosiano scandal?) and also seeks (and uses) other forms of political leverage to protect and expand its power. And they don’t want to be scrutinized for fraud or influence-peddling any more than they do for protecting pedos.