No more "Confessional" sex?

[3113]

A while back someone was asking about Catholic Confession for a story. Here's the latest on the subject, and it's pretty fascinating. Apparently, in the U.S. at least, very few Catholics still go to confession and those that do rarely see the inside of a Confessional anymore. What's even more interesting...on-line confessionals being done by other religions as well as Catholicism. The article is long, so I won't quote it all; but here are some of the highlights. For the entire article, you can go here: Confession in Adaptation.

HIGHLANDS RANCH, COLO. -- In the hush of a warm afternoon, Father Larry Solan waits for sinners. The veteran priest sets aside a half-hour every Saturday to hear the failings of his flock at St. Mark Catholic Church. On a typical week, he sees two penitents, perhaps three. Some weeks, no one comes....Confession is not what it used to be in the Roman Catholic Church; cultural and theological shifts have pushed the age-old sacrament aside. In the mid-1960s, 38% of Catholics said they went to confession at least once a month. These days, just 2% do. More than 40% never go.

Church leaders have tried to revive interest in the sacrament with tactics as varied as radio ads (this spring in Washington, D.C.) and a strip-mall chapel dedicated solely to confessions (a few doors down from a tanning salon in Albany, N.Y.). More priests are also doing away with the traditional wooden confession booth in favor of relaxed, face-to-face encounters. Outside the Catholic church too, the rite of confession is being reshaped, this time by Protestant megachurch pastors who see the ritual as a self-help tool for the lost and lonely -- and a marketing opportunity for themselves. Click over to "I've Screwed Up".com, and a black-and-white, Goth-tattoo-style graphic bursts onto the screen. You're invited to type in a description of your sins, along with your age and hometown. Click "send" and it's done; you've confessed -- to the webmaster of Flamingo Road Church, a Florida congregation affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

"I'm a patholgical liar. About everything. To everyone."
"I have a compulsive shopping disorder..."
"I constantly smoke marijuana..."
"I've slept with 11 guys and only 1 of them I actually loved."
"just been a jerk"

The confessions are screened for obscenities or identifying information (but not for typos), then posted for all to read...."It does break your heart," said Flamingo Road pastor Troy Gramling. He and his staff pray over every confession....Several other confessional sites also hold out the promise of catharsis, with a vaguely religious gloss. The Universal Life Church, famed for do-it-yourself ordinations, offers an online "Absolution of Sins Application Form." A gossipy secular site, DailyConfession.com, arranges sins by categories that mirror the Ten Commandments.

Catholics can try absolution-online.com, which invites you to fill a shopping cart with your sins (choices include calumny, vainglory, disregard for the environment and use of Ouija boards). The site then calculates an appropriate penance -- say, 228 Hail Marys and 43 Our Fathers. "I've screwedup" and MySecret.tv...Unabashedly voyeuristic...allow readers to scroll through pages of angst...

To many Catholics, especially the older generations, it's inconceivable that such online blathering could stand in for confession. "It would be like cheating!" said one woman at St. Mark, in this suburb south of Denver. But for Ashley Iodice, a high school senior in Weston, Fla., Internet absolution feels much more natural than talking to a priest. Now a Baptist, Ashley grew up Catholic; she remembers confession as scary -- and less than sincere. It's hard be honest about the depths of teenage depravity, she explains, when you're talking to an elderly priest "who's committed his whole life to poverty and chastity."

But at "I've screwed up", Ashley's inhibitions melted and she found herself admitting to the world how she'd fallen these last few years: "Drinking," she said. "And, you know . . . stupid teenage stuff." When she was done, Ashley said, her conscience felt newly light. "It sounds odd, but to me, it was much more personal than confessing to a priest," she said. "You can write exactly how you feel. The anonymity means you can tell everything. It's a very cool way to do it."

But what, exactly, does it accomplish?

Gramling sees online confession as a step toward personal healing. "It's good for the soul," he said. MySecret pushes the concept of healing even further. Anyone can comment on posted confessions, starting an anonymous dialogue with the sinner: "you need therapy. get it now." Or: "In the name of Jesus. . . I pray for a breakthrough with this family and their pot problem." The site refers sinners to a long list of self-help books and links to the sponsoring church, a fast-growing, Oklahoma-based congregation named after its website, LifeChurch.tv.

Scott Thumma, who studies the sociology of religion, sees sites like MySecret as marketing tools very much in keeping with modern mega-church philosophy...."Their strategy is not to go out, convert and bring [only] saved people into the sanctuary...." To keep the masses coming back, these pastors often turn sermons into self-help pep talks: How to build a good marriage; how to manage a hectic schedule; how to live debt-free. The brisk practicality of the online confession fits right into that culture.

The Catholic sacrament of confession, by contrast, is not about personal growth. It's about healing a ruptured relationship with God....Many Catholics now participate in communal penance services at Easter and Christmas, when the priest will read aloud a long list of sins -- "for the times I've left the poor in the dust; for the times I haven't been as truthful as I could have been" -- and ask parishioners to reflect silently.....With the Vatican's approval, some priests have moved away from the rote and mechanical confessions of the past. At St. Mark, Father Solan sees most penitents face-to-face, in a warm, welcoming "reconciliation room" with honey-colored walls. Those who want privacy don't retreat behind a wooden screen; they pull a shimmering curtain to divide the room.

Solan still follows a script -- his words, and the penitents' response, are outlined in a 12-page booklet -- but he makes clear that he wants to hear more than a laundry list of minor misdeeds. He asks penitents to truly reflect on how they've strayed. It's not supposed to be easy or convenient, said Stacie Kishiyama, 38, the only penitent to confess to Solan that Saturday. Approaching a priest with humility, even shame, "forces us to embrace our humanity, our failings and our dependence on God," Kishiyama said. She doesn't think of confession as clearing a guilty conscience; to her, it's about coming back into the fullness of God's grace. She can't imagine doing that with a mouse click. Neither can Solan.

When a priest grants absolution, "you know that you're back in the community of God," he said. On the Internet, he asks, "where's that 'Welcome home, son' ?"

So I guess this puts a damper on "sex in the confessional" stories that take place in the here and now...unless, of course, one is not at all interested in verisimilitude

By the way, for some reason Lit wouldn't let me spell out the website "I've screwed up".com! It's all one word with the "I, S, and U" capitalized. For some reason, it kept replacing "screwed" with asterisks! Funny huh?

 

[tickledkitty]

If they'd named it IFuckedUp.com, you'd have had no problem whatsoever.

 

[impressive]

I've written a bit of this confessional sex.

 

[BlackShanglan]

The Catholic church has been phasing out the old "box" confessionals for quite some time, now. Personally, I don't care for it. It's bad enough having to run into one's doctor at the grocery store following a particularly intimate difficulty; the last thing I want to do is look a priest in the eye while explaining what sins I might have on my conscience.

I can't decide what this signals more on the part of priests - unseemly curiosity as to who is doing what, or a charming innocence as to what they think people are likely to confess. Or possibly it just means that I'm the only person in the world who actually confesses actual sins.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

Catholics can try absolution-online.com, which invites you to fill a shopping cart with your sins (choices include calumny, vainglory, disregard for the environment and use of Ouija boards).

Dang good thing I'm a back-sliding Baptist (not to mention an ordained Cardinal in the Universal Life Church (cost me $5.00 mail-order, best I recall). Otherwise, the pontifical powers that be could have nailed my unrepentent ass with that last one.

Rumple Foreskin