The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession Author: John Cornwell | Language: English | ISBN:
B00ET7IZDO | Format: PDF
The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession Description
A bestselling journalist exposes the connection between the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis and the practice of confession.
- File Size: 413 KB
- Print Length: 321 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1781251088
- Publisher: Basic Books (March 4, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00ET7IZDO
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #113,128 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Clergy > Sacraments - #52
in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Worship & Devotion > Sacraments - #66
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Clergy > Church History
- #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Clergy > Sacraments - #52
in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Worship & Devotion > Sacraments - #66
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Clergy > Church History
In the movies, the confessional cabinet is one of the symbols of Catholicism. The setting might be used for jokes, as in _Lovers and Other Strangers_, or it might be completely straight, as in Hitchcock’s _I Confess_. It isn’t hard to understand why this should be. There is nothing like the confessional cabinet in other religions, and it contains an interaction that can easily be mined for dramatic potential. It can also be scandalously misused, and may be one of the reasons for the church’s sexual abuse scandals. These are lessons within _The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession_ by John Cornwell. The author, who has written often on aspects of Catholicism, is fully qualified to do so. He was a seminarian and headed for the priesthood, when he decided to go another way. He abandoned, and then regained his faith, and writes with the view of improving his church. Nonetheless, this is a quietly angry manifesto against what Cornwell sees as a longstanding systemic flaw within the church organization.
The inventor of the confession box was Cardinal Carlo Borromeo in the sixteenth century. He understood that sexual abuse was widespread within the practice of confession, and in 1576 he instituted the confessional box that became the standard. Cornwell cites as a moral disaster the decision by Pope Pius X in 1910 that the obligation of confession had to be extended to children as well, children as young as seven. He explains that this produced undue feelings of guilt carried into adulthood for many, as well as giving priests private access to children. Such stories make depressing reading, even though we have sadly become accustomed to reports of priests abusing children. The other side of the confession process is that abusing priests would have to confess themselves.
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