The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00IRJLETM | Format: PDF
The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession Description
Confession is a crucial ritual of the Catholic Church, offering absolution of sin and spiritual guidance to the faithful. Yet this ancient sacrament has also been a source of controversy and oppression, culminating, as prize-winning historian John Cornwell reveals in The Dark Box, with the scandal of clerical child abuse. Drawing on extensive historical sources, contemporary reports, and first-hand accounts, Cornwell takes a hard look at the long evolution of confession. The papacy made annual, one-on-one confession obligatory for the first time in the 13th century. In the era that followed, confession was a source of spiritual consolation as well as sexual and mercenary scandal. During the 16th century, the Church introduced the confession box to prevent sexual solicitation of women, but this private space gave rise to new forms of temptation, both for penitents and confessors. Yet no phase in the story of the sacrament has had such drastic consequences as a historic decree by Pope Pius X in 1910. In reaction to the spiritual perils of the new century, Pius sought to safeguard the Catholic faithful by lowering the age at which children made their first confession from their early teens to seven, while exhorting all Catholics to confess frequently instead of annually. This sweeping, inappropriately early imposition of the sacrament gave priests an unprecedented and privileged role in the lives of young boys and girlsa role that a significant number would exploit in the decades that followed. A much-needed account of confession's fraught history, The Dark Box explores the sources of the sacrament's harm and shame, while recognizing its continuing power to offer consolation and reconciliation.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 7 hours and 7 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Audible, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: March 4, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00IRJLETM
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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