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by Scott Hahn Doubleday, 2003 192 pp.; $19.95 |
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by Ann M.S. LeBlanc Saint Anthony Messenger Press, 2003 48 pp.; $4.95, paper |
Does being a Christian mean always having to say you're sorry? When outsiders look at the Roman Catholic rite of confession (now more often termed "reconciliation"), they suspect it is driven by feelings of masochistic self-hatred, and sustained by claims of sacerdotal magic. Why should we have to spend this life groveling over sins, if Jesus already paid for them on the Cross? Why should we speak sins out loud to another person, when they could remain between us and the bedpost? And why should we believe that a priest stands between us and God, forgiving or retaining our debts as he chooses?
Two new books from Roman Catholic authors attempt to make the case for regular sacramental confession. Scott Hahn, one of the best-known contemporary evangelical converts to Catholicism, builds Lord Have Mercy: The Healing Power of Confession on a foundation of Scripture and Tradition. It's a work of firm and orderly persuasion, calling Catholics back to a sacrament that has become astonishingly neglected. In my own Catholic girlhood, once every couple of weeks was the norm; now, Hahn tells us, parishes of several thousand worshippers offer only a half-hour of posted times a week. Even priests themselves don't go to confession: "almost half of our priests avail themselves of the sacrament only 'once or twice a year,' 'rarely,' or 'never.'"
Ann M. S. LeBlanc's short book, How to Go to Confession When You Don't Know How, is lively and inviting, often funny, and on occasion quite beautiful. LeBlanc has in mind a select audience: Catholics who desire something more personal than what is expected during that posted half-hour, and who make an appointment with a priest for a private confession. She is addressing Catholics who haven't done this before and "don't know how," and maybe aren't entirely sure they want to.
She once put herself in that category. She recounts the following conversation with her priest, Father John:
"I'm not going to do it."
"You don't have to, A. M."
"No way I'm going to do it."
"You don't have to, A. M."
"No *!%*!& way I'm going to do it."
"No one can make you, A. M."
"It's not going to happen, so you can forget it!"
"Will you listen to yourself?"
A.M. does it, of course, and through the rest of the book speaks frankly about what to expect. She doesn't lecture or shove, and her casual tone makes the content go down easy. LeBlanc knows that many of her readers had childhood experience with sacramental confession that inclines them to run the other way: "Everyone has some version of 'The Priest Who Fell Asleep,' 'The Priest Who Talked Real Loud,' 'How to Get the Priest Who Gave Easy Penances.' … Popular among boys is 'The Time the Priest Got Really Mad at Me.'"
As these children entered teen years, they tried to discover "How to Say 'Masturbation' without Really Saying It," and "[n]ew stories included 'The Priest Who Asked a Lot of Questions' and 'The Priest Who Asked a Real Lot of Questions.'"
If this book were merely a collection of light-hearted passages it would still be useful, but LeBlanc does better than that. Immediately on the heels of this passage comes, "[But] some [stories] were genuinely awful memories of hurt and bewilderment. These were never recounted in detail and didn't lend themselves to funny titles. These were the stories of being shamed and berated in the confessional. … [T]hese allusions came with the spoken or unspoken message, 'That will never happen to me again.'"
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