The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession by John Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page B

groves of trees. There were bars on all the ground-floor windows. The building resembled, as did many Catholic seminaries at that time, a Victorian mental asylum; and it was indeed a ‘total institution’ as defined by sociologist Erving Goffman: ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.’ 1
    I entered the seminary several weeks before the death of Pius XII, who had been pope for nearly twenty years, and the election of the stout and cheerful John XXIII. The ambiance of the clerical culture was patrician; legalistic in language and perspective. Attitudes towards other Christian faith groups were aloof; towards non-Christian faiths, dismissive. Seminary formation, the Church, and the priesthood appeared to us as unchanged and unchanging— semper eadem .
    The seminaries were booming and turning out ever more ordained priests. There were 21 seminarians in my year, known as First Year Philosophy, and similar numbers in each of the years ahead of us, comprising Second Year Philosophy, followed by four years of Theology, making 120 students in all, with a dozen professors or lecturers.There were at that time five senior seminaries in England with a similar student intake as well as four exclusively English seminaries abroad—one each in Lisbon and Valladolid, and two in Rome—all full. In the early 1960s, when I was due to be ordained, England was routinely turning out 200 ordained priests each year, about 120 diocesan and 80 from the religious orders. Elsewhere during that period ordinations amongst sizeable Catholic populations were at an all-time high, especially in Ireland, Western Europe, and the United States. Yet many of us had an impression of staleness and aridity even during those apparently halcyon years.
    Only in retrospect would it be obvious that there had been something dysfunctional in the state of Catholic clericalism during our era. Given Pope John’s age—he was seventy-six—nobody could have guessed that he would initiate an epoch-making council that would shake the Church to its foundations, promoting the idea of the faithful as a pilgrim people of God, engaging with the world. The shock would expose the deep-seated problems of priestly formation. The mass exodus of ordained priests worldwide from the 1960s to the 1970s, and the collapse in vocations, would speak for themselves. Locally, in England and Wales, since the year 2000 the number of newly ordained priests, diocesan and religious, has averaged just above 20 each year; compared with the early 1960s, that is a decline of 90 per cent. In the United States the ordinations collapsed from 1,575 in 1965 to 450 in 2002. The decline of potential confessors would have been critical for the fate of the sacramentof confession even had the faithful not rejected the practice: which they did.

    W HEN I ENTERED THE SEMINARY there were more than enough priests to confess the long lines of penitents waiting to enter the dark boxes every week. Few of us could imagine the collapse in numbers that lay ahead. In the United States, about 3 per cent of parishes, 549, were without a resident priest in 1965. In 2002, there were 2,928 priestless parishes, about 15 per cent of US parishes, and rising. By 2020, it is estimated that a quarter of all parishes, 4,656, will lack a priest. Between 1965 and 2002, the number of seminarians in the United States dropped from 49,000 to 4,700, a 90 per cent decrease. Seminaries have closed in their hundreds across America: there were 596 seminaries in 1965, and only 200 in 2000. 2
    There were many fine, decent men of generous temperament at Oscott. A small group of ex–national service men, and late vocations, exerted a modicum of common sense, knowledge of the world, and even at times ribald good humour. Yet the younger majority, fresh from junior seminaries,