a healing vision
ecclesial transparency in the light of the last judgment
As a child, the idea of the Final Judgment always intrigued me.
To a child, the idea of the Last Judgment, in all its Michelangelo-authored, Sistine-inflected baroque drama, is appealing. It appeals to our need for fairness, the standards that we have been told we are to adhere to, which we learn all too quickly that no one else bothers with. It is startling in its clarity—right, you’re good; left, you’re damned—and it is tantalizing in its promise: everything hidden shall be revealed (Matthew 10). What that means, I was promised as a child, is that one day we will know everything. Everyone’s stories will be told. The whole tangled Sargasso Sea of lives will be woven into one cohesive tapestry.
Which came first, the attraction to the Final Judgment or the desire to write? It seems apt that a girl drawn to journalism would have as a pillar of her nascent faith a scene of all the answers getting sorted. All the papers dug out of archives where they have been hidden or gathering dust and laid out in the sunlight. Clearing the air, getting the facts carved in stone, setting the record straight.
Stories are wobbly, liquid creatures. To know that one day, finally, God will solidify the narrative with one fell swoop, that one day, the story will go to print, permanently, no more edits—well, that’s terrifying. Committing a story always comes with accompanying terror that you’ve gotten something wrong. What if more facts emerge from the woodwork, a secret other thing that you never knew about finally comes out and the story you thought you had turns out to be a shape written in clouds. But the appeal of the Final Judgment is that there are no secrets cloaked in silence, no hidden places, no playing hands close to the chest. Cards are on the table, where we all can see them.
Anyhow, perhaps the allure of the Final Judgment also explains my love of Confession.
In a recent article in Today’s American Catholic, the inimitable Bill Droel, the founder of the National Catholic Center for the Laity, writes about the decline of the Sacrament of Confession.
Mr. Droel attributes the decline in participation in the sacrament of confession (as detailed in a recent book) to an increasingly secularized culture, but I would attribute this decline more to the flaws in the Church’s culture than the manifold sins of American culture.
The U.S. has embraced talk therapy—and other forms of individual counseling and psychotherapy—in increasing numbers over the past decades. Given the uptick of child sexual abuse after World War II and the pandemic of domestic violence that engulfs this country, this seems like an extremely positive trend. The CDC found that, in 2020—five years ago—more than 20% of Americans had sought some form of mental health therapy over the past year.
That’s slightly more Americans in therapy than there are Americans in the Catholic Church. So it’s not that our broader culture does not belive in the healing power of self-examination and in the need to excavate our inner sanctum in order to rid ourselves of an imprisoning negative thought pattern or flawed perspective on the world. It’s not that. Clearly, the principle of confession: that you can find some kind of reconciliation or healing by going and talking to a trusted authority remains unassailed.
Rather, it seems that priests are not seen as trusted authorities on this matter (if any innocent soul is wondering how that can possibly be in this blessed year of our Lord 2025, please type in “Boston 2002” or “Cardinal McCarrick” into the search engine of your choice). I’m not saying that therapy is a substitute for confession—it’s clearly not, given that the horizon of therapy is the self (perhaps a self-in-relationship or the self-in-a-family-unit) and the horizon of confesison is God. The goal of therapy is actually one of the ancillary benefits of confession: reconciliation and integration of the self with the self. But the main purpose of confession has a higher aim. But we’re not talking to the Americans (church-fulls of them) who are going to therapy. And we’re not talking to the non-Catholic Americans (smaller church-fulls of those). We’re talking about how to get Catholics to go to confesion more.
I don’t know how you could encourage Catholics of all stripes to reengage with this sacrament without some sort of confession for our ecclesial culture. A culture that dances dangerously close to Pope Francis’ definition of corruption: it sins but knows it not. It is blind but says we see. Our ecclesial culture has, over the past forty years, become increasingly exposed as unhealthy and, yet, seems proportionally, stubbornly resistant to transparency.
The sort of inescapable case study here is sex abuse. One priest told me in an interview—on tape recorder, no less, a few months before he died—about the daughter he had fathered overseas and how his order had generously supported her, paying his child support.
Several months later, I heard a priest in that same order make a fundraising pitch for their overseas missions fund during a homily at Mass. It took a lot of self-control not to approach him after Mass and ask for a breakdown of what percentage exactly of the funds raised were going towards child support for the children fathered by priests.
In our own parish, there has been a consistent second collection throughout the year to pay off the parish debt (the irony of this push happening during a jubilee year when debts are supposed to be forgiven [Deuteronomy 15:1-2)] is lost on no one). “If we really wish to prepare a path to peace in our world, let us commit ourselves to remedying the remote causes of injustice, settling unjust and unpayable debts, and feeding the hungry,” Pope Francis wrote in the bull announcing the jubilee year. That’s all well and good, Pope Francis, but we need our money. God will not provide! Sparrows are dropping from the skies like rain. We cannot trust the God who comes each time we call upon him in the form of bread and wine. Such a God is not dependable. How can we rely on him? In cold, hard lucre we trust.
I would have a little more sympathy for trying to pay off a debt to the tune of $800,000, if I had any idea how the debt was incurred. There has been some effort to determine its source, but those efforts have not been shared with the parish publicly. Apparently the debt originates from a dozen or so years ago and (at least hearsay goes) there is no large capital improvement that can account for it. I do wonder if the priest who incurred the debt is dead, such that he cannot be reached for clarification on this. It strains the imagination to assume that it is impossible to know more than just an accumulation of vaguely marked credit card purchases have somehow added up to $600,000 in loans, plus interest.
It absolutely reeks of a privilege of the ruling class, of the white colonial, of the king or elite, a privilege out of touch with the realities of human being-in-communion to demand: give us the average yearly income of 20 families in our city for an undisclosed reason. If I, a woman were out here fundraising $800,000, you can bet I would not make it one penny toward my goal before kindly older gentlemen with spectacles and spreadsheets would congeal out of the ether and gently press me on my physical ability to ascertain how much money I actually need. Women be shopping their way into $800,000 in debt you know! Give a woman (or a Franciscan priest, apparently) a credit card and whoop, there goes a cool One Mil.
Any beggar asking for just a dollar has to give at least some reason: “for food,” “for the bus.” They want 800 K, no questions asked, and yet a beggar can’t be out here asking for a Hamilton without getting the ninth degree.
It is the definition of insanity to ask someone for $800,000 and not tell them what it is for. (Unless you are Lauren Sanchez and you are asking Jeff Bezos. Then it’s just a Tuesday.) “A debt” is not an answer to the question of “hey what is this money for” because a “debt” is just a means of paying for something, and so, if we are paying the debt, we are still paying for something and I would like to know if that thing being purchased was a new gym floor or stained glass window renovation or semesterly college tuition for a priest’s child. It would be really helpful to know, because then I can evaluate whether or not I would like to pay for the child’s college, which is something I’m not necessarily opposed to doing. I’m not heartless, I’m happy to pay for the college tuitions of the children of priests. But, call me crazy, I grew up going to confession, so I actually believe that honesty counts for something and that there’s a moral mandate to transparency in a faith community where we read the words of Jesus who tells us “everything hidden shall be revealed.”
Now, confession, on the surface, seems different than transparency. Confession seems very Catholic, shrouded in mystery and hush-hush revelations behind closed doors. But if you truly believe that God knows everything and sees everything, then you know that you are like a sparrow, always flying within God’s line of vision.
Confession only seems different from public transparency if you do not believe in God and you do not believe that God sees you and that God’s seeing of you is the measure of reality.
The point of confession is not to hide our sins in the sand, burying our shame, and going out to live as though we did not have to be accountable to our community as well as God, the point of confession is to practice opening up the book of our lives to God’s loving gaze. The point of the sacrament of confession is to learn to see our lives not through the lens of our own neuroses or traumas or terrible inherited narratives from our family or culture but through the eyes of the God who loved us into existence—the only hermeneutic that can ultimately free us.
And I wonder if we are not exhorted to go to confession to open our hearts before the gaze of God because the men who are supposed to exhort us to do so do not know that that’s what confession is.
It seems that priests and bishops have also been trained by the non-profit corporation they work for to ask no questions, to turn blind eyes, and to eschew transparency. Pay the child support of your brother, quietly, and don’t mention it in the Sunday mission appeal.
In his autobiography, “Hope,” Pope Francis reiterates a distinction between sin and corruption, a distinction he thematized throughout his whole life. Corruption is a double life, he said in a 2013 meditation. He meditated on the problems that corrupt clergy cause for the Church.
“Corruption is an easier sin for all of us who have certain power, be it ecclesiastical, religious, economic or political power,” he said in a 2016 meditation. We all know the stories. We know them by now. Perhaps we have lived a few. But rather than grappling with the sins, they have been hidden, skipped over, unacknowledged. We are leading a double ecclesial life: and it is time to open its books into the light of a God whose justice is ultimately the healing we have been seeking.
So, perhaps if we are interested in a renaissance of the sacrament of reconciliation (and I think we should be, because it, like therapy, is truly therapeutic), then perhaps the first step is for the hierarchy of the Church to convert from the double life and secrets of corruption.
The Church hierarchy must first model the fruits of confession: a transparency that springs out of the conviction that the story of our lives will one day be read aloud to the class, that there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed; a transparency that arises from the firm belief that we are all under the judgment of God—a God whose name is mercy, and who bathes us in that mercy every time we open the book of our neuroses and sins and traumas and poor choices before him—an openness that arises from the joy of those who know themselves as loved by God, who know that his eye is on the sparrow, and that whatever clever guises they have devised to hide the rot will all evaporate in the unfiltered light of eternity.
Stop for Everyone
I was delighted to write a reflection for U.S. Catholic on this Sunday’s Gospel—the Good Samaritan.
As I recorded the reflection, the doorbell rang consistently. And my own words challenged me: would I actually stop this recording for each one? The Gospel doesn’t exist to make us feel good about our choices all the time, and I felt that knife edge of decision in that doorbell-inflected morning. But Christ’s word of life does make us feel good—as in feel full of goodness— as we embrace the freedom to live the simplicity of the call to love God and our neighbor.
You can read here or watch below (to see Rainy the cat enter the frame right on cue).