Sin in the Sixties: Catholics and Confession, 1955–1975 by Maria C. Morrow (review)

Maria Morrow's interesting book chronicles the collapse by 1975 of a Catholic penitential culture that had been in a flourishing state on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. Sacramental confession lay at the heart of this culture, with many Catholics—although probably not a majority—confessing at least monthly by the close of the 1950s. But that penitential culture also encompassed compulsory fasting, periodic abstinence from meat, voluntary personal sacrifice during Lent and even Advent, and an emphasis on the reparative dimensions of suffering. Meatless Fridays and austere Lents, in Morrow's telling, did more than define a people. They underwrote an acute consciousness of personal sin among Catholics and thus provided essential support to the Sacrament of Penance.

Morrow acknowledges certain tensions in the penitential culture of the 1950s. Prosperous suburban Catholics were less responsive than their immigrant forebears to what we might call the Catholic romance of suffering and increasingly open to what critics regarded as the exculpatory insights of psychology. Tensions were growing too around Catholic teaching on contraception, by most priestly accounts the single most difficult problem when it came to the confessions of adults. Certain theologians, moreover, were newly critical of what they saw as excessive Catholic legalism with regard to penitential practice and the inadequate Scriptural grounding of contemporary Catholic moral theology. Bernard Häring's The Law of Christ, published in 1954 but translated into English only in 1963, was for many American priests the most authoritative summary of a new approach to sin and confession, one that stressed an ethic of love and the penitent's fundamental moral orientation over an exclusively act-centered morality.

Genuine upheaval, however, came only in the wake of Vatican council II. Tensions over birth control came to a head and seriously eroded the Church's authority in the realm of sex. One predictable result was a sharp decline in the frequency of confession, even among the devout. The laws of fast and abstinence in the American Church were significantly liberalized by the nation's bishops in 1966, with Catholics encouraged to undertake voluntary penances in lieu of the traditional Friday abstinence, retained only for the Fridays in Lent. Catholics heard more about social sin from their parish priests and theologians and less about reparative suffering. Efforts to revitalize the sacrament of penance by emphasizing its relational aspects, had the effect—as Morrow sees it—"of minimizing the reality of actual sin and the value of the sacrament of penance to counter sin in everyday life" (p. 195). Small wonder, then, that by the mid-1970s, significant numbers of American Catholics seldom or never had recourse to the sacrament.

The revolution in consciousness that Morrow addresses is enormously important for an understanding of recent American Catholic history. She is right to analyze the sacrament of penance in the context of a broader penitential culture. My difficulty comes with her periodic assertions, invariably sans evidence, as to the impact of these changes. "Though the language of sin continued to be used at least in liturgies," she writes of the post-conciliar Church, "for many it became an elusive, empty, and even forgotten concept, with little reference to the actions in young adults' own lives" (p. 78). Rhetorical moments such as this remind me of childhood disputes in my religiously plural neighborhood back in the 1950s. The Catholics among us maintained that Protestants could sin boldly because their churches had abandoned the sacrament. The Protestants saw it otherwise: Catholics could sin boldly precisely because sacramental absolution was so readily at hand. Had a wise adult overheard us, she would surely have warned us against easy judgments when it came to the interior lives of others.